The Art of Being Governed under the Muli Tibetan Regime: A Case Study of Naxi House Kinship

Either explicitly or implicitly, states assume specific familial forms and governance structures are built in a way that creates political and economic environments favorable to some familial patterns while foreclosing options for others. For governed populations, kinship is a resource that allows people a means to achieve their own goals within the space governance and economic structures allow, even when those goals are informed by values that are contradictory to state ideology. In this dissertation, I explore the dynamic relationship between society, economy, and state from the vantage point of kinship in a small village of the Sino-Tibetan borderland. Eagleback is Naxi a village in southern Sichuan province that was governed by the Muli Kingdom, a Tibetan Buddhist regime, for nearly three hundred years. Since the 1970s, the community has captured the attention of researchers attempting to understand the co-presence of several marital forms and seemingly contradictory kinship practices. In this research, I take a historical approach to examine how Eagleback kinship intersected with the institutions of the community’s governing body, Muli Monastery.

Building on both classical kinship theory and new innovations, part one of this dissertation focuses on describing the kinship of Eagleback Naxi. I show how their kinship system as a whole is constructed of two mutually constitutive orders. The first order of kinship revolves around named “houses” called yao’gho which make up the basic domestic, economic, and political unit of Eagleback. The second order of kinship is constituted of personal kinship networks that are structurally maintained as distinct from yao’gho kinship. Together these two orders allow for the house’s topological reversal, creating a system in which families are able to demand strict cooperation toward their collective economic, social, and political well-being while still allowing a broad space for the fulfillment of personal needs. Part two explores the political and economic environment that Eagleback Naxi lived in prior to 1957, and how the conditions it created for families correlate with kinship structure and practices still observable in the present. I begin with a discussion of the ideology of Tibetan Buddhist polities described as “mass monasticism,” and describe how the state vision for society’s development included two specific implications for family structure. First is that families would have more sons than they needed and dedicate them to monasteries. Second, is that peasant families would provide labor for an economy that could produce enough surplus to support not just a government bureaucracy, but a large monastic population. Through examination of two central institutions of the Muli Kingdom’s governance structure—the system of monastic recruitment and structures of taxation and property rights—I explore how both were organized to steer families in particular directions while also leaving a broad space for society to utilize kinship in ways that allowed families to pursue their own goals. Within this context, we can observe how the topological reversal that the Eagleback yao’gho achieves relates to the political and economic demands Muli Monastery placed on the families it governed. The kinship system developed by Eagleback Naxi was an unintended consequence of families making decisions about how to live their lives as an expression of their values within the space allowed by the governance structures of the Muli Kingdom. What is revealed is the dialectic relationship between society, economy, and state, characterized by constant negotiation, contestation, and compromise. Essentially, Eagleback kinship is an art of being governed.