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This paper explores the pioneering work for future‐making by one of Myanmar’s non‐dominant ethnic groups. Specifically, it examines how the Christian Lisu elite strategically, and somewhat opportunistically, use ‘traditional culture’ to perform ethnicity against the background of their ‘double‐minority’ status vis‐à‐vis the dominant populations of the (Kachin) state and (Myanmar) nation. It analyses heterogeneous social actors and conditions that have influenced a Christian elite’s renewed interest in their pre‐Christian litpix traditions, as well as the challenges involved in translating the singularity of its abstraction into various embodied forms. Central to this process is the selection, revision and standardisation of previously marginalised artefacts and practices, placing them in the litpix domain independent of religion (Christianity). These embodied forms are readily tagged as ethnically Lisu whenever assertion of difference is needed. I argue that the emerging litpix space has become a significant discursive site relating to Lisu self‐representations of modern selves and relations. It is also crucial in the Christian elite’s efforts to gain competitive political, economic and cultural resources for the future development of the Burmese Lisu (especially the younger generation) while maintaining the church’s important influence on public and private life in the Lisu Christian community.

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In 1928, missionaries of the China Inland Mission (CIM), an interdenominational missionary society founded in Britain in 1865, established their first station in Yunnan's northwestern Nujiang, a border region renowned for its ethnic diversity and spectacular river gorge. 1 Since then not only Christian doctrine but also congregational hymn singing have been introduced to the Lisu, an ethnic group of over one million people who reside mainly in China's southwestern Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, in Myanmar's Kachin and Shan states, in northern Thailand, and in India's northeastern Arunachal Pradesh. 2 Ddoqmuq mutgguat (literally, "songs of praise"), a majority of which were translated from gospel songs from the northern United States by Philip P. Bliss, Ira D. Sankey, and other Evangelical composers, constitute the majority of Lisu hymns. 3 Characterized by The author is grateful to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for funding her fieldwork that forms the basis for this article, as well as to the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany for supporting the follow-up fieldwork in Myanmar and for the completion of this article. The author extends her gratitude to the editors of Yale Journal of Music & Religion and to the two anonymous reviewers for the helpful feedback.