In the early part of this century, 1916 and 1921 were especially dry years in the Kumaon region of the Indian Himalaya. In each of these years, forest fires racked the countryside, burning beyond the power of the colonial British government to control or extinguish. It was not just the dry weather that was to blame. Villagers in Kumaon set the forest on fire; the dry weather merely helped their efforts along. The containment of this “planned incendiarism” was one of the main planks of the scientific forestry that the colonial state had begun to introduce in the hills in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and especially from around 1910.

In place of the distinct peoples and cultures that once formed the object of ethnographic inquiry, anthropologists have for some time been emphasizing the political and economic processes that connect people and places, and the ongoing production of cultural difference in contexts of unequal power. This trend in scholarly analysis contrasts with assumptions about primordial difference that inspire indigenous rights activists to defend the autonomy of culturally distinct communities from state and market processes intruding on them from the outside. It contrasts also with the emphasis on difference and isolation in official discourses that cast “development” as a program to bring change to people without history, stalled at an earlier point in an evolutionary process.

Shi Shangxian was the youngest son of an impoverished Han (ethnic Chinese) family living in eighteenth-century Yunnan Province. As a boy, he was sold to another Han family for the purpose of marrying one of the family's daughters. Although there is no record of his married life, it apparently was not a happy one. Shi left his wife in 1748, never to return, and drifted southwestward toward the Burmese frontier to engage in commerce between the booming Munai mining region and the Tai polity of Keng Tung (now part of Burma). Shi eventually remarried, this time to an indigenous woman who belonged to one of the local Tai or upland tribes. Thus far, Shi's story is unexceptional. By the mid-eighteenth century, as many as one hundred thousand Han lived in mining communities along the Yunnan frontier (ZPZZ, 1733–2, Zhang Yunsui QL 11/5/9). Han men often married indigenous women, to the consternation of Qing officials who feared the political ramifications of intermarriage (ZPZZ, 142–1, Fuheng et al. QL 35/1/19). Shi, however, emerged from obscurity in 1765 when he and his father-in-law, a petty local leader, sided with Burma during the frontier wars of 1765–70 and attacked Qing territory. Shi, the Han ally of the Burmese, was later captured by Cao Xiu, the son of an indigenous “native official” (tusi) whose militia was patrolling the frontier at the behest of the Qing state.

Much attention has been focused on the recrudescence of Chinese nationalism in the 1990s. The PRC government generally denies, but occasionally defends, the existence of nationalism within China (Xi 1996). Many Chinese scholars acknowledge the phenomenon and debate its impact, with most evincing a positive attitude toward nationalism (Zhang Xudong 1997; Xiao 1997; Sheng 1996; Wen 1996; Li 1995). Outside the PRC, Chinese nationalism is increasingly scrutinized (Zhao 1997; Zhu 1997, Gries 1999). Some hold that it is rational and manageable (Nathan and Ross 1997; Metzger and Myers 1998; Zheng 1999), while others speak in more premonitory tones (Chang 1998; Su 1997; Mosher 2000). All conclude that it is statesponsored, popular, and fills an “ideological vacuum” left by the waning of socialism (see, for example, Oksenberg 1997; Christensen 1996).

Despite a large number of both historical and anthropological works on the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia, a number of questions remain concerning this matrilineal and Islamic society. In a recent study, historian Ken Young articulated a growing consensus that the received models of Minangkabau social life are suspect, including the “idealised categories of nagari [village], adat [customs], matrilineal kinship, lineage property rights, and the autonomy of village communities governed by panghulu [titled men, Minangkabau spelling]” (Young 1994, 12). Anthropologists have been equally perturbed by what they consider to be inconsistencies in Minangkabau life, such as the contradiction between Islamic law and matrilineal adat (customary laws, beliefs, and practices concerning matrilineal kinship and inheritance). The inconsistency that I address in this essay lies in the contradictory representations of elite men's and elite women's power in Minangkabau literature.