Rewriting Bondage
Literacy and Slavery in a Qing Native Domain
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2109215 |
|---|---|
| Authors | E Mueggler (0000-0002-5904-1574, University of Michigan, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 63 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 99-132 |
| Publication date | 2021-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Comparative Studies in Society and History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0010-4175 • E-ISSN: 1475-2999 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0010417520000390 |
| OpenAlex | W3121533714 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 40 |
The article examines legal plaints authored by the household slaves, bondsmen, bonded tenants, concubine, wife, sisters, and affines of the chieftain of a native domain in northern Yunnan Province, China in 1760. These kin and enslaved persons of the chiefly house were struggling over whether a slave baby should become the chieftain of this sprawling realm. The documents were preserved in the hereditary house of the native chieftain along with some 500 manuscripts in an indigenous script now called Nasu, which carried its own assumptions about what writing was and what it could do. I read the Chinese-language legal documents with an eye to the tradition of Nasu ritual writing. I argue that a group of bondsmen accused of rebelling against the chiefly household were actually seeking to preserve it by extending the ritualized tasks of writing ancestry and descent into the realm of Qing legal practice. This allows me to extend the first of two methodological suggestions: that the kinship of bondage and the bondage of kinship are best seen as participating reciprocally in a single field of relations. I then follow a group of domestic slaves as they travel to the administrative city and search for a litigation master to write up their own legal plaint. With this exercise, I propose a second methodological argument: that reading and writing are complex human skills, often partly available even to those who cannot use pen and paper, and involving the coordination of forms of textuality across different planes of inscription
Argument (complex analysis · Art · Genealogy · Indigenous · Kinship · Literacy · Literature · Political science · Reading (process · Realm · Sociology · Textuality · Wife · Anthropology · Chinese history and philosophy · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
Visible Writings
A Frontier Made Lawless
Asian and African Systems of Slavery
Slavery in Early Modern China
Dispossessed lives
Essays on China's Legal Tradition
Social Power and Legal Culture
Talons and Teeth
Civil Justice in China
Women and Property in China, 960-1949
The Making of the Chinese State
Exile in Mid-Qing China
The Manchu Way
A Native Chieftaincy in Southwest China
Civil Law in Qing and Republican China
Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China
Dispossessed Lives
Masters and Bondservants
Slaves and Forms of Slavery in Late Imperial China (Seventeenth to Early Twentieth Centuries)
The Mongols
The Cambridge world history of slavery
Slavery and Social Death
Language policy for China’s minorities
Coming to Terms with the Nation
A Tentative Discussion of Rank in the Liangshan Yi Slave Society
The practice of everyday life
A New Understanding of the Old Liangshan Yi Social Structure and an Analysis of "Black Yi" and "White Yi
Lady Qu's Inscriptions
Bondage on Qing China's Northwestern Frontier
Captives, Kin, and Slaves in Xiao Liangshan
Bondservants in the T'ai-hu Basin During the Late Ming
A Green Estate
A Green Estate
The city in late Imperial China
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2026 (5) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |