Two Social Forms among Mountain Dwellers in the Eastern Fringe of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

MING-KE WANG is a member of the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. He has written on the shifting ethnic borders of the ancient Huaxia people, on a historical-anthropological study of the “Qiang people” in western China, on the northern nomads who faced the Han Empire, and a reflexive study on China’s heroic histories. One of his current studies is a comparison between the Qiang/Tibetan and the Yi society along the eastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau.    

The Qiang and the Jiarong (rGyalrong Tibetan) are mountain-dwellers living along the Upper Min River and Dadu River valleys in western Sichuan. Both of them have a kind of mountain deity worship; every village has its own mountain deity, and neighboring villages have co-owned mountain deity. The mountain deities are boundary-protectors/guardians in native’s mind. The similar religious belief and practice have been widely found among varied ethnic groups living in the eastern fringe of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. One exception is the Yi people in the Daliang Mountains in southern Sichuan. In this talk I will compare these two kinds of society, the Qiang/Tibetan and the Yi, by looking at their settlement patterns, house construction (and related costume), genealogical memory, territoriality, social structure and so on.