Reading patterns: Textiles, religions, and the rhizome of the Miao people in southwest China

Textiles in Miao (Hmong) culture embody profound spiritual and religious meanings. They are considered as the knowledge from celestial beings and deities. This study examines the relationship between Miao (Hmong) textiles, religion, and cosmology by reinterpreting existing ethnographic, visual, and archival materials through the concept of the rhizome. In Miao culture, textiles are not merely decorative objects but material carriers of spiritual knowledge, ritual efficacy, collective memory, and cosmological imagination. Through weaving, dyeing, embroidery, and batik, Miao textile practices connect humans, ancestors, deities, landscapes, plants, animals, and the “other world.” Rather than treating textile motifs as evidence of a single origin, linear genealogy, or diffusionist sequence, this study asks how Miao patterns may be understood as non-linear assemblages of motifs, myths, rituals, ecological relations, and multispecies ontologies. Drawing on published ethnographies, textile catalogues, museum collections, visual records, and oral epics, the article offers a Deleuzian rereading of Miao textile archives. It shifts the analytical framework from origin and diffusion toward multiplicity, alliance, becoming, and assemblage. At the same time, it grounds Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical abstraction in the ethnographic materials of Southwest China, showing that rhizomatic multiplicity is not only a theoretical metaphor but also a lived cosmological and material practice. Miao textiles thus reveal a distinctive cultural cartography in which aesthetic form, religious belief, ecological imagination, and ritual practice are deeply intertwined. They should therefore be understood not as remnants of a disappearing tradition, but as living assemblages of multispecies ontology, ritual power, cultural resilience, and aesthetic becoming.