<p>Chinese history has always been written from a centrist viewpoint.<br>Telling the story of a quintessential Chinese culture that spread<br>uniformly from the administrative heartland to the previously untamed<br>periphery, official records have largely ignored the local histories of<br>the country's conquered peoples, preserved for generations in the<br>form of oral tradition through myths, legends, and religious rituals.<br>The history of southwestern China, a region known today for its<br>minority character, is the subject of this volume.</p><br><br><p>In <i>Chieftains into Ancestors,</i> the authors describe the<br>intersection of imperial administration and chieftain-dominated local<br>culture. Since the acceptance of a new socio-political structure never<br>happens overnight, they observe local rituals against the backdrop of<br>extant written records, focusing on examples from the southwestern<br>Hunan, Guangxi, Yunnan, and southwestern Guangdong provinces. The<br>authors contemplate the crucial question of how one can begin to write<br>the history of a conquered people whose past has been largely wiped<br>out. Combining anthropological fieldwork with historical textual<br>analysis, they dig deep for the indigenous voice as they build a new<br>history of China's southwestern region - one that<br>recognizes the ethnic, religious, and gendered transformations that<br>took place in China's nation-building process.</p><p><p><b>David Faure</b> is Wei Lun Professor of History at the<br>Chinese University of Hong Kong. His books include <i>Emperor and<br>Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China.</i> <b>Ho<br>Ts'ui-p'ing</b> is an associate research fellow at the<br>Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica and an adjunct associate<br>professor in the Institute of Anthropology at National Tsing Hua<br>University. She is the co-editor of <i>State, Market and Ethnic Groups<br>Contextualized.</i></p><br><br><p><b>Contributors:</b> Lian Ruizhi, Huang Shu-li, James<br>Wilkerson, He Xi, Xie Xiaohui, Kao Ya-ning, and Zhang Yingqiang.</p>