Dangerous Relations: An Ethnographic Study of Leprosy, Ritual, and Social Order Among the Nuosu of Southwest China

In recent years, new animism has encouraged scholars to understand animist worlds as constituted through multiple relationships between humans and nonhumans. Danger, pollution, and asymmetry within these relationships, however, still need to be examined through specific ethnographic cases. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture between December 2020 and February 2025, this article examines Nuosu understandings of leprosy, together with the everyday taboos, protective practices, and bimo rituals surrounding the disease. The ethnography shows that, in the Nuosu animist world, leprosy takes the forms of dangerous nonhuman agents known as “Cut” (ꋄ), “Nu” (ꆓ), and “Nuse” (ꆓꌋ), which can transform into one another. These beings move through natural objects, human bodies, kinship ties, and the ancestral realm. Their danger lies not only in the harm they cause to the body, but also in the way their pollution disrupts established boundaries between humans and nonhumans, the living and the ancestors, and lineage insiders and outsiders. The Nuosu seek to avoid and expel these dangerous beings, yet they cannot remove them once and for all because the beings are embedded in bodies, lineages, and relations with ancestors. This gives rise to a relational paradox: they must be rejected, but they must also be dealt with repeatedly. Taboos, protective practices, ritual expulsion, and the purification of ancestral spirits provide different means of managing this paradox, redrawing boundaries, and restoring order. On this basis, this article defines “dangerous relations” as nonreciprocal relations that people seek to sever but that repeatedly re-emerge through pollution, kinship, and ontological transformation. The Nuosu case shows that animist worlds encompass ethe formation and maintenance of relationships, as well as efforts to avoid or transform dangerous relations and manage the boundaries surrounding them.