Erik Mueggler

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Su Ping and Erik Mueggler discuss ritual form,
Yongren County, China, 2001

Research and expertise

Erik Mueggler has extensive research experience in rural Southwest China. The main body of his ethnographic research is with a community who call themselves Lolop'o. These are among the eight million Chinese who are officially designated Yi. Lolop'o speak a Tibeto-Burman language known, officially, as the Central dialect of Yi and among themselves as Lologno.

Mueggler's research with Lolop'o has focused on the interplay of language, ritual, and politics. How did these mountain residents deploy the resources of language and ritual to imagine the form of the socialist state and to survive or deflect the many civilizing and modernizing campaigns of the twentieth century? What does their particular experience tell us about twentieth-century Chinese history in general?

Mueggler has also worked with several other minority peoples in Southwest China, including Lisu, Naxi, and other Yi groups. In addition to two years of field research in Yunnan Province, he has also lived for extended periods in Shanghai and Xiamen. He visits Yunnan and Sichuan frequently, and he is planning another extended field stay in rural northwestern Yunnan.

Another aspect of Mueggler's research is the history of imperial exchange along the long border between the British Empire and China in the early twentieth century. In particular, he has focused on the relationships between early twentieth-century British botanical explorers and the local mountain residents who did most of the work of collecting and organizing the flora of Southwest China for the British imperial archive. How did British botanists and their local helpers walk this landscape differently, see it differently, collect and archive it differently, and how did these differences shape Southwest China as a botanical region? His research for this project is conducted in archives in China, Britain, and the United States.

Department of Anthropology |Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History | Center for Chinese Studies

last update: 4/28/06