Mythogeographies of anthropological knowledge: writing over the lines and footsteps of history in Southwest China

In this article, I delve into the field diary of Ma Changshou – a major Chinese ethnohistorian and social anthropologist active between the 1930s and 1960s – to show how his journeys through Liangshan, a mountainous land in Southwest China inhabited by the Nuosu‐Yi, led to a new kind of anthropological knowledge. Ma worked under the theoretical, methodological, and ideological assumptions of his era, where he strove to assemble his findings on Nuosu‐Yi kinship relations and textual sources into a linear historical narrative, even though the Liangshan of his day was not fully controlled by a centralized state bureaucracy. Retracing Ma's journey in mythogeographical fashion, I propose that the travel‐fieldwork trajectories of China's Republican‐era social scientists and their interpretation of data obtained from native chieftains, bimo ritualists, and other members of prominent Nuosu‐Yi clans have shaped today's knowledge of Nuosu‐Yi history, society, and culture. Notably, Ma's mythogeography fleshed out two different essentialized but intertwined ways of seeing the past: that of state‐bureaucratic societies and that of genealogy‐based societies like the Nuosu‐Yi. Mythogeographies like this can give rise to more than new ways of performing genealogies; they can throw light on the anthropo‐history of China and the world at large.