BOOK REVIEWS

Christina SchwenkelUniversity of California, Irvine

The Age of Wild Ghosts:Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China

Erik Mueggler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)

In recent years there has been an increase in the number of works that address the practicesand politics of social memory (sec, e.g., Sturken 1997; Yoneyama 1999). Anthropologicalresearch on the cultural production of memory, as well as its suppression, has made significantcontributions to this scholarship, underscoring the intersections of memor>, violence, and thenation-state (Boyarin 1994; Fujitani, et al. 2001: Malkki 1995). This scholarship addressesquestions about how memories of violence are integrated into historical consciousness, andhow individuals come to terms with the pain, suffering, and loss that are a result of violence.Such questions are particularly relevant given the present state of global affairs and increasingtensions across and within perceived ethnic, religious, national, and transnational borders. InThe Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China, Mueggleraddresses these concerns and, with his eloquent ethnography of an ethnic minority communit}in the mountainous village of Zhizuo, contributes to the expanding body of literature onmemory work. Tracing the landscapes of memory and violence through the intimate spacesand places that people occupy, Mueggler examines how the Lolop'o people in Zhizuo useritual practices and poetics to attempt to excise the spirits of a violent past. For Mueggler,language is intricately linked to memory and serves as a vehicle to reclaim the past, rebuildcommunity, and heal the pain of violent loss. In this sense, The Age of Wild Ghosts is not onl>an "ethnography of place" (10), but also an ethnography of healing.

Mueggler refers to the text as an "ethnography of a state" (4), but this volume can also be seenas an ethnography of a relationship between the state and its citizens. A central concern of thebook is the evolving role of the Chinese nation-state and its increasing infringement upon thepractices, rituals, and lives of the marginalized people of Zhizuo. Mueggler argues that forvillage residents, the state is perceived as an imaginary, abstract entity that has inserted itselfinto the intimate spaces of everyday life, thus disrupting social relationships and promptingcommunity disintegration. State pressures to rid society of "backward" customs thought b>state officials to work against "modernization" policies and against socialist narratives ofprogress resulted in rapid social change, violent deaths, and the eventual return of angryancestors as "wild ghosts."

Mueggler's text is not just a story of victimhood, nor is it a simple narrative of a "traditional'*community facing cultural destruction and violence in the face of modernizing forces of thesocialist state. It is also a stor\ of agency and resistance. One of the main arguments thatrepeatedly resurfaces is that the nostalgic and painful stories of the past that unfold throughoutthe ethnography provide alternative modes of historical thinking. These alternative modesundermine official narratives and produce an "oppositional practice of time" (9). Memories ofstate violence that continually resurface in the present demonstrate a perspecthe of time as

Copyright C 2002, American Anihropological Associaiion

Page 182 |PoLAR: Vol. 25, No. I

neither cyclic nor linear, but spiral (252). This spiral temporal reality challenges the evolu-tionary project of the state, a project that aimed to stamp out memories of the past and build aprogressive, socialist future.

Resistance to this project is particularly evident in tales of "wild ghosts" who haunt thepresent, possessing and killing those who are responsible for past violence. The presence ofthese angry ghosts, according to Mueggler, keeps the violence of the past alive in the present.Fear of possession by and/or violent death on account of these ghosts subverts state authorityand disrupts state intentions to transform the economic and social structure of Zhi/.uo. Forexample, agricultural production is hindered when residents refuse to farm collectivizedancestral lands without first performing the necessary rituals and offerings to the spiritualguardian of the land, practices that had previously been banned as "superstitious."

The book is organized around themes of place, habitation, and the gradual movement of thestate from external to internal Other (288). This movement occurs through the private andintimate spaces of homes, valleys, bodies, rituals, and relationships. Mueggler describes theethnography as "a journe> through places I found people to inhabit intensely" (10). Thisjourney takes the reader through spatial and temporal landscapes that illustrate the troubledrelationship between a Lolop'o community and the Chinese nation-state. The text travelsthrough "the age of wild ghosts," a period marked h\ violence and death. This period beganwith the famine of the Great Leap Forward and continued through the educational campaignsof the Cultural Revolution to the present open policy reforms. Although the framework of thebook is historical and chronological, Mueggler asserts that his intentions are not to reify givenhistorical categories and temporal constructions, but rather to use them as a means of identi-fying localized visions and contrasting these with the state's visions (7).

At the heart of Mueggler "s ethnographic anal) sis are oral memories of the past as recountedby the residents of Zhi/uo. Dreams are recalled, songs are performed, ghost stories are retold,ritual poetry is recited. The theme of language and its intricate entanglements w ith pain andloss is a powerful component of the book. Assigning language to memory allows for a counter-narrative of history to emerge, and thus provides insights into a particular historicalconsciousness that recreates the world and refashions the past. For Mueggler, retelling thestories and poetics of the past is as much about mourning as it is about healing. Rememberingand retelling are perplexing tasks given the abstract and immaterial nature of the nation-state.

The book is divided into two sections. The first section moves through spaces of habitation andexplores imaginings of and desires for community. It traces the expanding role of the state inthe lives of Zhi/.uo villagers and efforts by local officials to reorder and control space. Thisexpanding role has the effect of upsetting social relationships upon which the foundation of thecommunity is structured. Chapter 2 begins with a body and a dream. These introduce the restof the book by illustrating how the state comes to invade the private spheres of people's lives,in this case women's bodies via sterilization campaigns. Mueggler argues that the culturalimplications of forced tubal ligations are rooted in cosmological understandings of the body asa vessel through which sexual energy continually flows. To inhibit this flow would plug thebody's life forces, thus impairing people's labor capacity and eventually leading to death. Thechapter is structured around a dream of infants, which Mueggler sees as a manifestation of theidea that state power has intruded into the most intimate of spaces: a woman's womb. Rituals

May 20021 Page 183

performed to exorcise the spirits associated with the dream provide a means "for creating anethics to deal with the violence of power, especially state, in daily lives" (50).

In Chapter 3 the ethnographic journey continues with a tour of the gendered and cosmologicalordering of space in a Lolop'o house. Mueggler's analysis here is particularly compelling. Hecarefully outlines the process through which policies of collectivization decentered thehousehold economy and inverted social relationships. As power shifted away from the familyas an economic unit, women saw their authority and power diminish. Large collective messhalls, for instance, replaced the centrality of the granary, a highly feminized, domestic symbolof economic power and familial/social reproduction. State intervention into the privatizedspaces of the household thus served to restructure gender relations as male cadres took chargeof economic spheres previously controlled by women.

The destruction of the ts'ici system, a cultural institution of rotating political and ritual respon-sibilities, is the subject of the following two chapters. Through thick description, Muegglerleads the reader out of the house, beyond Zhizuo, to the ritual sites of the ts'ici in thesurrounding valley. Following Liberation in 1949, the ts'ici system gradually declined until itwas finally stamped out in 1963 when Socialist radicals polluted the sacred ts'ici box withmenstrual blood. This action let loose a slew of angry ancestors and spirits who returned aswild ghosts to find and kill those responsible for its desecration. The memory of the ts'ici,however, is kept alive through "digested words," rather than written text. Oral narratives of thets'ici system, its ritual structure, and its eventual demise were a means for Zhizuo residents toreimagine identity and reconstruct community. Knowledge of the past, Mueggler writes, "ga\ esuch memories continuity and coherence, kept alive the possibility that the ts'ici might bereconstructed should local officials accede, and created a foundation for the politicallysensitive claim that the area once administered by the ts'ici should be the territory of a distinctnationality" (97). This dream of a reconstituted, autonomous community, made possiblethrough the return of the ts'ici, is a driving force of this text.

While the first section of the book is a journey through space, the second section is a journexthrough time. The remaining chapters construct a counter-narrative of history through theretelling of ghost stories. These stories, Mueggler argues, are a means for Zhi/uo residents towork through their memories of the past and allocate responsibility for the violent deaths thatoccurred during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. In their search foraccountability, survivors fluctuate between the imagined, "spectral" state and fellow neighborsand kin.

Tales of land reform and collectivization in the 1950s are the focus of Chapter 6. This periodimmediately following liberation is remembered by Zhizuo residents as a transformative timewhen the state moved in to replace the authority of the ancestral ts'ici spirits and assumecontrol over economic and social production. Land reform and collectivization inex itabl\resulted in severe agricultural crises, leading to the devastating famine of the Great LeapForward. In addition, the cultural order of Lolop'o cosmology was also disrupted as thenumber of dead and the lack of resources for mourning the deceased prevented funerarx oblig-ations from being fulfilled. These conditions ushered in "the age of wild ghosts,' which, inMueggler's words, refers to "the sense that life in this era was inflected by eruptions into thepresent of unreconciled fragments of the past, often personified as the ghosts of people (orspirits) who had met bad ends and who frequently possessed or killed their descendants' (3).

Page 184 |PoLAR: Vol. 25, No. I

Chapter 7 focuses on ritual exorcisms used to expel these wild ghosts. Concentrating on th^affectiv ity and symbolism of ritual poetry as performed in these rites, Mueggler describes howprocesses o\' healing and forgetting are enacted through the act of remembering violence. Here,the main argument of the book appears again: exorcisms and narratives of the past produced a"subversive practice of time" that "defeated state efforts to leave past injustices behind a linear'socialist road' toward the future" (200-201).

Chapter 8 brings the reader to the Cultural Revolution and the Socialist Education campaign.Adopting de Certeau's notion of "strategies of time," Mueggler further develops his argumentthat ghost stories challenge state constructions of time as a linear progress. However the ghoststories in this chapter are different. Unlike the w ild ghosts of the post-famine era—ghosts ofthose who suffered violent deaths, often without proper burial —the wild ghosts of the CulturalRevolution were ancestral spirits who were angry at the desecration of the ts'ici. In Lolop'onarration of history, both groups of ghosts joined together to take revenge on cadres, teamleaders, and Red Guards deemed responsible for the violence of the famine and the destructionof custom. As Mueggler argues, bringing past injustices to bear on the present speaks to amoral order that is driven by the need for justice. Once again the point is made that theemergence of the past in the present ultimately challenged state schemes of socialist devel-opment and progress, the success of which was dependent on forgetting. To remember, then,is an act of resistance in and of itself.

The journey then ends where it originally began: with women's bodies at the height of thesterilization campaign in the reform era. Here Mueggler continues his analysis of the body asa site for the inscription of state power in order to illustrate the "widening rift between theeveryday and the imagined state" (290). The stories retold in this chapter are some of the mostpowerful, for they re\ eaJ a population that stands at the margins of socieu, struggling to makesense of an abstract nation-state associated with invasion, violence, loss, and social andcultural upheaval. This is perhaps the greatest contribution of the book: it traces peoples'attempt to restructure their lives and rebuild social relationships in the aftermath of violenceand community disintegration. The dream of reconstituting community infuses these storieswith hope and makes them vivid to the reader. However, while telling stories of the past canbe healing, such stories also reopen old wounds and bring repressed pain to the surface. Oneof the ethical dilemmas of conducting research on violence is that such research often requiresthat painful memories be brought to life again. Mueggler demonstrates an awareness of thispredicament and his chapters include self-reflective musings about the research process andabout his role in the community during fieldwork. In the end, Mueggler has written apersuasive book that is rich in ethnographic detail, yet sensitive to the plight of his researchparticipants. Although he offers little optimism for the future (as the withdrawal of the statefrom private spaces seems rather unlikely), Mueggler succeeds in depicting the Ii>ldp'o peoplenot as victims, but as historical agents who are struggling to locate a place in a national and,increasingly, global, imaginary.

References Cited

Boyarin, Jonathan, ed.1994 Remapping Memory: The Politics o/Timespace. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.

May 20021 ' Page 185

Fujitani, T., Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, eds.2001 Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s). Durham: Duke University

Press.

Malkki, Liisa H.1995 Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu

Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sturken, Marita1997 Tangled Memories: The Vietnam Wan the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics

of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Yoneyama, Lisa1999 ' Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkelc\:

University of California Press.