Culture from 'cool mountains' visits Burke Museum through Sept. 4

Probably not one in a thousand Puget Sound residents has ever heard of the Nuosu people of remote southwestern China. Stevan Harrell wants to change that.

If the UW anthropologist and two colleagues from China have their way, thousands of people are going to learn about the Nuosu and their culture in the next six months from an intriguing exhibit that opens today at the UW’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. The exhibit, Mountain Patterns: Survival of Nuosu Culture in China, runs through Sept. 4.

Curator Arn Slettebak (with mallet) and Adjunct Professor of Art Leo Berk help set up the display of architectural elements of Nuosu culture for the exhibit Mountain Patterns that opens today at the Burke Museum.

The Nuosu (pronounced NOH-sue) are an ethnic minority of about 2 million people who live in the rugged mountains of Sichuan province near Tibet. The forbidding geography of the land, where the people subsist by farming and herding, allowed the Nuosu culture to develop over more than a thousand years with little influence from the outside world.

But this cultural isolation came to a sudden end in the second half of the 20^th century when the Chinese Communists won control of China. Reforms in the late 1950s and then the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 severely threatened the Nuosu, according to Harrell. The Nuosu language wasn’t taught in schools, Bimo or priests were forbidden to teach or perform rituals, and the Nuosu culture was in danger of being swallowed up. Repudiation of the Cultural Revolution in the early 1980s by the Communist Party enabled the Nuosu to resume their traditional culture while at the same time being exposed to modern consumer culture and economic development.

Mountain Patterns is an attempt to introduce Nuosu culture - while it is still flourishing - and Harrell emphasizes that the exhibit is a collaboration between American and Chinese scholars. His collaborators in organizing the show and in collecting the 450 items that will become a part of the Burke’s permanent collection are both Nuosu - Bamo Qubumo, an associate professor at the Institute of Ethnic Literature in Beijing, and Ma Erzi of the Liangshan Nationalities Research Institute.

The exhibit includes a wide variety of traditional Nuosu arts including colorfully decorated wooden and water buffalo hide lacquerware, intricately patterned clothing, elaborate silver jewelry, native musical instruments and religious images.

“Like so many great ideas, the inspiration for the show began at a party,” explained Harrell, who since 1988 has been traveling and working in Liangshan - Chinese for the Cool Mountains - where the Nuosu live. “Myself and Qubumo were at her parents house and they started showing us the Nuosu cultural items they had collected.”

Harrell and Bamo began planning the exhibit and the kinds of things they wanted to collect in 1996. Two years later, when money became available they began the slow process of collecting by car, bus and on foot through the mountainous realm of the Nuosu who primarily live in small villages.

“Going to the villages was an interesting process,” said Harrell. “The ordinary villagers would say, ‘No, we don’t have any cultural items. They were taken during the Cultural Revolution or they broke.’ We’d talk some more and then they might bring out an item or say there’s a guy up the hill who might have something. Eventually, the word got out and we had a problem because too many items were being offered to us.

“Or we might call on a master silversmith in a small village, sit in his workshop and take pictures of him working, and then order a silver piece we wanted.”

Harrell remembers trudging up a dirt path for half an hour only to have to climb a ladder in the attic, “the dustiest attic I’ve ever seen,” to have an artisan show him how he painted exquisite designs on a water buffalo hide bowl.

“This exemplifies the Nuosu for me. They have an extreme appreciation for craftspeople, who have an honored status,” he said. “At the same time there is a total lack of interest in comfort. They sleep on the ground, wear clothing that chafes and there are chickens and cows wandering through their houses. There is an incredible toughness to these people who also have an aesthetic sense and appreciation of crafts.”

Harrell, a cultural anthropologist, originally didn’t set out to study the Nuosu. It was still difficult for Americans to do field work in China in the 1980s and the easiest way to break in was to study minorities. He focused on southwest China and looked for a specific group; going down a list he found the Yi people, of which the Nuosu are a subgroup.

“Then I choose the Nuosu because there was a language textbook available. The compulsion to work with the Nuosu came later,” said Harrell who has traveled to Liangshan seven times. “I discovered I had a psychological affinity to the Nuosu culture. The people are easy to relate to and today I have so many friends there that it is like visiting family.”

Harrell and his Nuosu colleagues hope the Mountain Patterns exhibit will help paint a truer picture of China and its minorities.

“I hope we can introduce Nuosu culture to American people,” said Bamo. “In China, the Han (China’s main ethnic group) people know very little about minorities.”

“There are misconceptions that there are no minorities in China. But it is really a multiethnic country like the United States and it has the same benefits and problems from being multiethnic as we do,” Harrell added. “There has been constant warfare between the Chinese or Han people and minorities. This exhibit shows how a minority people can flourish when they are not completely opposed all the time and how they have carved out a niche in a multicultural country.” ¶

Joel Schwarz, News & Information