Southwest China is home to a diverse range of minority peoples with their own ritual traditions, some of which have native scripts. This book offers profound, hard-won insights into one such semi-oral tradition, that of the Yi-Sani bimo, male religious practitioners of the Yi nationality, a Tibeto-Burman-speaking ethnic minority of around eight million people spread throughout southwest China, primarily in Yunnan and Sichuan. The bimo religion occupies a liminal space somewhere between the oral and the written: a religion whose chants are based on secret writings voiced by the bimo shamans. Masters of Psalmody is an anthropology of this shamanic writing, an attempt to answer a prevalent ideology of “structuralist logocentrism” which finds expression in the policies of the Chinese state, and to thwart the common idea that shamanism would be a religion of orality (p. xiv).

At the book's foundations lie ethnographic data collected over two decades, primarily from bimo informants. Yi writing has been discussed in prior scholarship – but never has the shamanic writing been the subject of a monograph such as this in English, where the author focuses on the writing of the Sani branch with its own distinct logographic scriptural tradition. The author offers a unique perspective, having been trained by a bimo in the shamanistic writing, and thus having “partial access” to their secret written language, and, therefore, the “scriptural metaphysics” that make up the heart of this study (p. 2).

The book recounts the transubstantive journey of bimo writing, beginning in the first chapter with a discussion of the origin myths and the importance of lineage to the shamanic identity. In chapter 2, the oral nature of the writing is revealed, with a focus on psalmody – the sound passing through writing, leading to the text and texture of the books in chapters 3 and 4, where the books are shown to be “mountains” traversed by the shamans. The ritual books are vessels for shamanic movement. The focus of the fifth chapter is on bimo ritual and sacrifice, where the blood of a sacrificial animal enables the transmission of a message to the gods. We are introduced to a specific text, Achema, in chapter 6. This bridal chant follows a lyrical narrative more easily understood than the shamanistic chants. The final and most poignant chapter of the book describes the process of democratization of writing, and turns the book as whole into a meditation on what is lost during such a process. Primarily, it seems, we lose the “shamanic voice”: the final question that Névot asks in her conclusion relates to the use of the bimo script in a contemporary painting: “does the painter not make us hear the mutism in which this shamanistic writing plunges irremediably?” (p. 245).

The key to the scriptural metaphysics of the Yi-Sani bimo, and the central metaphor running throughout this work, is that for the bimo writing = blood: “This concept is that of se, a graphic sign which at the same time means ‘writing’ and ‘blood’” (p. x). It is metaphorical because the bimo actually write in black ink, not blood, although Névot rejects the “Eurocentric” language of metaphor in favour of Geoffrey Lloyd's notion of “semantic stretch” (p. 6). Essentially, textual transmission among the bimo was traditionally linked to blood ties via patrilineal transmission, with the graphic sign for “writing” being identical to the sign for “blood”, but with the exact graphs used differing between bimo lineages (p. 5).

This is a work that relies heavily upon transcription (utilizing the author's own notation system instead of IPA), which by necessity puts us one step removed from the object of discussion: native writing. Unfortunately the reliance on transcription means we are presented with sentences like this: “The Master of psalmody explicitly states that through its blood, se, and its breath, sè, this mo [sacrificial animal] takes the message contained in the psalmody that it has to communicate to the spirits, se” (p. 162). The reader is always placed at arm's length from the object of description, for the phonemes are discussed without the Yi-Sani script itself. This leads to a certain confusion: are these phonemes multi-graphical, or homo-graphical? The book seems to suggest both, depending upon the situation: “The semantic ambiguities of the homographs” (p. 144) vs the “multidimensional, multi-graphical” phoneme “se” (p. 164). A clearer approach (typographical difficulties notwithstanding) might have been to show some of these graphs embedded within the main discussion. Only in chapter 7 does the reader get to see actual written representations of “blood” and “writing” (p. 209), in a reproduction of a page from the author's own field notes, as an example of non-patrilineal scriptural heterogeneity. A philological analysis of these different written forms may have proved fruitful, for while clearly different graphs, they appear to share similar features.

This study juxtaposes the master–disciple lineage of transmission with the scriptural unification project of the Chinese state, ending on the melancholy note of the shamanistic tradition of bimo lineage in the Stone Forest County having been consigned to the past (p. 244). This is because the effort of the Chinese state to unify the script is, perhaps ironically, a process that entails the separation of blood from writing: the imposition of logocentrism onto what was traditionally a non-linear, divine writing. This separation is, in the author's estimation, an attempt by the Chinese state to uproot local shamanistic power. While this may certainly be true, it is also, as the author notes, the continuation of a process that actually began before Communist Party rule, with the missionary Paul Vial (1855–1917), who taught bimo writing at a school to any who would learn it (thus breaking the tradition of patrilineal transmission) in the early twentieth century (p. 210). Perhaps this is also a necessary process, if we accept that the “gradual democratisation of writing is an essential aspect of the passage to modernity” (Martyn Lyons, Ordinary Writings, Personal Narratives: Writing Practices in 19th and Early 20th-century Europe (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), p. 27).