Introduction
The Hmong are a mountainous tribal ethnic group from southern China who have migrated to the northern parts of Southeast Asia and recently to the US and other Western countries in large numbers. In China they form part of a larger population classified as ‘Miao’; in Southeast Asia, where they have settled over the past three centuries, they have traditionally practiced forms of shifting cultivation at high altitudes, with an economy based on the production of maize, dry rice, and opium as a cash crop. Their language family is a unique one, related only to the Yao and She languages, their culture shows traces of very early Chinese influences, and their religion is a mixture of a classic type of shamanism with forms of pantheism and ancestral worship. They have a strongly patrilineal system of descent and are divided into surname groups on the pattern of Chinese surnames. In Southeast Asia they live in the highlands of Thailand and Burma, Vietnam and Laos, and some have recently migrated to Cambodia. After the involvement of many Hmong on the American side in the ‘Secret War’ against the communists in Laos in the 1960s and 1970s, many were resettled under UN auspices in Western countries, particularly the USA, so that they now form a truly global community.
Millennial movements, based on the belief that a New Age is shortly to come, have been widely reported among the ethnic minorities of Southeast Asia and elsewhere (Scott Reference Scott2009). These are often, although not always, linked with the adoption or impact of Christianity, and the Messianic belief that a Saviour will come or has already come, to save his chosen people. Since Burridge's (1979) argument that the Messiah is merely the symbol or the figure of the expectation of a New Age, the distinction between these two terms (messianic, and millennial or millenarian) has largely collapsed, and they are used interchangeably in this article. In the immediate proximity of the Hmong, the best known of these messianic movements have been reported for the Khmu of Laos (Proschan Reference Proschan1998), for the Karen of Burma (Keyes Reference Keyes1995; Stern Reference Stern1968), and among the Northeastern Thai at the turn of the twentieth century (Tanabe and Turton Reference Tanabe and Turton1984).Footnote 1 In several of these cases, including among the Lahu and other minorities of the southwest China borderlands, beliefs in the imminent arrival of a new epoch have been linked with a folk-tale of the restoration of a form of writing believed to have been historically lost, and the story of lost writing is in fact even more widely distributed through the Tibeto-Burman speaking world, as Blackburn (Reference Blackburn2007) has shown. In many of these cases, however, the story is just a story and not associated with any messianic movement.
For the Hmong, however, even in diaspora, the almost constant recurrence of messianic movements among them since they first began to be credibly reported in Western writings over a century ago, and before that time under their general ethnonym of ‘Miao’ in Chinese writings for some 2000 years of history, requires some explanation in terms other than those which have generally been given for messianic movements (Burridge 1979; Cohn Reference Cohn1970[1957]; Worsley Reference Worsley1957). In the cases over the past hundred years there has been an extraordinary consistency of the main elements in these Hmong messianic uprisings which is unparalleled in any other case, and which I will detail in this article. They have also been uncommonly recurrent and persistent. The beliefs and practices associated with these Hmong messianic movements appear to be central to ideas and definitions of Hmong identity which is not the case for neighbouring or other groups, among whom such movements only occur sporadically and in response to specific circumstances, if at all. It is my view that we are in need of a new approach to understand this very remarkable phenomenon. Recently Byron Good (Reference Good2012: 527) has called for a new understanding of subjectivity which is “embedded in the Ordinary and lies at the complex intersection of the social, the psychological, and the political”. I share his fear of the ‘obvious fallacy’ of reducing the social to the individual at the same time as his discomfort with the old dissociation of the “social or cultural from the psychological”. In terms of some of these considerations, I should like to reintroduce an older notion of ‘cultural structure’, to which I will turn in conclusion. First, however, we should examine some of the evidence.
Since the Hmong first began to be credibly reported in Western writings, as I have said, the periodic recurrence of messianic or millenarian movements among them, frequently associated with the discovery of a Hmong form of writing and the establishment of a Hmong kingdom, has been reported. Prior to that time there were frequent uprisings of the Miao people in China under whom the Hmong were generally subsumed and it seems likely that these were often of the same type, since they were referred to as Miaowang rebellions, or ‘Miao King’ rebellions, and associated with messianic-type figures (Cheung Reference Cheung2012). The best known of these movements involving the Hmong in recent times have been the Hua Miao Protestant movement from 1898 in Southwest China, the Xiong rebellion in northern Vietnam of 1860, the Xiong Mi Chang uprising in northern Vietnam of 1911, and the Pachay revolt in Laos and Vietnam of 1918–21. There were frequent flarings up of similar movements in the 1950s through to the 1980s, such as the mass conversions to Christianity which occurred in 1949 in Laos, accompanied by occasional prophets reportedly declaring themselves to be Jesus, inspired by beliefs in the imminent coming of the Hmong Emperor (Smalley Reference Smalley1956). There was the ‘Meo Trinity Cult’ in Laos in 1957 where three Hmong representing the Holy Trinity travelled from village to village burning household altars like the missionaries and exorcising ghosts (Barney Reference Barney1957a, Reference Barneyb). Similar movements were reported for Laos in 1964 based on the belief a prophet had fallen from the sky who was calling on the Hmong to revolt and would establish “a great independent kingdom” for the Hmong (Halpern Reference Halpern1964: 138). Later there was the widespread belief that Christ would shortly appear to the Hmong in a jeep handing out army rifles (Garrett Reference Garrett1974). There were news reports of similar movements along the Vietnam China frontier in 1978, the explicitly anti-Christian movement of Hmong from northern Thailand to China in 1960 after hearing of the birth of the Hmong King there (Heimbach Reference Heimbach1976), and the movement of Hmong in 1960–62 up to a communist stronghold in Theung district of north Thailand in 1976, where the Hmong King who would unite all the Hmong was said to have been born.Footnote 2 It was believed, in a way which is characteristic of messianic movements worldwide, that one grain of rice would become a thousand, gold and silver would be had by all, all would be equal and not have to work. Particularly well known became the movement associated with Yaj Soob Lwj, which first came to public notice in the urban Hmong settlement of Long Tieng in war-torn Laos in 1967 (Lemoine Reference Lemoine1972; Smalley et al. Reference Smalley, Koua Vang and Yee Yang1990), although it had already been in existence for many years prior to that, and of which one main branch was later established in Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand, led by Lis Txais.Footnote 3 There have also been other occurrences such as the messianic Christian conversions in Vietnam since the 1990s studied by Tâm (Reference Tâm2011), and the esoteric and pacifist sect led by Nkaj Vas Hawj in Nan province of Thailand charted by Culas (Reference Culas2005), identified by its own specific writing system revealed by the divinity Yia Npis Me Nus (see Smalley et al. Reference Smalley, Koua Vang and Yee Yang1990: 157). There has also been the millennium-related movement centred in Chiangrai province of Thailand associated with Lis Txais (Tapp Reference Tapp2010), where a temple or cultural centre had been established with some help from a Japanese Embassy-funded NGO.Footnote 4 Jacob Hickman (Reference Hickman2011, Reference Hickman2014) has also written on and is currently analysing several contemporary Hmong messianic movements, including the Nkaj Vas Hawj one, and one in the US associated with Yaj Soob Lwj (see below). Common themes and motifs are persistently repeated in these occurrences, as I will show here.
Common Themes in Hmong Messianic Movements
The Pollard Movement
The mass conversions to Protestant Christianity of A Hmao and Hmong in the early years of the twentieth century, largely messianic in nature, have been very well described by a number of sources including missionaries present at the time.Footnote 5 From the beginnings of our reliable records we can discern a range of responses to Christianity; there were mass conversions to Christianity among various Miao groups, at a time of terrible poverty and deprivation at the hands of Han Chinese and Nosu (Yi) landlords described by many travellers to the region at the time, and there were attempts to incorporate Christian beliefs and rituals into indigenous messianic movements. Other movements of a still more indigenous nature also occurred.Footnote 6 We should remember that these occurred at a time in China when in the last half of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth, growing conflicts were caused by the increasing influence of Westerners in the region, such as the Boxer Uprising of 1898–1900 when a wholescale massacre of Westerners, particularly missionaries and their Chinese followers, took place, while in a contrary movement earlier (which adopted rather than opposing Christian elements) the millenarian Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64, led by a man who claimed to be the younger brother of Christ and which involved many members of ethnic minorities, had convulsed large areas of southern China.
The Pollard movement began in Guizhou province where James Adam, a Scottish missionary of the China Inland Mission, began in 1901 to make conversions among the Shuixi Miao which soon spread to the Da Hua Miao of Weining county adjoining Zhaotong county in Yunnan where Samuel Pollard of the Bible Christian movement was working.Footnote 7 A mission was established in Bijie county of Guizhou where every Sunday a thousand Miao converts attended church. In 1904 the tribal people visited Pollard and mass conversions began in Zhaotong. On one day Pollard (Reference Pollard1919) records a thousand of “these mountain men” arriving to hear the Gospel, and the missionaries also travelled from village to village winning converts. The combination of Adam's magic lantern showing slides of the life of Jesus with communal singing and the new writing forms for the Miao languages the missionaries were working on proved an irresistible attraction (Clarke Reference Clarke1911; Lewis Reference Lewis, Tapp, Michaud, Culas and Lee2004). By 1910 there were 30 chapels in the area with four to five thousand converts. Quite early rumours started among the Chinese and Nosu, similar to those reported for the Boxer movement (Elvin Reference Elvin1979) that the Western foreigners were giving the Miao bags of poison to put in the water sources which would kill them all so that the land would be left to the Christians (Pollard Reference Pollard1919); there were conflicts between Chinese and Miao and between Miao Christians and non-Christians.Footnote 8 As I have mentioned, at about the same time as the first Miao conversions to Christianity were made, the anti-Westerner Boxer Uprising was raging through northern China and there was fierce anti-foreign feeling in the south too.
But these conversions were in many cases based on what the missionaries saw as a terrible mistake. The people, it is clear from the missionary writings, believed that the Bible was their own lost writings returned to them, since their legends spoke of once having a form of writing which would one day be returned to them. The invention of scripts for their unwritten languages by the missionaries was taken to be the restoration of their own lost writing (Enwall Reference Enwall1994; Hudspeth Reference Hudspeth1937), and the messianic elements of the Bible had obviously struck an immediate – I would say cultural – chord with the Miao, since the ‘King’ who was spoken of as to come again was undoubtedly the ‘King’ whom both Hmong and A Hmao legends also spoke of. As Pollard (Reference Pollard1919) puts it, some of the “old wizards” and some of the “singing women” took on the role of prophets and several dates were announced for the coming of Christ. Whole groups of people gave up farming and devoted themselves to singing and awaiting Jesus (cf. Pollard Reference Pollard1928).
In what seems to be a parallel, or rather, as I think, significantly different type of development, there were cases such as the Miao woman who claimed that she was Jesus' sister and preached and won converts on that basis.Footnote 9 Such indigenous incorporations of Christianity were to prove a common theme in similar movements throughout the coming century, such as the ‘Meo Trinity’ cult described by Barney (Reference Barney1957b) for Laos in the 1960s mentioned above. Here, it is almost as if we can see the Hmong trying to take hold of this alien creed and bend it to their own cultural will.
The 1910 Yunnan Revolt
There seem also to have been more indigenous uprisings of a messianic nature in the region which did not necessarily adopt a Christian form, although they too may have been influenced by the impact of Christianity. In 1910, after the appearance of Halley's Comet, there was an anti-foreign rebellion by an army of 3000 which included Hua Miao and Nosu people, in the very heartland of the Pollard mission, which went almost unrecorded by the missionaries (Dingle Reference Dingle1911). The people blamed the Western foreigners for a poll-tax introduced after opium cultivation had been banned in Yunnan, and demanded the right to cultivate opium again. Grist (1971[Reference Grist1921]) links this movement to the deaths of thousands of coolies on the new French railroad being constructed from Vietnam to Yunnan, which led to rumours that the missionaries were sacrificing children to the railway gods, or as Dingle (Reference Dingle1911) says, that they were buying up children to use their heads to make grease for the railway engine wheels.Footnote 10 The movement was led by a young girl who distributed beans outside all the houses she came across in the belief that wherever a bean was dropped, an invincible warrior would spring up.Footnote 11
It is in these turn-of-the-century Yunnan movements that for the first time we find most clearly recorded the connections between land, writing and sovereignty which were to prove a constant in later movements. We also find beliefs in magical substances, the role played by a maiden, the involvement of ethnic groups besides the Hmong, and tensions between the overt adoption of Christianity for indigenously messianic reasons (the mass conversions), the incorporation of Christian motifs to legitimate an indigenous movement (the mad Miao woman), and even more nativistic movements which were anti-foreign and anti-Christian in nature (the 1910 uprising). Although not very systematically, these themes constantly recur throughout the movements, in a way more like the leitmotif of a musical piece than a mechanical causal relationship.
The 1860s Xiong Uprising
Moving from China proper into Southeast Asia, we find that well before this, and even before the French colonisation of northern Vietnam, although again at a time of considerable mobility and the first encounters with Western foreigners, Hmong messianic movements had occurred. Lunet de Lajonquière (Reference Lunet de Lajonquière1906) describes how in the early 1860s, in Ha Giang province of northern Vietnam, a Hmong man of the Xiong clan declared himself to be the King and led an army composed of Hmong together with Nung and Yao supporters, in the inter-ethnic way characteristic of these movements, to attack and pillage the temples and homesteads of the feudal Tai landlords in Dong Van.Footnote 12 Prior to becoming King he is said to have practiced “prodigious” bounds and leaps onto a very high tower, at first made of branches but then of stone, burning incense and sacrificing to the spirits in a way which resembles the actions of a Hmong shaman; another common theme. After killing thousands of the Tai he was worshipped in a palace of “gold” and the rebellion is said to have lasted for some twelve years. From the top of his tower he would cry “It is I who am the king of the country; the four spirits whom I command go to sew green beans and turn them into soldiers; nobody will be able to vanquish me” (de Lajonquière 1906), since it was believed he had been granted the power to sow seeds which would grow not into beans, but into soldiers, similarly to the beliefs reported for the 1910 uprising in Yunnan.Footnote 13 His followers all wore white turbans, and sartorial distinction also forms a common theme in these movements. However, after killing his own wife, of the Thao clan, he wanted to marry her younger sister and fell out with his father-in-law over this, who fled to China and arranged to have him assassinated. Again, the theme of assassination by one's own people, and inter-clan rivalry, was to prove a common one. We may classify this, like the 1910 Yunnan revolt, as a purely indigenous movement, in the sense that it was not a Christian one, although its circumstances were connected to the impact of western colonialists and their new faith.
The 1911 Xiong Revolt
Again in 1910–12, this time under direct French rule, a rebellion broke out in the same area of Vietnam led by another Xiong clan leader (Tapp Reference Tapp1989; cf. Culas Reference Culas2005; Larteguy Reference Lartéguy and Dao1979; M. N. Lee Reference Lee2005). As recorded by Bonifacy (see Condominas Reference Condominas, Chiao and Lemoine1991), Xiong Mi Chang invited his followers to dance all night, talked to plants and animals, distributed hierarchical titles associated with a new civil and military state apparatus to his officers on condition that they behaved morally well, not doing harm to men or animals, and mustered 600–700 followers armed with trumpets and a handful of rifles. Mi Chang had a maimed right hand so that he could not work normally in the fields, which removed him from normal agricultural activities, and Mai Na Lee notes the common association by the Hmong of power with extraordinary physical features (M. N. Lee Reference Lee2005). Miracles abounded; a talking goat told a story about a Chinese woman who cursed the plant she was tending for not growing well; the maize answered her, saying she had a bad heart and wanted to eat it, and that was why it could not grow well (Bonifacy 1912, in M. N. Lee Reference Lee2005: 73; Culas Reference Culas2005: 111). Culas (Reference Culas2005) also notes the ironies of a movement which became martial despite its avowed aim as the recovery of peace between men and between men and animals, and forbade the killing of animals. Mi Chang posited the equivalence of animals and humans, so that to kill one, was to kill the other; such decrees, among an agricultural and shamanic people accustomed to animal sacrifice, made it easy to attribute disasters and failures to the transgressions of such taboos, as we will see in future uprisings.
Like the followers of the earlier Xiong movement in northern Indochina, supporters signified their membership in the movement through their hairstyle, in this case wearing their hair long (M. N. Lee Reference Lee2005). It appears that Hmong from China joined them, and one must ask what connections there may have been between such messianic movements and the mass movements of Hmong to new places in search of new lands to till at this time (see Culas and Michaud Reference Culas, Michaud, Tapp, Michaud, Culas and Lee2004). As with other Hmong movements of this nature, it was by no means adhered to by all Hmong, and there seem to be have been conflicts between the supporters of the Xiong leader and the Vang clan in the region who were not White Hmong, as Mai Na Lee (Reference Lee2005) describes. Xiong Mi Chang's eventual arrest was directly the result of betrayal by a Hmong. Like other movements, too, the nature of contested borderlands seems to have been crucial, since Xiong Mi Chang fled to China in 1911 to gather support. According to Mai Na Lee (Reference Lee2005), it was the death of his infant son, who was believed to be the new King, which brought an end to this movement, and here we see yet another recurrent motif; mostly it is not the military and shamanic leader of uprisings, whom outsiders assume claims to be the Hmong king, who makes such a claim; the apparent leader is usually a prophet who announces the imminent or already birth of the real King, and is spoken to in visions such as those of Xiong Mi Chang.Footnote 14 Bertrais describes how the Hmong prophet is typically possessed by the spirit of the Emperor or Huab Tais whose imminent arrival he announces, and how often evidence of such authority is made by appeal to forms of writing.Footnote 15
The Pachay Revolt 1918–19
Pachay originated from China, probably from the very areas where in 1918–19 an anti-China messianic movement was reported after receipt of mass famine relief funds from England had triggered mass conversions to Christianity (Tapp Reference Tapp1989), and had been adopted into the family of the brother of a village headman in Muang Theng, in the Dien Bien Phu area of French-ruled northern Tonkin (see Gunn Reference Gunn1986; Michaud Reference Michaud2007). The ambiguity of parentage is a common theme in the Hmong messianic uprisings.Footnote 16 Pachay was a remarkable and charismatic man, gifted like Xiong Mi Chang before him with the knowledge of several languages.Footnote 17 In June of 1918 the news of the appearance of a ‘Hmong king’ in Son La province in northwest Vietnam calling for the Hmong to abandon farming – just as in previous movements - and join him was announced. It must have been before this time that Pachay is supposed to have had his first vision of his mission to lead the Hmong as an emissary of Heaven.Footnote 18 In October 1918, Pachay led several hundred men in an attack on Muang Theng and although repulsed at the time moved his forces to Son La and became the spiritual and martial leader of a major uprising which involved the whole of northern Indochina for some years. At its height it convulsed 40,000 square kilometres of territory and tied up companies of the crack French colonial troops for several years (Gunn Reference Gunn1986). Yao and other minorities joined the movement, in the way we have seen characteristic of other movements, while their enemies remained the elite; the French and Vietnamese and their Tai-speaking proxies in different parts of Tonkin. Pachay and his men moved into Laos to summon uprisings in Luang Prabang and then Sam Neua and finally arrived in Nong Het district of Xieng Khouang province in Laos, which was ruled at that time under the French by a Hmong named Lo Bliayao. Lo Bliayao's nephew had joined Pachay's forces and attempted to assassinate his uncle, the Nong Het chief, but failed and this proved a turning point for the movement (see M. N. Lee Reference Lee2005). Finally Pachay was captured and killed in Luang Prabang, Laos, in 1922.
Unlike Xiong Mi Chang, we find some ambiguity in whether this tragic and heroic figure was a prophet of the Hmong Spirit or the incarnation of that Spirit itself. It is said that Pachay's divine mission to rule Heaven and Earth was first announced by three puppies (compare the stories about talking goats and maize plants associated with Xiong Mi Chang, above) when Pachay, in a fit of temper after a row with his wife, called on Heaven in vain. Pachay fed these puppies, and was then whisked up to Heaven on a magical piebald horse, where he was taken to task for not fulfilling his appointed task of providing moral guidance to the Hmong. He was taken into a palace built of bricks which shone like gold (again echoing what is reported for the first Xiong leader) and interviewed by several divinities including Tuam Tswb Tchoj (the ‘Emperor’).
In the most authoritative Hmong version of Pachay's life we have, the Rog Paj Cai, recorded and transcribed by the Catholic priest Bertrais from a Hmong (Yaj Txooj Tsawb 1972) who was the nephew of one of Pachay's collaborators, Pachay, just like the first Xiong leader, could perform extraordinary leaps, and leaped from the floor to the roof of the house. To receive his instructions from Heaven he would climb up a nine-branched tree. Pachay was also, like Xiong Mi Chang, known for his shaman-like burnings of incense and paper money in sacrificial rites.Footnote 19 An early intimation of the doom of the movement was received when his uncle opened a magical flying trunk Pachay had received and out flew a myriad of grasshoppers. Although they frantically tried to put them all back in, they could not, and Pachay told them that this meant Heaven would not be able to help them later. It was believed that if the trunk had not been accidentally opened, each grasshopper would have turned into a soldier – as was also said of the beans in both the 1901 Northeast Yunnan revolt and in the 1860s Xiong uprising.Footnote 20
Pachay proved to be an adept military leader although the legend of his life presents him as a peacemaker who had not originally wished to make war. He gave out official titles to his officers as Xiong Mi Chang had done. On one occasion during the siege of Muang Theng his men poisoned the water sources of the French-Vietnamese garrison with a herbal toxin. On a number of occasions a young virgin of 17, reminiscent of the 1910 Yunnan uprising, named Nkauj Mim, led his troops into battle, and Savina describes how she would try to catch the French bullets, which never seemed to find their mark, in her apron. In his first vision Pachay was supposed to have been given a magical gun with thirteen shots in it; his solders believed in their “invulnerability” and would fearlessly present themselves in front of the French (Savina Reference Savina1924a, Reference Savinab).Footnote 21
Pachay's instructions to his followers included moral instructions similar to those of Xiong Mi Chang which included loving children, washing their hands and feet with hot water, taking care of dress, avoiding mosquitoes, not killing animals or cutting down trees which were not needed… “And do not skin animals…the spirit impaired in such a way will mount to Heaven to register its complaint” (Yaj Reference Yaj1972 ). Although we may class this movement as indigenous, as both an anti-foreign and anti-Christian one, it certainly seems to reflect some of the messages about health and hygiene which the missionaries were propagating at the time (Tapp Reference Tapp1989). We may also note the similarities of this pacifistic message against animal sacrifice to that of Xiong Mi Chang, above.
Pachay's downfall and defeat was attributed by the Hmong to the failure of his men to strictly observe the various precepts about sex and diet he laid down for them, in a way that has been shown to be common to such movements worldwide (Festinger et al. Reference Festinger, Riecken and Schachter1956), and above all to a great moral and sexual transgression which took place at the hands of his lieutenants who were said to have raped not only the wives of Lao soldiers who had surrendered but also the women of four Hmong families (M. N. Lee Reference Lee2005).
The theme of lost writing regained which we met so clearly in the 1900 Pollard movement is also very clear here.Footnote 22 Together with the magical gun, Pachay had also received from Heaven three pens and a book. The Rog Paj Cai actually refers to Pachay as the “madman who knew writing” and shortly after his vision he encountered four men who “knew writing”. To these he transmitted his instructions by means of writing a single character. It is said that those around him would spontaneously convulse and shake and become literate (which probably means that they spoke in many different languages, or incomprehensible ones, as in the evangelical ‘speaking in tongues’). As Alleton (Reference Alleton1978, Reference Alleton and Brocheux1981) discovered, Pachay distributed to his followers magic squares of white cloth inscribed with strange characters which assured ‘invulnerability’. He also communicated with his followers by sending messages with weird hieroglyphs on them (see Lemoine Reference Lemoine1972) which shows he was believed to be in possession of a form of writing. Pachay was finally assassinated in Luang Prabang province of Laos in November 1922 by four Laotians hired by the French and led by a Hmong named Qhua Kuam, just as other Hmong leaders were betrayed by their own people. Pachay had, of course, foreseen his death, and had already bequeathed to his future widow some mystic writing engraved on a sheet of copper which, he said, should only be opened when he returned thirty-five years later.
The Yaj Soob Lwj Movement 1967
The movement of Yaj Soob Lwj first surfaced to general attention in Laos in the massive and mostly Hmong refugee camp of Long Tieng, the military base of General Vang Pao, leader of the CIA-supported anti-communist forces, as Lemoine (Reference Lemoine1972) has well described. Yaj Soob Lwj had announced the arrival of the Hmong Messiah for 15th September of that year, an event which of course did not happen. It was said that Yaj Soob Lwj had overheard a conversation between a lizard and a toad (traditionally associated with Hmong mythological origins) about this; “Sir”, said the lizard to the toad, “Look at all these people here, they are all my subjects”. “No”, said the toad, “they are Hmong, and they are my own subjects”. “Your subjects?” exclaimed the lizard indignantly, “then why are they dressed like that?” [for most of the Hmong in Long Tieng wore either military or modern civilian clothes, rather than traditional Hmong costume]; “If those are your subjects, then tell them to tie a thread of red and a thread of white to their sleeves, so we can distinguish between them!” In a very few days, practically the entire population of Long Tieng displayed red and white threads on their sleeves (Lemoine Reference Lemoine1972). Again we find the speaking beasts, the concern with correct dress, in these reasons for the failure of prophecy. An old woman, it was said, had also been spoken to by a tortoise while cutting the maize, who told her to inform the camp authorities that the King would still come to help them, but he could no longer recognise who his own subjects were, so they should all tie white and red threads to their sleeves.Footnote 23 Moreover, as Lemoine (Reference Lemoine1972) records, a plague of caterpillars had devastated the rice harvests that year and Yaj Soob Lwj had proclaimed that those caterpillars were the subjects of the King to come – just like the beans in 1860 and 1910, or Pachay's grasshoppers.
I think the question of conscious mimicry of the past is irrelevant here; it is not really relevant whether revitalist leaders actually made claims or were attributed them by others, even later disciples as may be the case in some of the accounts of Pachay.Footnote 24 What is important is that there is a kind of ‘cultural mould’ into which the events of history are being put, or into which they fall, again and again. Narrative, as Good (Reference Good1994) has put it elsewhere, represents and recounts particular experiences in a “meaningful and coherent order”, and rather like narratives of suffering, these historical accounts represent “possible stories…potential plots” which might be told about traumatic events (Good Reference Good1994: 139,146). We will soon see the relevance of this to the arguments of Sahlins and Maurice Bloch about culture and history in the following section.
Yaj Soob Lwj had been born in a small village in a communist zone on the Vietnam border near the Laotian district of Nong Het in 1929 (Smalley et al. Reference Smalley, Koua Vang and Yee Yang1990). His mother had been a Khmu', and the mystic writing he revealed to his followers was supposedly designed for the Khmu' people as well as for the Hmong; his followers included both Khmu' and Hmong.Footnote 25 According to his older half-sister who was brought up with him, both his parents died when he was very young (M. N. Lee Reference Lee2005), so that he was an orphan of somewhat uncertain clan affiliation, like Pachay. He is described as extremely poor and uneducated, and Smalley et al. (Reference Smalley, Koua Vang and Yee Yang1990) considers the invention of a fully-fledged writing system for his own language, and moreover an alphabetic one, by such a person, as extremely rare in world history. In 1957, according to the somewhat authoritative account collected in Vang et al. (Reference Vang, Yee Yang and Smalley1990), he heard a loud voice from Heaven instructing him to prepare for communication with the divine, build a circular temple with an ancestral pagoda, put candles and flowers inside it, and make ink and paper in preparation for the teachings he would receive.Footnote 26 His wife then gave birth to twin boys he had foreseen as his future teachers in a dream but they both died within a fortnight. He found a written message from the youngest one saying they had been sent to him only to bring the mystic writing, and had decided to leave because his mother-in-law had scolded him for being lazy. His mission henceforth would be to spread the heavenly new writing and to save people on behalf of his Heavenly or Royal Father, Vaj Leej Txiv.Footnote 27
Yaj Soob Lwj was unlike the other messianic leaders we have considered in that he did not lead any active movements of revolt himself. Indeed, his disciples were split between those who did not believe in armed uprising, and those who did. However, his teachings were taken up by various disciples, some of whom became leaders in the resistance to the communist authorities after the Pathet Lao takeover of Laos in 1975, fanatically believing the teachings of Yaj Soob Lwj afforded them invulnerability (Turton Reference Turton, Chitakasem and Turton1991), as other messianic Hmong before them had believed. One of these, Paj Kaub Hawj, invented new official titles for his followers and formed a shadow ritual Hmong bureaucracy among them along the lines of national bureaucracies, following the example of earlier Hmong messianic leaders who had attempted to set up similar quasi-governmental structures among a basically religious movement. However, one pacifist follower, who mounted an extraordinary syncretic revitalist movement centred on the worship of an ancestral boar (believed to be the spiritual father of the Hmong Emperor who is to return) in the refugee camp of Ban Vinai from 1975 onwards, and has until recently been active in propagating the writings and teachings of Yaj Soob Lwj, was Lis Txais, who has invented new music and musical instruments, new rituals and procedures, new legends – virtually a new culture – for the Hmong.Footnote 28
We know that Yaj Soob Lwj, like it seems the other Hmong prophets, was a shaman, and also that he was an opium smoker. He preached moral messages of peace, of the evils of ambition, of return to a simple life of farming, of the need for unity and amity, as had Pachay and Xiong Mi Chang. We know that he functioned in, and was ultimately a victim of, the tortuous politics between rightist and leftist Hmong at this time, for he first announced his visions in a communist-controlled area, where he was suspected of being a CIA emissary, and then fled to an area controlled by General Vang Pao. In 1967, suspected of being a communist agent on account of his uncanny knowledge of enemy movements together with the presence of what looked like some Russian characters in his mystic script, he was imprisoned, and freed, or escaped, in 1971, only to be finally tracked down and assassinated by disguised soldiers of Vang Pao's; again, betrayed and killed by other Hmong.
Like Pachay, Yaj Soob Lwj is said to have predicted his own death, which would come about when one of his magically endowed flags was torn by bullets, and promised to return in the future.
Understandings of Messianism
Although it is difficult to typologise flexible and fluid movements of belief and bodies of this nature, and arguably all can be seen in terms of some sort of resistance to or reaction against forces felt to emanate from a sphere outside of that of Hmong culture and society, I would argue that all the movements can be distinguished according to whether they have been directly associated with Christianity, or those which have sprung from more indigenous themes, with an intermediary form in which Christian motifs are incorporated into basically indigenously-inspired movements. The Pollard movement was a classic Christian messianic response, for instance, albeit interpreted in culturally Hmong terms. The later Barney movement, where Hmong claimed to represent the Holy Trinity, represents an intermediary form, clearly drawing on Christian motifs and attempting to appropriate them in the same way that the Taiping Rebellion in China had done, while the Pachay movement was an overtly anti-Christian movement. We must be careful in such a typology since even Pachay's overtly anti-Christian uprising seems to show some influences in its teachings from missionary Christianity, in the form of messages about mosquitoes and hygiene for instance. Indeed, this points to the wider influences of what we may call the ‘modernising project’ on these movements, and perhaps to what has been called the “millenarian tendencies of modern capitalism” (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and John2000). However, in addition to the need for such caution, there are important linkages and overlap between these three different types of Hmong messianism, and I believe that the repeated drawing on the same or similar mythological themes and the use of similar ritual techniques in these recurrent movements points to a deep cultural core which is potentially or latently messianic, and which only sometimes adopts an overtly Christian form, but often a more syncretic one, or even a form which is even more indigenous. And this deep cultural core, manifested more clearly in those expressions which are less overtly Christian than others, is one which is activated only in response to certain unbearable conditions.Footnote 29
We might say much the same of many other cultures with indigenous traditions of messianism; messianic tendencies have been traced far beyond the Christian and Celtic worlds, in the Asian context in Chinese popular religion and in Theravada Buddhism for instance. Yet the Hmong are truly unique, as I argue, in having such frequent and regular recourse to such historic cultural tendencies or proclivities and we must ask why this is so.
Burridge (Reference Burridge1971) turned our attention to the idea of religious activity as a redemptive process associated with notions of power, as well as the influence of a monetary economy, and the crisis of moral assumptions leading to the formation of a ‘new man’ and a new kind of community, in messianic movements. He distinguishes four different approaches to the study of radical messianism as the psycho-physiological, the ethnographic, the Marxist, and the Hegelian, the latter three of which are all ‘historical’ explanations to some extent, and ‘sociological’ inasmuch as they can be generalised. The ethnographic explanation is both a historical and a particularist one, showing how a movement occurred at such a time in such a place. Burridge seems to most favour what he calls a Hegelian explanation, to which he partly assimilates Weber's notion of charisma, in that it is able to admit the power of Spirit and divinity and revelation and account for messianism in terms of a wider structure of a total experience encompassing both the ‘investigator’ and the ‘investigated’. He remarks that the virtue of such an explanation, which would see all the concrete manifestations of messianism as epiphenomena of “a far wider and more complex problem” (Burridge Reference Burridge1971), is that it has no need to account for the negative instance nor for why a movement took place just when it did.
Maurice Bloch is rare among leading anthropological theoreticians in having directly approached the problems of cultural persistence and the apparent recurrence or continuation of ritual forms, in a very different way from the post-structuralist approach pioneered by Marshall Sahlin's rapprochement of cultural structure with historical event.Footnote 30 Bloch's earlier (1986) work, From Blessing to Violence, was concerned with the apparent plasticity of ritual functions in comparison to the similarity of their forms. The circumcision ritual of the Merina of Madagascar has survived in its essential form for at least 200 years, although it changed from being a family or descent group ritual to a great state ritual under the expanding Merina kingdom of the nineteenth century, then became a covert underground form under French rule and finally was revived on a much larger scale around the early 1970s to express a newly nationalist ideology opposed to Christianity. Its meanings changed, when considered in terms of the social and cultural contexts of historical change, while its form (its ‘symbolic content’) has persisted, and Bloch is concerned to explain this “extraordinary stability” of ritual which has “reacted with extreme plasticity to socio-economic events” (Bloch Reference Bloch1986: 167).
In his later (1992) book, Prey into Hunter, Bloch clarifies that while some aspects of the ritual had adapted to changing politico-economic circumstances, others remained unchanged, and it was the simplest form of the ritual which had persisted, posing problems, he notes, for those still trying to explain phenomena “in terms of their fit with other aspects of culture and society” (Bloch Reference Bloch1992: 1). What had not changed, he says, was a “central minimum structure or ‘core’” , or “minimum irreducible structure” of the ritual process (Bloch Reference Bloch1992: 1,3), which called in his view for a more general, even universal, theory of ritual, freed of functionalist, intellectualist, or symbolist approaches. This he introduces, building on the classic tri-partite theories of rites of passage first elaborated by Hertz (Reference Hertz1960[1907]) and van Gennep (Reference van Gennep1909) and then refined and modified by Turner (Reference Turner and Turner1967, Reference Turner1969, Reference Turner1975), in terms of what he calls a structure of “rebounding violence”; there must ultimately be a triumphant return to the everyday world by a self transformed and identified with the transcendental in the second, liminal or ‘in-between’, phase of such rites, which retains its transcendental aspects, having ingested ‘external vitality’ from animals and plants which serves to conquer the ‘native vitality’ denied in the first, initial phase of the ritual process, where everyday understandings of biological life are merely inverted.Footnote 31
In Merina millenarianism at one point the Merina became possessed by their ancestors in their reactions to the abolition of the state circumcision rituals by a nineteenth century king influenced by European colonialists. Bloch argues from this that in millenarianism the general ritual process described above is arrested; the triumphant return of the transformed self to the everyday to reaffirm earthly authority is not accomplished, as vitality has not been ingested from the outside. Millenarians, according to Bloch, remain in the ‘primary’, transcendental, mode, unable to reaffirm real authority in the practical world, and this is evidenced in their frequent denials of the realities of reproduction, as in the giving up of farming activities we have seen. Bloch argues that the “key element” of all millenarian movements lies in this refusal of what he recodifies as the second (liminal) ritual stage of “rebounding violence”, the failure to ingest forms of external vitality and “therefore ultimately a refusal to continue with earthly life” (Bloch Reference Bloch1992: 91). The symbolism of “rebounding violence” can have several possible outcomes in terms of legitimating a community or its hierarchies of authority, depending on people's evaluations of their “politico-economic circumstances”, and it is because of this wide variety of outcomes that the idiom can be adapted to so many different contexts and yet survive. Although Bloch admits the millenarian option may in some cases be seen as revolutionary, he sees it as ultimately “intellectually conservative” since it does not reject the overall symbolism of the ritual (as some mythic formulations do) but merely aborts the ordained sequence.
In the Hmong case, it may be we find the essential ‘core’, as Bloch himself puts it (although in inverted commas), of the messianic movement, in the complex of identical ideas which impel them all, rather than in particular actions, although certainly a case could also be made out for some continuity of ritual action. There are several different interpretive approaches we might adopt to consider these Hmong movements. One can approach these constantly inter-related themes of a King, or Emperor, who was defeated by the Chinese but will return, a form of writing which have been lost but will be returned, and a lost country which will be restored, as I have argued elsewhere, as analogous to the conditional statements in modern Indo-European languages with temporally inflected tense and mood forms, so seeing them as similar to conditional statements or subjunctive tenses saying “If it had not been for the Chinese, we would have had [a King, a country, a writing]”, and then speculate how such a past conditional may be projected into a future perfect; the might-have-beens and might-bes of our existence, if not the will-have-beens.Footnote 32 Or, taking a step forward, and learning from Foucault, we might see them in terms of what Foucault sometimes called ‘Power-Knowledge’ (e.g. see Foucault Reference Foucault and Gordon1980); certainly these tales are about the loss , or deprivation, of an original form of ‘power-knowledge’; they speak of its absence in the present, and open the possibility that one day in the future that Power/Knowledge will be regained; what the great heretical Marxian philosopher Ernst Bloch called the Noch-Nicht or the ‘Not-Yet’ of our existence, to which Hope, the ‘Utopian function’, is critical (Bloch Reference Bloch1995[1959], 2000[1918]). Or, taking another step forwards, one might speak of them in terms of the complex relationships between sovereignty and violence, power and the sacred, otherness and autochthony, in the way that some of the contributions to the initial issue of the online journal Hau speak of (Graeber Reference Graeber2011; Sahlins Reference Sahlins and Swift2011; see also Fiskesjö Reference Fiskesjö2012). We need to remember that not only have the Hmong, under their classical rubric of ‘Miao’, formed the archetypal outcasts of Chinese civilisation, while their continued practice of shifting cultivation throughout the twentieth century has pitted themselves at the very periphery of the modernising world with its ideologies of development (Escobar Reference Escobar2011; Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and John2000), but that recently they have also formed a part of that population of the ultimate outcasts of society, stateless refugees, the kind of people whom, Agamben (Reference Agamben1998) rightly pointed out, are thereby divested of the protection and reach of any Law (cf. Fiskesjö Reference Fiskesjö2012). However, none of these approaches, perhaps, really answers the puzzle of very persistent repetition and recurrence and apparent continuity among the Hmong which I have drawn attention to above.
Maurice Bloch's attempt to resolve the problems of the old Marxist theory of ideology might in fact have benefited from a consideration of the other Bloch, Ernst. Ernst Bloch (Reference Bloch1995[1959], 2000[1918]) provides an adequate explanatory framework, in Marxian terms, not only of messianism but also of the problems of accounting for anachronisms and persistences in history. Since not all parts of the society change and develop at the same rate, he says, there is always a residue or surplus which forms part of the superstructure of society but cannot be dismissed as merely ‘ideological’ since it is not necessarily linked with the current form of that society. It is here that the realm of unfulfilled possibilities of the past is located. This cultural surplus, which he calls the “cultural heritage”, actually transcends the ideology of its particular era and can contain not only regressive but also progressive elements which can work to transform society. The cultural surplus contains unfulfilled wishes and desires for a better world, in fact a perfect one, and thus the surplus is also a “tradition of the future” and it can be revealed, at any time, in moments of what Ernst Bloch called “anticipatory consciousness”, an intimation of the humanity yet to be, of the “homeland” which is ahead of us; “something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been” (Bloch Reference Bloch2000[1918], Vol. 3). For me this goes right to the heart of the messianic impulse as I understand it and such a view may provide some kind of theoretical approach towards understanding its manifestations among the Hmong in such similar forms throughout such very different types of society; late imperial China, the advent of colonialism, the Cold War, and today.
Messianism and Time
In the abbreviated summaries of Hmong messianic movements given above, the recurrences and resemblances I have noted between them are of several kinds. There are recurrences of circumstance, from which we might derive some sociological sort of explanation of them; there are other reflections and echoes which seem almost uncanny in their likenesses, and which we may see as resemblances of basic form. The facts of extortion and social injustice, of geographical transnationalism at a time when modern nation-states and their novel borders in East and Southeast Asia were just in the process of formation, of the surrender of agriculture for religious reasons, and of mass migrations and relocations of many thousands of people, are among the former. Among the latter, which are matters of both belief and behaviour, are the constant relationships between the prophet and the future Messiah, the lack or dubiety of parentage and clan affiliation of the leader, the consistent association with forms of writing and magical script, the constant appeal to the mystic transformation of insects and inanimate legumes, the assassination of the leader or prophet by members of his own ethnic group, the use of shamanic techniques of incense burning and rituals, the ascent to great heights and prodigious feats of supernatural power. To these we could add the beliefs in ‘invulnerability’, the repeated role of a maiden in warfare, the promised reversals of the everyday state of affairs, the promised vision of cornucopia and plenty, the moral failure which leads to ultimate defeat, the strange sympathies between animals, insects, plants, and humans. The beliefs in the establishment of an independent sovereign realm, the use of flags and official military titles, perhaps lie midway between resemblances of form (what Maurice Bloch, Reference Bloch1986, would call their “symbolic content”), and resemblances of circumstance (or “functions”). There is still an urgent need to explain, or to understand, their repetition, in such similar forms, so very frequently and with such regularity, in terms other than the merely positivistic. Particular notions of messianic time may help to illuminate this.
As the subject of history moves inevitably, we suppose, through that empty, homogeneous time which Walter Benjamin (Reference Benjamin and Benjamin1969[1940]), then Anderson (Reference Anderson1991[1983]), saw as the defining feature of modernity, the past appears always to precede the present and to be constantly superseded by it.Footnote 33 In revolution, however, which interrupts the predictable course of history, it is a past charged with present-ness, or the ‘here-and-now’, which is “exploded out of the continuum of history” (Benjamin 1969, emphasis added). It would be idle to look, in these recurrences I have sketched, for positivist laws of predictive power, in the kind of historicism Benjamin rightly criticised. Instead, we seem to find exactly what Benjamin (1969) called a messianic stand-stilling (stillstellung), a “revolutionary chance in the struggle for an oppressed past”, which “explodes a specific life out of the epoch”. For Maurice Bloch (Reference Bloch1992), however, messianism is not revolutionary. Indeed, as a type of ritual, it is ultimately concerned to deny the real biological passage of time, and to reaffirm a supposedly higher, transcendent spiritual and social order. Yet messianism, as Maurice Bloch also admits, fails as ritual; it is arrested, it fails to complete the triumphant second classic stage of ‘rebounding violence’ which would have established a transfigured social reality as authoritative, and reaffirmed the social collectively over the biological individual and the happenstance of events, as rites of passage are designed to do.Footnote 34 From that point of view, in the sense that it fails to complete the ritual cycle, messianism does, as he also admits, mount a successful challenge to earthly authority, and from that point of view, I would suggest, despite Bloch's view, may be seen as genuinely revolutionary in its inception and its conception. A radically different notion of time, I think, is involved to that of historical progression, one which is based on a notion of dynamic simultaneity, and it may be this notion of time which mounts such an effective challenge to the ideologically charged common-sense of the everyday (Bourdieu's doxa) and contemporary structures of power.
Charting the rise of the nation-state, Anderson (1991) remarks how unlike the medieval idea of simultaneity was to our own, which is predicated on the notion of an empty and homogeneous time. What you had there, as in images of the Virgin Mary as the daughter of a Tuscan peasant, in what we might call an ‘anagogical’ understanding of history, was, as he says, a notion somewhat akin to what Benjamin (1969) had called ‘Messianic Time’, or “a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present”. Here we are quite close to Ernst Bloch's notion of a ‘tradition of the future’ and the idea of ‘anticipatory consciousness’; his ‘cultural surplus’, in effect. It is something like this radically different notion of time which I think one finds in messianic movements such as those of the Hmong I have described, although this notion cannot be reduced to the simple oppositions between linear and cyclic types of time of the kind criticised by Greenhouse (Reference Greenhouse1996).
If ritual ‘freezes’ and arrests the process of time, then, and messianism, according to Maurice Bloch, fails to do that, then just what does it do, and what conceptions of time can we find in it? Can we assume, as suggested above, that it replicates a medieval notion of atemporal simultaneity, and in that sense forms a ‘cultural surplus’ of the type Ernst Bloch proposed? Or, in the same way as Leach (Reference Leach2004[1961]) proposed for ritual in general, we might think that it conflates an irreversible sense of time with a repetitive (‘cyclic’) one.Footnote 35 Yet the conception of irreversible (‘linear’) time which we find in messianic movements is not at all equatable with the processes of entropy and decay which both Leach and Maurice Bloch emphasise (cf. Greenhouse Reference Greenhouse1996). On the contrary, it is a notion of telos or purposefulness very similar to the Idea of Progress (through an empty homogeneous time) which is so fundamental to the modernising project that the Comaroffs (Reference Comaroff and John2000) could talk of the capitalism of the moment itself, not just its great meta-narratives of Christianity and Marxism, as messianic and millenarian, presenting itself as “a gospel of salvation”.Footnote 36 In a similar way, Burridge (Reference Burridge1971) found it necessary to stress the redemptive, prospective or future-oriented aspects of religion in general, in order to explicate millennialism. And even so, I would argue, the notion of time we find in messianic movements is still more than this, for it goes right outside history, in the way Benjamin (1969) meant when he spoke of a particular revolutionary consciousness, or Ernst Bloch (1918) when he spoke of a ‘cultural heritage’ which similarly surpasses its epoch.Footnote 37 This, I would say, is based on an essentially medieval understanding of time, as Anderson (1991) describes it, which however is still able to form a continuing alternative to what Roy Porter (Reference Porter1996; cf. Porter Reference Porter2003) scorned as those “traditional liberal-progressive tellings of the ascent of man” in terms of the “heroic struggles of the old escapologist self”.Footnote 38 It is, moreover, enabled to counter such progressivist modernist narratives of time because it is allied to and coupled with a notion of progress and ultimacy which is not at all that of the gradualist type endorsed by the modernising project.
We still have not yet provided any causal or functional/positivist explanation for the recurrence of Hmong messianic movements, or for the recurrence of features within them, although we may be sketching out the outlines of a framework of attitudes and assumptions which will help us to understood them better. It would be wiser to proceed from such a framework towards the kind of explanation Burridge would have seen as ‘ethnographic’. Such an explanation would still not, as Burridge (Reference Burridge1971) points out, attempt to account for why certain movements occur under certain circumstances but not under others, or not always. However, in the Hmong case, I would suggest a much more careful examination of their enduringly marginal social position within or beyond the frontiers of the pre-modern, early colonial, and modern nation-state, and of the huge symbolic power – besides its literal and physical power – of the hyphenated modern nation-state idea in eliciting pale reflections of itself of the kind we find in what has been called “proto-nationalism” (Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm1992[1990]) or “ethnic nationalism” (Castells Reference Castells1997).Footnote 39
We also need to think of a historical context in which the insistence of state administrations on the fixity of their citizenries within particular localities has been seriously challenged by both traditional and novel mobilities of the kind which the Hmong have displayed throughout the twentieth century. The mass movements of Hmong into Tonkin in the late nineteenth century, the raids of the anti-French Chinese rebel army (‘Black Flag’, Haw) remnants in alliance with White Tai chieftains, the complicated strategic border politics between British Burma, Siam, French Indochina, and China, at the turn of the twentieth century – these cannot really be separated from the formation of colonial nation-states in the region, nor from the messianic movements which stirred through the Hmong populations of the area at exactly that time. Similarly, later, mass relocations within Laos owing to American mass bombing, complicated border politics between communist and non-communist localities in Thailand, Laos and South China, and the flight of more than 100,000 refugees from Laos into Thailand from 1975, again provide the essential socio-economic context in which we may be better able to understand the Hmong messianic movements from a historico-ethnographic viewpoint.
Conclusion
Finally, and to return to the topics of recurrence and repetition in history throughout these movements, I would like to raise the issue of whether we may not need a new understanding of cultural structure to aid us in our appreciation of the real motivations and reasons – in a historical, individual, and eventual sense – for such phenomena. I began this article by drawing attention to Byron Good's recent (2012) attempt to grapple with the traditional dissociation of the social and cultural from the psychological, and clearly his approach to studying subjectivity, rather than the ‘self’, through ‘multiple vantages’, offers one way in which we may be able to consider the links, as he puts it, between “the political and the psychological, states of order and states of disorder” (Good Reference Good2012: 518).Footnote 40 Yet this approach seems somehow oddly fragmentary and in need of a more coherent framework. The themes of persistent recurrence in the Hmong messianic movements demand an explanatory framework which is at once more particularist and more coherent. We can find the philosophical underpinnings for such an approach in some of the approaches I have drawn attention to, notably that of Ernst Bloch, illuminated by understandings of ritual gained from a range of writers from Hertz (Reference Hertz1960[1907]) and van Gennep (Reference van Gennep1909) to Burridge and Maurice Bloch. But I return here to the question of what Bloch (Reference Bloch1992) himself calls a central minimum structure or core of ritual, which is necessitated for him by precisely his own ethnographic materials on the Merina of Madagascar. For the Hmong I would locate this in what Maurice Bloch calls the ‘symbolic content’ of their messianic movements, above all in the close associations between writing, kingship, and sovereign territory. It goes without saying that these must have entirely different meanings, or ‘functions’ in Maurice Bloch's terms, when we consider them in the late imperial China context, or in the context of an early developing colonial state in Indochina, or within the framework of a socialist state, or in the new global and diasporic world of today where the Hmong inhabit countries from Australia to France including the United States. Certainly we need far more adequate historical accounts of these movements than we have in order to be able to consider them properly in all their different social and economic contexts. But in the meantime, we do have something like a central irreducible core of beliefs and activities which seems unique to the Hmong people and their culture in their invariability, although we can certainly find refractions and variations of them in many other cases.Footnote 41 There used to be a body of theory which would have found all this quite unproblematic, although it has largely been bypassed or rejected.Footnote 42
Without following the same historical trajectory which split into different disciplines of ethnology, social psychology, psycholinguistics, cultural geography and so on, I wonder if it is possible to reach back to some of those nineteenth-century philosophers who were not ashamed to talk of the folk psychology of a nation, as in Wundt's notion of a ‘totality of spiritual life’?Footnote 43 These notions, such as minzu fengge or minzu xingshi (national style or form) in the China context, have become deeply embedded in the folklore studies of several Asian and other nations, and it may be as well that we take them more seriously than we generally do. Confronted with the recurrent cultural complexes and associations of ideas which take constant and historically, materially embodied form in Hmong messianic movements, I find myself in need of such explanatory concepts at a level above that of individual psychology or the ‘humanist subject’ but more in line with what Good (Reference Good2012) wants us to call ‘subjectivity’. At the least, to comprehend better how processes of cultural production construct ideas of national identity, we may need a more efficient genealogy of these specific ideas which would cover Herder, Wundt and many others.Footnote 44 Is it possible to talk of these things, or of what Bateson (Reference Bateson1936) called ‘cultural structure’, in some way which would more finally deconstruct racialist formulations of nationalism?
Acknowledgements
An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the panel on ‘Reading the Past and Writing the Future: Asian Religious Revitalization Movements’, organised by Jacob Hickman and Ngo Thi Thanh Tâm, at the 114th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, 14–18 November 2012. I would like to thank various Anonymous Readers of earlier versions of this paper for their very helpful comments in revising this article.
