The Many Ways of Being Human

5.3

China's Other Peoples

A notebook of handmade bark paper lies open, its strips filled with a frog, an eye, a foot, a white-capped mountain. A Dongba priest among the Naxi in Lijiang can sing from one page for half an hour. The chapter moves through the mountains of southwest China, where Miao, Naxi, and Yi live under a state that decides which peoples exist.