PROCREATIVE METAPHOR AND PRODUCTIVE UNITY IN AN YI HEADMANSHIP

In the 1990s, residents of a mountain community in southwestern China engaged official discourses about their 'nationality' with claims that they had once possessed a rotating headmanship, an institution once c ommon in Yi minority areas of Yunnan province. As Yi (or Lolop'delta) peasants remembered it, this institution protected their community fro m the least predictable excesses of the Qing and Republican states by rotating yearly among the area's most affluent inhabitants the respons ibilities of feeding and entertaining visiting officials, guarding pri soners, carrying letters and burying dead outsiders. Talk of this bygo ne arrangement amounted to a powerful strategy of self representation, which bound together people of diverse origins into a single house-li ke unity, descended from a single ancestor and mutually engaged in the intimate processes of household reproduction. By the early 1990s, thi s remembered unity had become a foundation for politically-risky claim s to a separate 'nationality' status.