Bearing the Decline of Animal Sacrifice: Enhanced State of Consciousness, Illness, Taboos, and the Government in Southwest China

Abstract

In this study, I analyze how economic development projects and the ethnic tourism project in Southwest China have contributed to the failure of the ethnic Kachin villagers to observe taboos involved in shamanic healing rituals. Such a failure, initially as a local response to politico‐economic processes in Southwest China, exacerbates the increasingly poor health status of Kachin shamans in the local community. Taboos thus become an active site where the local decline of animal sacrifice intersects with regional processes of economic development. In examining this site, I propose a framework for understanding transformation of rituals in Southwest China, not simply as a response, or an appendix, to wider transformation in China at large, but as an integral part of China and its transformation. I also extend the relation between shamans' enhanced state of consciousness and the patients' recovery to that between the shamans' enhanced state of consciousness and their own health.