Event

How can we excavate the experiences of enslaved people from archives that systematically exclude enslaved voices, while negotiating the demands of a liberal sensibility that requires subjects to speak for themselves? In 1760, six slaves submitted a confession and plea for mercy to the magistrate of Wuding Prefecture, Yunnan, the immediate superior of their dead master, Nuo Jiayou, a Né (or Yi) native chieftain. The slaves had been caught, terrifyingly, between two factions struggling over who would succeed their master as the sole owner of all the lands and peoples within his extensive domain. Their plaint, which named the slaves as its collective author, was written in Chinese, a language they could neither speak nor write. This paper traces their footsteps as they followed their master’s widow to the prefectural capital and found a translator and a cut-rate litigation master to fashion their plaint. I show how the slaves’ own form of spatial literacy, developed through service in their master’s house and participation in his rituals, may have helped them read and navigate the unfamiliar city. Thinking through the specificities of how slaves became writers and readers also helps better delineate the shape of slavery in Né places, which became the designated “slave societies” of Chinese social science despite ubiquitous slavery in every region and economic sector of the Empire. I argue that the native chieftain system itself became a system of bondage in Qing society, confining Né and other ‘non-Chinese’ to mountain enclaves while extracting their wealth and using their lives in military actions.

Erik Mueggler is Katherine Verdery Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He works on a variety of topics in social and cultural theory, including the politics of ritual; science, nature and the environment; the poetics of death; and literacy, sovereignty and bondage, all in China’s border regions. His books include The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence and Place in Southwest China (University of California Press, 2001); The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet (University of California Press, 2011); and Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text and World in Southwest China (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Mueggler is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a Macarthur Foundation Fellowship, the Julian Steward award for best monograph in Environmental Anthropology, and, most recently, a Guggenheim Fellowship (2019-2020).