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David Crockett Graham (ed. Hartmut Walravens): More Songs and Stories of the Ch'uan Miao. (Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes.) 329 pp. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag / Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, 2018. ISBN 978 3 447 11001 3.

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David Crockett Graham (ed. Hartmut Walravens): More Songs and Stories of the Ch'uan Miao. (Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes.) 329 pp. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag / Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, 2018. ISBN 978 3 447 11001 3.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2020

Mark Bender*
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
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Abstract

Type
Reviews: East Asia
Copyright
Copyright © SOAS University of London, 2020

David Crockett Graham (1884–1961) was a missionary and ethnographer who spent decades in south-west China. His first and middle names recall his namesake, the early nineteenth-century American frontiersman, Davy Crockett. An ordained Baptist minister, Graham received a doctorate in religious studies from Chicago and studied anthropology and archaeology at Chicago and Harvard. While conducting his missionary work for the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society on the borders of Sichuan and Guizhou provinces, Graham (with the help of local collaborators) collected hundreds of thousands of specimens of plants and animals for the Smithsonian Institution. He also collected copius oral texts and artefacts of the Yi (Yizu 彝族), Miao (Miaozu 苗族), Qiang (Qiangzu 羌族), Tibetan (Zangzu 藏族), and Han (Hanzu 汉族) ethnic groups, some of which are housed in the Smithsonian archives. In the 1930s and 40s, after initial years in Suifu (present day Yibin 宜宾, Sichuan, at the confluence of the Yangzi and Min rivers), Graham acted as the first curator of the West China Union University Museum, in Chengdu. Presently, Sichuan University Museum (an incarnation of the former museum) displays artefacts Graham collected, including garb and accoutrements of Yi warriors, and artefacts of a people once known in Chinese as the “Ch'uan Miao” 川苗 (a subgroup of the official Miao ethnic minority group, made up of peoples often collectively called “Hmong” outside China).

Hartmut Walravens, the editor of the present volume, terms Graham's Songs and Stories of the Ch'uan Miao (Washington DC: The Smithsonian Institution, 1954) as “pioneering”, as it is one of the first major collections of folk literature of the Miao ethnic group to appear in a Western language. More Songs and Stories of the Ch'uan Miao is based on an unpublished English-language manuscript of translations left by Graham at Whitman College (from which he received a BA), mixed with some notes by Wolfram Eberhard, a German founder of modern Chinese folklore studies active in China in the 1930s. Walravens discovered the forgotten manuscript and edited it into the present volume, maintaining the Wade-Giles Romanization system as it occurs – a prudent move as the manuscript did not contain many Chinese characters or Miao-language equivalents.

In the “Preface”, Graham notes his collaboration with a number of Miao, beginning with Chang Sa-kai (Zacchaeus Chang), who introduced him to a young man named Yang Feng-chang, who he trained as an assistant in learning Ch'uan Miao culture and language. As he became interested in translating the oral songs and stories, Graham later collaborated extensively with Hsiung Chao-sung (Xiong Chaosong 熊朝嵩 – the only name with Chinese characters in the text), and also with a student named Yang Ch'ing-ming. Graham and his co-translators employed several different techniques (none it seems involving electronic recording devices), including translation from Miao to Chinese, and then into English. Graham eventually learned enough Ch'uan Miao to participate actively in transcribing and decoding some texts. The bulk of the songs and narratives, however, were collected and initially transcribed by Hsiung, whose work allowed him to travel widely in the Miao areas. A number of other collaborators are acknowledged in Graham's works. In all, 752 texts were translated, the bulk published in the first volume, Songs and Stories. But due to printing costs, 276 were not published. Those remaining texts make up the bulk of the More Songs collection.

By Graham's intention, the present collection of oral texts includes a more informative introduction than the nine pages supplied in the initial collection. The enhanced “Introduction” covers basic information on the geographical setting of the Ch'uan Miao people (located in mountainous border areas of Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan), language (tones, phonemes, structure, etc.; comparisons with Yi, Chinese, and other Miao dialects), population, ethnonym (Hmong Bo “ancient Miao”), physical characteristics, and historical background (including memories of a great war with imperial troops and a forced migration about 1733 ad). There are also many details regarding economic life (including foodways and farming practices), architecture, hunting and natural plant foods, textile production and embroidery, other crafts, social organization, relationships, daily customs, sexual life (rather clinically described), marriage and child-rearing, demons and illnesses, funerals, memorial ceremonies, festivals, rituals, amusements, religious beliefs, etc., that Graham recorded. This context, though limited, is useful for understanding aspects of the oral texts, especially those related to daily and ritual life.

The folk literature content is organized as “Legends”, “Tales related to mythological, historical, and etiological traditions”, “Songs and ceremonial chants”, “Stories”, “Folk-Tales”, followed by an “Appendix” of the notes by Eberhard and a bibliography of Miao/Hmong studies. “Legends” could have been labelled “Origin myths” as all the passages/versions describe the creation of the world, sun and moon, and origins of thunder, certain gods, etc. – themes found in creation stories from other Miao and regional ethnic groups. The volume includes many examples of antiphonal love songs (once popular in many parts of China), and songs connected to go-betweens, the marriage process, joking and ridicule (across genders), the use, making, and transport of material items (such as porcelain bowls, embroidery, thread, iron ore, etc.), hunting, and so forth. The stories involve origins of customs, animal and shape-shifter accounts, customary law and practices, and conceptions of the cosmos.

More Songs and Stories of the Ch'uan Miao gives researchers more data for charting the complex weave of motifs, myths, rituals, customs, lifeways, environmental knowledge, and material culture that appear in many formats and many formulations in the oral traditional mediums of south-west China and contiguous areas in Southeast Asia and the eastern Himalayas. Hartmut Walravens and the press are to be thanked for making available this material from a now distant era of oral literature collecting.