From 1994 to 2003, I traveled several times to the upper reaches of the Ximin River on the eastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to conduct fieldwork combining historiography and anthropology in local Qiang and Tibetan villages, focusing on the relationship between the ethnic identity of the local people and their historical memory, and the changes between the two in the past half century. During my fieldwork, I observed the social and living customs of the people in the villages here on the one hand, and on the other hand, I inquired about and recorded people's memories of the past. The former is context and the latter is text; I explore the correspondence between the two and its meaning. With multi-point fieldwork from ditch to ditch, I entered into one context after another in connection with the text; observing how changes in social context caused the corresponding changes in the text (social memory), so as to gain a deeper understanding of the local social context and its changes. Finally, these understandings of the Qiang also changed my understanding of the knowledge system that I was familiar with. This seems to be a systematic method of investigation and research, not a proper plan that has been made before the field is carried out, but gradually takes shape as the field progresses.
My fieldwork, in a way, is "playing" while doing it. Sichuanese "play" is to play, play willfully and happily. In those years, every holiday, I and two or three Qiang friends would carry backpacks and walk together to various ditches, over mountains, beams, and villages. In the village, our activities were relaxed and enjoyable; visiting the door, drinking, chatting (Sichuanese). My small talk with the owner's family in the village is often from crops, cattle and sheep to the local New Year customs, everything is talked about. After about two years, some of the field methods and the important topics of the inquiry gradually came into focus.
The method of fieldwork, which moves so often between multiple points, is not derived from the multi-point field, which was already an example in anthropology at the time, but is inspired by a simple concept in oral history: history has multiple voices. And thanks to a fundamental rule in the study of social memory: individual memory is deeply influenced by their social identity. As a result, I not only moved to different field points, but also in the same village, my interviews also moved between individual villagers of different generations, genders, education, occupations, etc.
From the beginning of the field, I recorded as much as possible in the interview room. This was influenced by several academic traditions that appealed to me at the time—oral history, social memory, and ethnic identity. These three academic traditions generalize to history, sociology, and anthropology. Field recordings are casual at first and have no specific theme. Later, the ancestral history of the brothers, the story of the poison cat, the belief in the mountain gods, and the ancestral memories of local heroes such as Dayu and Zhou Cang became the subject of interview recordings.
The stories of the ancestors of the various brothers that have been circulated throughout the Qiang ethnic group are actually a kind of local "history" and a collective memory. They arise from social situations in which people in various villages are both cooperative and differentiated and antagonistic, and they are also reinforced in turn. People live in such a social reality, and therefore believe in but do not doubt such "history". A cultural historical mentality, called the historical mentality of the brothers' ancestors, allows people to constantly create, tell, and believe in such a history that begins with "a few brothers came here in the past." In this way, the study of "Qiang Between Han and Tibet" can be said to be the work of "turning strangeness into familiarity".
After understanding this kind of "history" that is quite strange and peculiar to us (the centralized and ordered so-called civilized social groups), I explain in "Heroic Ancestors and Brotherly Nations" that the "history" that we are familiar with and believe in, a kind of "history" that begins with the deeds of heroic ancestors, is also the product of a historical mentality, the historical mentality of heroic ancestors. The history of heroic ancestors corresponds to the reality of the concentration of power and the order of wealth and social status. In the same way, living in a social reality created by this "history", we therefore have no doubt about such a "history". Under the social situation of the era formed in Huaxia in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, how did the Yellow Emperor, YanDi, And Other figures become the ancestors of the heroic history that condensed Huaxia, and how did they later develop into the concept of historical groups such as the descendants of the Yellow Emperor and the descendants of Yanhuang. In the context of the expansion of the Chinese margins during the Han and Jin Dynasties, how did the Historians of the Central Plains create some heroic histories of the descendants of the Yellow Emperor, such as the history of Jizi Running in Korea, Taibo Benwu, Zhuang Shu Wang Dian, and RongRen Wuyi Sword Running in The Western Qiang, which is used to illustrate the Chinese blood of the marginal people in China. This is to "regard the familiar as strange", that is, to analyze and understand the knowledge we are familiar with based on the same thinking logic and method as before.
Each ditch (valley) of the Qiang people is a small human ecosystem. In a special environment, people use the environment to carry out their economic livelihood, because of the distribution of environmental resources and competition in the activities of life, people form various social groups, and use culture to regulate the behavior and values of the people, so that the environment, livelihood and society can be maintained and developed steadily. In the book "The Nomadic Choice", I compare three nomadic social groups in northern China in the Han Dynasty from the perspective of human ecology: the Western Qiang, the Xiongnu and the Xianbei. The geographical and natural environment of their subsistence activities is different, so they have different nomadic economies and auxiliary livelihoods, and support their economic livelihoods with different social organizations, and therefore have their own cultural and moral customs that match their livelihood and society. Taking the Xiongnu, Xiqiang and Xianbei in the Han and Jin Dynasties in China as examples, observe and analyze why they have different interaction patterns with the Han Empire and the historical events (appearances) of different natures, and think about the differences in human ecology (essence) behind them. Documentary records and historical events are the same as the phenomena we see in the field, and they are all representations and appearances under the essence of a certain social situation. Therefore, the investigation between multiple representations and the present phase is like moving a concave and convex mirror to observe multiple objects; by observing and comparing the surface changes on the mirror surface, we can have more understanding of the under-mirror object (the original phase).
For more than twenty years, my academic research has benefited from the fieldwork of that year. Or, in both ways, I have never left the Qiang fields. First, that fieldwork experience allowed me to see the world around me with a new perspective (including reading historical documents) and thus live in the field. The other is that I have become more and more aware of the macroscopic significance of the humanistic phenomena I have seen in the fields of the Qiang people, so they still lead me to continue to explore their significance in global human society and its development and evolution. Human society itself is one of the richest books that deserve our in-depth "reading".
Qiang Between Han and Tibet: A Study of the Historical Anthropology of the Qiang People in Western Sichuan, by Wang Mingke/ by Century Wenjing| Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2022
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