Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China

Belonging to a native place is an important piece of a person's identity in China. The intersections of this identity with other ways of categorizing people, specifically ethnicity, family, class, and gender, create hierarchies of resource claims and behavioral expectations within regional systems. Nativeplace identity and associations in Chinese urban environments are well-documented sojourners' phenomena (Skinner 1976, 1977; Honig 1992; Goodman 1995), but native place is also a factor within rural areas. This essay looks to the less-studied periphery, exploring issues of rural native-place identity (bendiren, bencun, laojia, guxiang) and ethnicity or nationality (minzu) between Han Chinese and Sani Yi now settled in Lunan Yi Autonomous County in eastern Yunnan (see Map 11.1).¹

My goal is to show how native-place and ethnic identities interact in local rural resource competition through time. Throughout China there exist ethnically distinct populations with claims to the same rural place. In rural China, migration over time is a significant factor in identity formation. Two types of population movements can be distinguished: those undertaken by migrants (for resources, in the wake of devastation or for colonization), who perhaps re-create their native-place identity, and those by emigrants, sojourners to urban centers (individuals expected to return to their abode) who maintain their native-place identity (Skinner 1976, 335–36).² Throughout China, histories of antagonistic relations between immigrant and native

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