Jiayu Tang, Junior Anthropology and Philosophy Major, shares about their internship at the Na Ethnic Culture Association
“I’m Jiayu Tang, a junior-year anthropology and philosophy double major. This summer, I am honored to work with the Na Ethnic Culture Association in Sichuan, China as an anthropologist and the association secretary. The Na, or well-known as the Mosuo, is a self-identified ethnic minority group (which is officially identified as Naxi or Menggu) living in Southwest Sichuan and northwest Yunnan around the Lugu Lake area in China. The Na Ethnic Culture Association mainly focuses on the research of the Sichuan part of the Na community, which is much understudied compared to its counterpart in Yunnan.
My summer internship generally has two parts. The first part is to conduct interviews and collect folklore and oral history with my “colleague” (association president) in the local community. The second part is online. We work together to organize and translate all the stories into both Mandarin Chinese and English. Additionally, some preparations, including learning the Na language and reading related books and articles, have also been done before the internship. At the end of the internship, I will write my thesis on the analysis of folklore and oral history, combined with the fieldnotes collected from my previous field trips there from 2020 to 2022. 
So far, I have done the first part of my internship. Our target informants for this field trip are mainly the elders above 65 in the local community. Most of them are known as great storytellers or previous officers of the village (although I have also interviewed young people who used to be migrant workers for my own interest). We visited all five villages in the Sichuan part of the Lugu Lake plus Lijiazui (a Na village in the Muli Tibetan autonomous county) and conducted semi-structured interviews with 36 people. Here are pictures of me and two of the informants with whom I have built special connections:
From left to right: my informant friend Jiachu Zhima and her grandma; the famous local singer Erche Namu Yang’s mother, who used to be a leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s Democratic Reforms in the Sichuan Luguhu area; Dajia, an eighty year-old Apu (grandpa) who tells marvelous folklore and the legends from the Daba religious scripture
Recently, I am at the stage of translating and organizing the collections from this trip. I surprisingly found how folklore embodies the social and cultural changes of the local community and people’s interpretations of them. For example, three informants respectively told the same story of a gifted Lama called “Buwo”, who chose to commit suicide and left the community with a religious prophecy. According to the Great Lama, he has no more reason to exist because there will be something arriving as a waistband of the mountain and flying in the sky, which is much more powerful than his magic. People before were very confused: how could there be anyone (anything) even more powerful than the Great Lama? How can a mountain wear a waistband? Now we realize the waistband he mentioned is the hilly
road, and something flying here is the airplane. From this story, we can preliminarily see how technology is introduced to local people and the implied modernization process (including secularization). Other stories are also found illuminating traditional moral values and the life philosophy of the Na people. Moreover, many stories and oral history interestingly offer a narrative of the events in socialist China which shows differences from the government’s official report. These stories and oral history provide me with profound insights into understanding how local people (as ethnic minorities) experience and understand socialist China’s reforms and how people, particularly the leaders, managed to balance the relationship within the villages, facing the collective trauma of violent reforms such as the Cultural Revolution.
Meaning-unknown Daba and Bon religious scriptures from hundreds of years ago that we found. My informant friends during their ethnic dance performance; local food I had during my fieldwork”