person would thus extend across the moments of my fieldwork, the lives and research of my Nuosu colleagues (especially ethnologists) in Southwest China, my life and research in England, my return (and past) visits to Ninglang, the previous and upcoming
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Religion through the Looking Glass
Fieldwork, Biography, and Authorship in Southwest China and Beyond
Katherine Swancutt
The Mule Caravans of Western Yunnan
An Oral History of the Muleteers of Zhaozhou
Ma Jianxiong and Ma Cunzhao
Mule caravans established a network across physical, political, and ethnic boundaries that integrated Southwest China, Southeast Asia, and Tibet. This article is a first exploration of this little-known mobile network. Based mainly on oral history, it focuses on the mule caravans based in Zhaozhou in western Yunnan from the late Qing to the 1940s, when the first motor roads were constructed. The investigation assembles horse and mule technologies and trade organization in detail in order to reconstruct the role and standing of transporters and their networks in local society, in the regional setting, in a volatile political environment, and in the face of challenging natural conditions.
Introduction
Narratives, Ontologies, Entanglements, and Iconoclasms
Sondra L. Hausner, Simon Coleman, and Ruy Llera Blanes
religion and aspiration. Taking the example of Southwest China as her case study—where she was asked to judge a cultural competition on the basis of her own history as a dancer—Swancutt looks at the engagement between ethnographers and their communities of