[keynote] As one of three curators, I wrote this essay about my personal experience in exhibiting my native culture in Burke Museum, University of Washington, which titled "Mountain Patterns: the Survival of Nuosu Culture in China," from March to September 2000 in Seattle. Anthropologist Stevan Harrell, and Nuosu local scholar Ma Erzi were the other two curators. This Essay was published in the Journal of Asian Ethnicity, Vol.2, No.1, March 2001, Oxfordshire, UK.

Contents:
1) The Yak Arrives in Seattle
2) Endless debating: "Hi, I have another new idea!"
3) Welcome to our Cold Mountains: Photos and Colors
4) The Biggest Puzzle from the Dead Lady
5) The Wooden Door: The Connection Between Two Worlds
6) Farewell, my Yak Head

*The Yak Arrives in Seattle

When he saw me carry our exhibit "baby,"--the Yak head--though the final customs line at Seattle, "American Muga" (Dr. Prof. Stevan Harrell) gave me the thumbs-up sign through the glass pane. I had not only brought that thing with the long, sharp horns all the way from the mountains of Liangshan, I had brought to the city on the West Coast of America, bringing upon myself the inspections of customs, the suspicious eyes of stewardesses, the curious questions of co-passengers; and nearly having had it carried off by someone on the way. I fidgeted nervously at the airport, wondering if it would be confiscated by some kind of endangered animal act or animal quarantine regulation. I didn"t crack a relieved smile until Muga happily took it out of my hands.

Afterward, as Muga brought me from my new home in the Fremont district to the streets of the University of Washington campus, I could see the eye-opening sign for the Burke Museum. We could have taken the shortcut through the employees" entrance in the back, but Muga took me around the long way, saying as we walked: "The first time, you should go in through the front door, and experience the museum from the visitor"s perspective." When we saw the Burke director Karl Hutterer, Muga held up the yak head in front of his face, and I suddenly realized that what Muga was most anxious to introduce was this lacquered Yak head from the hand of a herdsman. "Amazing": Karl was equally delighted. After a short exchange of greetings, Muga took me to see our gallery. From the time we first conceived the exhibit all through the process of collecting, many times I had thought about "our" gallery on the other side of the Pacific, and had turned over floor plans over and over in my mind. Nevertheless, when I first saw it with my own eyes, I was a little surprised: "isn"t it a little small?" I asked Muga quietly, even though he had long ago given Ma Erzi and me the exact dimensions. "Whatever the size, this is the Burke temporary exhibit gallery." His answer had a little flavor of "there is no choice in the matter." Maybe it was because the exhibit in the gallery at that time was "Scary Fishes," which took my vague ideas of a huge space and shrunk them to a hallway in the shape of a fish"s gullet. But wasn"t this very different from my original idea of a "magnificent gallery?"

"Good that our yak from Luoji Mountain isn"t looking for pasture here," I joked, "but don"t we need to find a place for him to stay?" Turning around and exiting the gallery, "Over the main entrance," Muga and I said just about in unison, as he held up the yak head to try out the idea. Clearly Muga knew something about Nuosu residential customs, because we do hang sheep and cattle skulls over the main doorways to our houses, in order to "suppress evil influences," and protect "peace in entering and leaving," so we could borrow Liangshan"s influence and use the yak head to ensure the success of our Nuosu cultural exhibit in Seattle.

Endless Debating: "Hi, I have another new idea!"

Early the next day, I took the four keys I received from Burke Public Programs director Erin Younger (something that would have been inconceivable in China, and that gave me a sense of responsibility toward the Burke) and began in earnest my three months as a curator there (a title for which I have still not been able to come up with a good Chinese translation). I opened the gate to the ethnology storage area, and immediately recognized the Nuosu objects there, so that suddenly the Burke became much more familiar to me. Most of the objects had come by air freight, but when the remaining large things and the pieces of the domestic architecture would arrive by the courtesy of the China Overseas Steam Navigation Company was still unknown. Looking at these objects, the main question was how to display them. For me, each object we had collected had a "story," which it was telling me about that culture that was so familiar to me, but how would we organize these stories anew, how would we link them together, to tell an "ethnic narrative" to the American audience to whom they would be so unfamiliar? When I thought of this, I realized that my own ideas about display had never gone beyond "ideas," and now that I was in America, "display" was not so simple.

At that time, the position of exhibit designer in the Burke was temporarily empty, so that for me and Steve, but also for the museum professionals, this was a new experience. Muga had just moved two months before from six years as chair of the anthropology department to Curator of Asian Ethnology at the Burke; and I, though I had been involved in the design of the "Yi Village" at the Chinese Nationalities Park in Beijing, that wasn"t really a museum, but rather a commercial tourist park, and "The Son of the Horse," who did have actual museum experience, had visa problems and was absorbing the sunlight in distant Southwest China, and so we couldn"t look to him.

That morning, Erin had called a meeting of Arn Slettebak, the Burke exhibit builder, Jeanine Ipsen, the specially hired preparator, Ruth Pelz, the check title, and other people to discuss the plans and the schedule for the exhibit. Everyone recognized that this was a new kind of exhibit for the Burke: there was no designer, and three curators without museum experience: an American anthropologist and two native scholars. Erin set out twenty tasks for us to accomplish. I already don"t remember how many times we met to redesign the exhibit; I only remember that every time Erin opened her 2000 date planner, I was gripped with fear, and that every time she used her pen to point to a work deadline and asked for ideas, there was a debate. Because there was no designer, everyone became a designer, and with all the opinions floating around, there were bound to be conflicts among us--over placing a case, over the use of a platform, over the wording of a label, over what colors to employ--they would all engender divergent opinions, and sometimes quite heated ones.

The directness with which Americans were willing to express opinions in their work brought sighs to this Easterner, accustomed to using soft methods and indirect suggestions, and also caused me to gradually change my original attitude of not joining in the debates. For example, in an early meeting Erin decided to eliminate the idea of using clothing to demonstrate caste differences, even though I had my own idea I didn"t say anything, restrained perhaps because of my inability to express myself in English, but probably more because I had not yet recognized my own role as a curator. Later on, when Muga and I were being interviewed, I said something to the reporter about my own idea concerning this matter. Muga reported to Erin the opinion of the "native scholar" on this matter, and the "caste" display ended up in the gallery. The resolution of this question illustrated to me my role and responsibility as a curator. Not only participating in the decisions of how to display, how to present, how to illustrate, how to translate, how to interpret the Liangshan that had borne and nurtured me and the culture with which I was so familiar, how to "defend" the original essence of my own culture it a place to which it hadn"t the slightest link, but even more I considered how to display my own culture in a museumified space far removed from any local context, without twisting, distorting, or wrongly representing it. Of course, an exhibit like this is limited by being presented in a particular country, but I wanted to display it in such a way that it would have the minimum possible loss of cultural meaning. When this kind of incident happened, it seemed like Muga realized that his own anthropological viewpoint could be used to serve a kind of communicative function, and there gradually developed between us a kind of pact: whenever I had a difference of opinion with the plans at the time, he would transmit it; particularly when there was a conflict between scholarly ideas and some sort of museological principles, Muga would stand on the side of the natives and undertake liaison; this really was a clever way to operate. Actually, Muga and I never stopped debating the whole time, while the relatively easygoing Ma Erzi stood between us, either saying nothing or chuckling, to the point where I scolded him for indecision. I have always liked to chew over words and deliberate about phrasing, and there was more than once that Muga and I "looked at each other with knives and spears" in front of our museum colleagues over the use of a single word or technical term. I remember when we were trying to decide between "myth" and "legend," our dispute turned white-hot, so that Muga stormed out of the room angrily, and I thought I would quickly gather up my things on the work table and go home. Five minutes later he was back, and his "You win" quickly revived my enthusiasm for my work.

In this way, the display plan would emerge out of our discussions and debates, be overturned, emerge in consensus once again; and sometimes it would enter the even broader debates among the museology students in Muga"s seminar entitled "exhibiting culture," where he gave the students sixteen topics, touching on every aspect of the whole exhibit; the students engaged the topic enthusiastically, and in fact did come out with quite a few good suggestions. And on Arn"s styrofoam model, pieces continued to get moved around, while the bright-yellow "post-it" notes that represented pictures and storyboards in were repeatedly taken down and put somewhere else by different people"s fingers. This reminded one of a yellow traffic light, suspending us between red for stop and green for go. But we couldn"t just "hang;" almost every day the plan changed; sometimes from morning to afternoon we would encounter new questions and new debates.

Until the time that the big fish gut went under--the Scary Fishes exhibit was dismantled--and we switched from Arn"s model to real objects in the real gallery, the objects continued to move around restlessly. One could say that in the two months of installation, proceeding under considerable pressure from chaos to order and from unending debates to gradual consensus, especially when everybody pulled together to construct the late-arriving architectural pieces, even though the carpenter whose arrival everyone eagerly awaited never appeared under the Seattle sky, the collective spirit and the individual wisdom ended up surpassing my expectations... clear until, practically on the eve of opening, we were still looking for the impossible space to display that heirloom saddle from a Bimo household that Steve had bought for not a little cash. In the end, it seemed best to leave its elegant design, which had once rode the mountains, back in our imagination. The "Mountain Pattern" that the exhibition in the end presented to the audience was conceptualized in this fighting and debating. Out of Muga"s bald cranium there would always emerge a new idea to resolve every dispute. After the opening ceremony was over, Muga invited all the main participants in the planning and construction to dinner in a nearby Chinese restaurant. Erin took the floor to present him with a little key chain that said "I just had another idea," and before she was even done, everybody began to laugh riotously, because everybody knew that this was a mantra that was always hanging on Muga"s lips, and at the same time was often the lead-in to one more debate...

Looked at from one angle, I didn"t know a thing about museology, though I had been to all kinds of museums, including the Mus de l"Homme in Paris and the Kokuritsu Minzoku Hokubutsukan in Japan, and the transition from visitor to curator was not an easy one. One should say that it was precisely because both Muga and I came to exhibiting from a scholarly perspective, that we didn"t have much of a museological framework to refer to in our work, that in both of our minds conceptualizing Mountain Patterns was not much constrained by pre-existing models, and this may have been the reason that we as curators continued to have differences of opinion with the museum staff, and also why the design emerged from a process of arguing and consensus as an "exhibit without a designer" with a rather unusual design. So conceptualizing Mountain Patterns from start to finish was a fluid process, one involved in change from beginning to end, one embroiled in debate from conception to completion, a process from start to finish full of strategy and rich in creativity.

Welcome to our Cold Mountains: Photos and Colors

Maybe I understand Nuosu conceptions of time in terms of "ritual process." And how was this understanding embodied in Mountain Patterns? Let"s go together into the Burke Museum, and come stand under where "Gguhxo Jjojju" and "Mountain Patterns" are written in Nuosu and English: those are three colored pictures, from left to right: Sheepfolds on a snowy day, a mountain scene from late spring or early summer, fields in autumn. Next to them is hung the introductory panel for the exhibit.

Muga in his years of fieldwork in Liangshan has photographed who knows how many scenes; these professional-quality photos certainly add not a little color to Mountain Patterns, as well as filling up the gaps between the exhibited objects. Nevertheless, we put a lot of consideration into simply selecting these three photos. In the end, we decided to lead off the exhibit with the seasons, to think of the strand of time as a cycle leading back to a new beginning. Visitors used to the idea of "Spring Summer Fall Winter" might ask, "Why should the first picture be one of Winter?" Actually, these pictures have a deeper cultural background to grasp; they aren"t simply pretty landscapes. I should say here that putting these three seasonal photos together on one panel was influenced by a set of four Han shell-carved panels in Muga"s house, representing the four amusements of the zither, the chessboard, the book, and the painting, but the time conceptions embodied in our panels came from my familiarity with the Yi calendar year and calendrical rituals: the traditional calendar of the Nuosu was the "10-month solar calendar" which always started with the new year in the blowing snows of the 10th month of the Chinese lunar calendar, so we started with winter snows as the beginning of the year. Nuosu divide the year in accordance with the mountain climate into Winter, Spring, and Fall, and in rhythm with the changing of the seasons they carry out the three important calendrical religious festivals: the yycy naba calling of the souls in the winter, the xi"obu counter-spell in the spring, and the jjyjo turning back of spells in the fall. We can see from this chart the workings of these three rituals together with the turning of the seasons:

We can see from this chart the workings of these three rituals together with the turning of the seasons: the new succeeds the old, over and over again.
1) the yycy naba: calling of the souls in the winter, to celebrate the Solar New Year;
2) the xi"obu: counter-spell in the spring, to dispel spring melancholy;
3) the jjyjo: turning back of spells in the fall, to drive autumn obfuscation.

The seasons and their rituals are always turning and coming back to the beginning, reflecting the perpetual Nuosu concerns about production and reproduction, human longevity and agricultural productivity, and at the same time giving rise to a series of folk phenomena dealing with the agricultural cycle, plowing and herding, astronomy, divination. These three pictures portray the changes in the course of a year, using the cycling of time to draw visitors into a vividly nature-oriented mountain society.

Still, in the actual exhibit, detailed cultural background concepts like the 10-month solar calendar and the calendrical rituals can only be hinted at; I suppose this is the unavoidable loss of meaning in a museum exhibit. Particularly whenever we considered introducing some kind of cultural meaning behind an object or a picture, the museum specialists would all be afraid that this would "confuse the audience." Especially, it seemed like the more scholarly a display the more it deviated from the Burke"s long-time orientation toward children. We even debated whether this exhibit was really "scholarly" or "educational," and in the end we achieved a kind of synthesis, both educational and scholarly, with the scholarly part realized almost entirely in the displays of Bimo culture at the end of the exhibit, allowing those visitors who really had an academic interest to digest this material slowly.

In addition to the limited prose we could use on the labels, problems about the order of presentation were numerous and complex. In choosing photos, we needed to connect them with the main topics being exhibited, and we could also use them to illustrate some of the important processes in the manufacture of lacquer and silverware that could not be demonstrated by the objects themselves, as well as important life events such as funerals and the summertime Fire Festival. In the matter of colors, the first thing we needed to decide was the colors used in the different kinds of labels; even though everybody leaned toward using the three primary colors of Nuosu lacquerware--red, yellow, and black--but when we saw the numbers of choices presented by the Publications Office, we realized that nobody had paid close enough attention, and the only thing to do was to take a reasonably representative piece of lacquerware and hold it up for comparison... Another question that caused us trouble was the colors of the walls in the gallery. At the beginning, Arn and Muga both advocated using a color close to that of Liangshan"s mud; Arn spent a considerable amount of time turning the pages of The Yi of Liangshan and examining Muga"s slides looking for the right mud color. Erin and I advocated using some kind of "cool color" in order to give visitors the feeling of having entered the "cool mountains." The two color choices were advocated to the same purpose: to try to use the results of the visual sense to create a feeling of "Liangshan" for the visitors. Finally Arn painted stripes of many different possible colors on the walls of his exhibit shop, and everybody"s opinion gradually came around to a kind of cool gray. After the exhibit opened, there really was an old woman who said she felt cold in the gallery, making it appear that we really did achieve a result of bringing the visitor bodily into the environment: "labor is not a burden to the believer." So by leading into the exhibit with the snow scene and creating the "cold of the Cool Mountains," being able to conceptualize Mountain Patterns to the extent of affecting the visitor"s feelings, really took us through a lot of twists and turns.

The Biggest Puzzle from the Dead Lady

Another kind of temporal passage that is intimately connected with the lives of mountain people is to use the life cycle to construct an account of ideas about human existence and life experience in the native culture. Nuosu people have a birth ceremony that uses naming, horoscope casting, and feasting to pray for the smooth growth of the newborn; they have an adolescence ceremony that employs changing of the skirt to indicate that a girl is an adult who can interact socially as an adult; they have a boisterous marriage ritual including carrying the bride, splashing each other with water, and smearing pot soot on each other"s faces; and they have a solemn, serious funeral ritual that involves cremating the corpse on a wood pyre. Birth, adulthood, marriage, and cremation--each kind of ritual has important cultural meaning and social significance in the lives of the mountain people. In our exhibit, Steve took the anthropological concept of the life cycle and brought it into our display of women"s clothing, and also incorporated folkloristic ideas explaining the form of rites of passage: from the fern patterns of the different styles of children"s hats, symbolizing the flourishing of life, to the different styles of girls" and women"s skirts before and after the skirt-changing ceremony; from the silver saturated bridal outfit to the sober, heavy old woman"s skirt...we attempted to use the changes in Nuosu women"s clothing with age, marital status and social rank to illustrate the simple Nuosu life-cycle concepts. And since the clothing we collected was mostly women"s, reflecting partly the fact that women"s clothing has changed less than men"s under the influence of Han culture.

Because of this, the section on the life cycle, uses its serious content to embody its explanations in the concrete, from head to tail thoroughly stimulates deep reflection, vivifies the covert and symbolic nature of beauty, and stimulates the audience"s understanding of Nuosu ideas of life and death. Nevertheless, in the course of planning the exhibit, the life cycle section was almost truncated in a debate. Only a few days before the exhibit opening, the life cycle section had reached its last scene: exhibiting the funeral clothes. In order to display a traditional Nuosu cremation ceremony though a combination of objects and photographs, Muga and Ma Erzi had built a seven-tiered pyre in the gallery (there are nine tiers for a man; seven for a woman), while I stayed in front of Muga"s computer busying myself with the labels for the ritual section. Suddenly, Ma Erzi appeared in the door, came in and said, "Qubumo, Muga wants you to go right upstairs to have a look." I said "What this time?" and he answered, "Abbe, it"s too terrifying. As soon as we built that pile of firewood, the effect was really realistic, but it scared everybody up there. I think the best thing would be to get rid of it." I thought to myself that from the time of collecting to the design of the exhibit, Ma Erzi was always muttering, now saying that doing it this way would violate a Nuosu taboo, then saying that doing it that way was against Yi people"s prohibitions--for example women"s clothes, ghosts boards etc., even to the point of saying that looking through bimos" spell books made him vomit blood. Generally when he was afraid of something like this I would just forge ahead without regard for my own safety, even when I harbored internal fears. Now, seeing his face blanch, I had best hurry upstairs with him.

I don"t know where Muga had gone, and the only person in the gallery was Karl, the Director, standing over by that really rather startling funeral pyre, looking like he was mulling something. As soon as he saw me he said, with an air of concern, "If we display it this way it"s sure to scare some of the audience, especially the children. Should we think about getting rid of this part?" I immediately disagreed with the idea of eliminating it, because then the life cycle would not be complete, and the whole clothing section of the exhibit would lose its thread of coherence and become random, and more importantly Nuosu ideas of life and death would have no place to be expressed. So I briefly explained to Karl about common Nuosu ideas of death and cremation: When their parents die of natural causes in old age, Nuosu people commission a bimo to conduct a solemn cremation ceremony; the mood is serious, but the atmosphere is not lacking in warmth. Aside from the children and grandchildren of the deceased who are wearing signs of mourning in their clothing, the other young people in the villages should all dress up in their best and go to the funeral, the girls in new jackets and colorful skirts, with pretty headdresses, with yellow sashes tied on their headcloths and trailing down their backs, and the boys in their most formal clothes, with a yellow sash around their waists and the studded "hero"s belt" over one shoulder. When the ceremonies are over people begin singing traditional funeral songs, which are about astronomy, geography, customs, human nature, or they chant the mythical-historical epic Hnewo teyy or the long instructional poem Hmamu teyy, with their language is lively and quaint and they amplify and embellish. Or they sing somber, tragic tunes about the lives of the deceased, fitting them into a commonly recognized pattern of social morality. When the funeral ceremonies are over, there will be a big meeting in the village, where the young men wear a long white yak tail, carry a sword in one hand, and do ancient warrior dances to open the way for the deceased back to the ancestors, while at the same time there are beauty contests, horse races, wrestling matches and other traditional sports, all of which give an air of even greater gravity and warmth to the funeral ceremonies. All of this demonstrates Yi people"s positive attitude toward death, so what cremation embodies is a an actively upward life-orientation. I have gone to cremations since I was a child, and never felt that one was anything scary...

Maybe my words made sense; Karl just told me to write out an appropriate explanation on the label, and also to think of a way to make the pyre a little smaller, so it would not be quite so obvious and frightening--in short, make the audience understand and accept it. And in the end Muga and Ma Erzi stood on my side, so that in my stressed-out state I could let out my breath (even though Muga said that if Ma Erzi continued to oppose it, he would respect his wishes and consider taking it out). In the end, this difficulty came to a perfect resolution: we took out the platform under the funeral pyre, moved it away from its central position in the gallery, and covered the "dead" mannequin with fake pine branches: a "cremation" half hidden and half visible resulted in a dilution of the "death" flavor, and made it more mysterious, more grave, more solemn.

This "dead lady" really did trouble everybody"s thoughts, and the decision as to whether the audience ought to be subjected to such a realistic depiction of death caused divisions that we hadn"t had before. But I really believe that attitudes toward death constitute an important element of the psychological structure of a people, and the question of whether attitudes can be adequately expressed in an exhibit is a separate question from whether such an exhibit might induce "terror of death" in the audience. I think the question of life and death is something that everyone worries about, and is part of everyone"s experience, no matter what they believe in or what kind of funeral they have. From the reaction of audiences after the exhibit opened, we could see that displaying the "cremation" was the right thing to do, that visitors were able really able to observe from this the Nousu positive attitude toward dying and the whole psychological structure that derives from that, and that we were able during this period of exhibit design to reveal that the whole stream of cultural meanings hidden behind "a set of cremation clothes" had a real public educational meaning. Whether it was going to my friend Amber"s mother"s memorial service in Seattle or seeing a tape of my landlady Solv"s late husband Jack"s funeral, they both had similar facets in expressing different cultural attitudes toward questions of life and death.

The Wooden Door: The Connection Between Two Worlds

Space influences and limits display in ways that go without saying, but the natural correspondence between spatial and temporal considerations that permeated Mountain Patterns was something we had not previously counted on. To put it another way, this whole correspondence was covert at the beginning and emerged during thee process of design.

As one of the curators, perhaps I appeared at the Burke in the role of "Native Scholar." But because I studied ethnic literature early on, and because I have recently been working on a Ph.D. in folklore from the famous scholar Zhong Jingwen at Beijing Normal University, I should be seen in the role of the folklorist instead. The study of various kinds of material folklore, including clothing, utensils, and vernacular architecture, has traditionally been an important topic of folklore research. But because of the continuous influence of Japanese folklore studies on Chinese folklore studies, historically the latter has concentrated more on "time" and relatively ignored "space." For a long time, Chinese folklore studies have been a field centered on time, to the point where every kind of customary phenomenon of every ethnic group has been explained by incorporating it into a temporal sequence, and this has resulted in relative neglect of the spatial logic of ethnic folk customs in many places. Even the various works that attempt to explain local differences in folk customs are really nothing but an effort to temporalize spatial questions, using questions of space to pursue matters of temporal significance. For example, research into the local nature of Yi culture does not explore the particular nature of culture in each different area, but rather they use local cultural differences to explicate the origin and development of Yi culture as a whole. And when scholars go to a particular Yi area to carry out research, what is most often omitted is any attention to folk phenomena that bear on spatial arrangements: space, place, borders, landscapes, districts, and environments. From the time Muga began considering the presentation of Nuosu culture, his idea was to encompass it in a scheme of regional subcultures of the "big and little Cool Mountains," including Ninglang County of Yunnan--the Yynuo, Shynra, and Suondi local variants. This received its most concentrated expression in the clothing and textiles section. But this was nothing but using cultural geography as an organizing principle; in Mountain Patterns what we worried about even more was using tangible space to display intangible borders.

Actually, when we first laid out a plan for MP, our choice of topics for the exhibit was constrained by the raw materials of the objects. Because the only Nuosu cultural things we could bring into the museum were tangible objects, even here spatial and monetary constraints precluded us from collecting and bringing into the museum many kinds of Nuosu cultural objects: for example many kinds of interesting bamboo implements and wooden farming and herding equipment were excluded. So our collection plan had three major categories: Body ornamentation (including clothing and jewelry), objects of use (including lacquerware, silverware, and musical instruments), and objects of religious culture. Putting wooden architectural pieces into the exhibit was something done afterwards in order to set up a framing atmosphere, since it would have been impossible to ship an actual house to America (though we did consider it). In this way, Mountain Patterns can be divided into three major zones. When it came to installation, two concrete pillars in the middle of the area became a kind of "natural wall" that divided the gallery into a larger and a smaller space. And the "door" that Muga had ordered was originally going to be placed at the entrance to the gallery, giving those relatively tall Americans the realistic experience of having to duck their heads upon entry into a Nuosu house. But in the end, this "door" became a "mysterious gate" erected at one end of the "natural wall" between the large and small sections of the gallery, with a picture of life inside a Nuosu house hung on one side of the door, in which a hearth with a burning fire can be seen deep within. So this door became a boundary line: outside is the "apparent world" of ordinary Nuosu life, somewhat like the courtyard of any family"s dwelling, where people would ordinarily hang clothes, make felt, or weave, while inside the gate is the "hidden world" of Nuosu spiritual life, somewhat like the gaku, or hearth, inside a house where it would be more difficult for outsiders to enter, where there would usually be an altar where offerings were made to the ancestral spirits.

What needs to be pointed out here is that we had many things to consider about positioning of objects in the large and small spaces. One was the receptivity of the audience: we designed the layout of the exhibit so that the esoteric bimo culture, that is the religious elements of the exhibit, was at the very end. Another was that we chose two different shades of gray for the inner and outer portions of the exhibit, with the inner color a shade darker. A third was that the presence of the free standing architectural structure further restricted the already rather cramped space of the inner gallery, as well as partially blocking the ceiling lights, causing the whole atmosphere in there to seem obscure, somber, different from that in the outer gallery. And this solution was purely serendipitous, since we didn"t discover until we moved the original 7 units of architectural pieces into the gallery that they wouldn"t all fit, so at the beginning we just set up three units, but the result was not ideal, so we expanded it to five units. And Muga, in another inspired move, decided not to put shingles on top, and thereby allowed us not only to limit the oppressive feeling of a too-narrow space, but could also allow the lights from the ceiling to filter indirectly through the dense structure of posts and beams. As the saying goes, "deliberately prune the flowers and they don"t bloom; accidentally plant the willow and it gives shade." This strong contrast between the inner and outer spaces produced an atmosphere of random rising and falling, of interplay of light and shade, of rapidly shifting rhythms.

Now let"s bring the topic around to the door, that natural dividing line. I think we can divide the Nuosu culture that we wanted to exhibit into two parts--daily life and ritual life. In that case, this door, intentionally or unintentionally, is a kind of organizing principle of the composition of the entire exhibit:

This "door" thus becomes the key location for visitors to understand the entire exhibit: At the same time as it is a folk object made by the carpenter (who gave up a once-in-a-lifetime chance to leave the country because he was afraid of the complex visa application procedures), it is also a metaphor for the whole exhibit: outside is the extant material world of the Nuosu, manifestations of clothing, food, residence, and travel, while inside is the belief realm of the spirit. This door offers a vantage point that embodies a deep perspective; through it we attempt to explain the intangible culture in back of the tangible object, to covertly display the multilayered mountain pattern that pulls the Nuosu spiritual beliefs, systems of knowledge, ways of ritual, annual rituals, and rites of passage together into one embodiment. If the visitor, passing through this door, can move the experience of this exhibit from the superficial to the interior, from the shallow to the profound, from the apparent to the hidden, they will be able to understand and connect with a kind of culture rich in its uniqueness, and thereby be stimulated, surprised, and delighted.

Equally interesting is that when Dr. Ralph Litzinger had walked around the exhibit for only a short time, he "read" the attempt to present two worlds to the visitor: one was the tangible material customs, and one the intangible spiritual customs: when you bend your head to go through that wooden door, you move from the multicolored world of Nuosu everyday life into a profound and somber spiritual world...whether we describe it through the technical language of Asian folklore studies or look at it in the light of western anthropology, we can say that because of this, this kind of spatial exhibit arrangement and our practical solution to the dictates of our spaces covertly display a kind of cultural concept, which was validated by the reactions of visitors. I remember an evaluation of the exhibit that I heard at the time, when Muga and I exchanged looks, recognized each other"s meanings and smiled--"at this time the unspoken prevailed over the spoken"--it was as if we could transmit our respective delight without saying anything: " We did it!" During the whole process of installing the exhibit, we were doing as Deng Xiaoping said about China"s "reform and opening": "Crossing the river by feeling the stones, or maybe "following our feelings." This exhibit concept, which evolved gradually day by day was somewhat abstract, and in the entire construction of the exhibit labels, strictly following the museological guidelines of using simple language, we never referred to it explicitly. This kind of a hidden "pattern" was somewhat academic, but as long as it could be detected by sensitive visitors, who thereby gained a deeper understanding of Nuosu culture, we could say that it was the realization of a scholarly idea, so that the research of us individual scholars could gain a real reward through the participation and acceptance of exhibit visitors.

Farewell, my Yak Head

After the exhibit had been open for a month, I had to say goodbye to Seattle. Walking out the front door of the Burke, turning around to look at "our" gallery, protected by the Yak brain case that I had carried here, protecting those Nuosu cultural objects that would stay forever in the Burke, I couldn"t suppress a reluctance to part... When Ma Erzi and I hugged Muga goodbye at the airport, Muga said, "when you two leave I won"t be able to get used to the office with just me in it." I said to myself, "after I leave I won"t be able to "fight" with you any more, Muga." In fact, the thing that will be hardest for me to forget will be our debates: from them I learned very, very much, and the benefits I derived from them were not shallow. As my American friend Aaron Tate said to me in an e-mail:
"Thank you for the updates on your work in Washington, they were very interesting. It was fascinating to read about the disputes between you and Dr. Harrell, it became clear to me that he is trained as an anthropologist and you as a folklorist! It is great that you are "standing your ground," so to speak. I am sure that you are both learning a tremendous amount from the experience, and that is a very valuable thing. I also always love to read about your improvement with English -- you sound like quite a fast learner."
It"s true: Muga"s anthropological perspective not only contributed the temporal perspective of the concept of the entire life process, but also used the anthropological perspective to extract from ordinary people"s conceptions two kinds of space that they elaborate in living their lives: the outer world of living and the inner world of the spirit. And I, from my background as a folklorist, was able to transmit what I understand as the patterns of Nuosu culture extracted from the concrete phenomena of custom. Different perspectives, different scholarly backgrounds, maybe this was a process of reciprocal complementation and mutual advantage derived from the process of conceptualizing Mountain Patterns. Speaking frankly, the reason why I dared to "fight" with this respected anthropologist was because Mountain Patterns made us move from collaborators to friends between whom there was nothing we couldn"t say, who were completely open with each other. When I went back to Beijing, we started calling each other "sister" and "brother" on email, and I am happy to have this kind of a "big-brother" like senior colleague, because Muga will always be my private anthropology tutor.

Not long afterward, Chinese Central TV repeatedly broadcast two documentaries, and immediately the telephone which had lain silent on my desk for a long time began ringing unceasingly: Beijing classmates and friends, fellow students and fellow workers, Liangshan kin and hometown relatives, friends and neighbors from all over, all in unison congratulated us on the success of the exhibit, while some people asked in detail how we could possibly have shipped such a heavy "wooden house" to America... I believe that--when they hear Muga"s good wishes spoken on TV in the Nuosu language, when they see the objects collected from their own houses, or even pictures of themselves and their relatives appearing in America, even more "Nuosu Qobo"--friends, one telling ten and ten telling a hundred, will talk about Nuosu culture having reached American Muga"s country. But what will they be thinking about it? In September, my sister and I will be coming back to America to be visiting fellows at Harvard, so before that we will return to Liangshan to visit our parents, so at that time I ought to find a few days" time to return to Meigu and interview a few families... (Translated by Stevan Harrell)

Go to Chinese Version:
http://www.chinesefolklore.org.cn/tyjj/tycz/ganyan1.htm