Ghung Hmung

ETHNONYMS: Go Za, Gu To, Gedou, Gejia, Gezu, Ge

Orientation

Identification and Location. The Ghung Hmung are an agricultural people who live in Guizhou Province in China. They are distinguished from their neighbors by their cultural practices, especially their distinctive warriorlike female ceremonial costume with bright red embroidery and blue and white batik work. Neighboring ethnic groups call them Go Za and Gu To. The Chinese call them Gedou, a name that has appeared in Chinese records since the sixteenth century. They have been pursuing status as a nationality known as Gezu; before acquiring state recognition, they were known as Gejia in official and public media. According to some native intellectuals, the self-appellation Ghung Hmung means "native people" or "indigenes." Some say that the term refers to simple, honest, and diligent people. The term ghung refers to places or to a particular place and that hung refers to being or existing. The Ghung Hmung are spread across Guizhou Province, with a small number in the southern part of Sichuan Province. The major concentration is in the contiguous region of Huangping County and Kaili City, and Southeastern Guizhou Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture. Divided by the Chong'an River in the middle, this is a hilly area with elevations between 1,978 feet (600 meters) and 3,280 feet (1,000 meters). The Ghung Hmung villages in this area are interspersed with those of the Han, Miao, Dongjia, Xijia, and Mulao groups. There is a small concentration in Guanling County and Zhenfeng County, and Southwestern Guizhou Buyi and Miao Autonomous Prefecture. In this highland area with an elevation of about 4,265 feet (1,300 meters) the Ghung Hmung are interspersed with the Han and Buyi groups.

Demography. According to a special census conducted in 1982 for a project of ethnic classification, the total population of the Ghung Hmung is 37,115, with 16,362 in Huangping County, 9,613 in Kaili City, and 4,015 in Guanling County. The rest are dispersed in southeastern Guizhou Province. Because the Ghung Hmung are not recognized by the Chinese state as a nationality, their population figures do not appear as an independent category in the national census. In the mid-1990s some Ghung Hmung intellectuals made a rough estimate of 50,000 as the total Ghung Hmung population.

Linguistic Affiliation. The Ghung Hmung language is tonal. According to Chinese language classification, the people speak the Chong'anjiang subdialect of the Miao language's Chuanqiandian dialect within the Miao-Yao branch of Sino-Tibetan. However, the Ghung Hmung language is not mutually intelligible with those of any Miao groups. There are minor vernacular differences among Ghung Hmung groups in Huangping County, Kaili City, and Guanling County.

History and Cultural Relations

The name Gedou, a Chinese term that the Ghung Hmung consider derogatory, first was used in a sixteenth-century Chinese record to refer to certain native groups in eastern and northeastern Guizhou. Gedou settlements and cultural practices are mentioned in documents produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through the tracing of similar terms in Chinese records, the Ghung Hmung are linked to the ancient Lao and related groups, with one of those groups said to have had settled in southern Sichuan before 940 c.e. Ghung Hmung oral tradition traces the genealogy of some lineages back more than thirty generations. Historical migration is said to have resulted from invasion by Miao groups for resources, and relics of Ghung Hmung settlements in Miao villages are abundant. Some Ghung Hmung migrated from Huangping County to southwestern Guizhou to avoid the mid-nineteenth-century "Miao Rebellion," and Ghung Hmung collective memory is replete with the atrocities inflicted by Miao rebels during those years. Grave inscriptions show the titles of some Ghung Hmung military officials who served in the imperial forces, and award banners for Ghung Hmung militias still can be found in some villages. As a group much smaller than the neighboring Miao, the Ghung Hmung often think that they were oppressed and disadvantaged.

Settlements

The size of settlements varies from twenty to two hundred households, with a few large ones having up to three hundred households. Most settlements are situated on upland hillsides around an open square for public gathering and ceremonies. Houses are mostly single-story wooden buildings on leveled mud ground, with additional storage lofts under a tiled roof. Usually the house is composed of three chambers with a bedroom at the back of each one. The front part of the middle chamber is the guest-receiving room, which opens to the living room in another chamber where family members eat and obtain warmth around a fire pit in the middle. There is a hole on the wall separating these two chambers for hanging the lineage's sacred wooden drum when it is received by the family. The kitchen is a small extension with a stove at one end of the house. On one side of the house are the pigsty and the family toilet. In front of the house there is a cleared space with fruit trees planted along the edge that sometimes is surrounded by mud walls with a gate leading to a footpath winding through the village.

Economy

Subsistence. The Ghung Hmung are settled farmers who grow rice in intensively irrigated terrace fields and supplementary crops in upland dry fields. Nonsticky rice is the staple food, and glutinous rice is grown for ceremonial uses. Dryfield crops include corn, millet, sweet potatoes, beans, vegetables, and tobacco. The ratio of rice farming to dry-field cropping varies from place to place; in areas where land for rice farming is limited, people have to mix corn with rice as a staple food for several months. Farming technology includes bullock-drawn plows and the use of animal and human wastes as a fertilizer. Animal protein is obtained mainly by raising pigs and poultry with corn. Some people keep goats that graze in nearby pastureland, and many raise fish in irrigated rice fields. People distill alcohol from fermented corn or rice for festive consumption.

Commercial Activities. The Ghung Hmung buy daily necessities and sell farming and industrial products in local periodic markets. Usually, these markets include neighboring ethnic groups, and exchanges cross group boundaries. Villagers sell pigs, poultry, mats, and baskets and buy salt, processed food, cloth, farm tools, and other daily necessities. They also sell tobacco and surplus rice to state corporations and buy from them chemical fertilizers and grain seeds. Some villages provide tourist receptions and cultural performances, and women produce embroidery and batik handicrafts for tourists.

Industrial Arts. Some villages specialize in basket and mat weaving for the local market. There are carpenters and blacksmiths in many villages. Silversmiths produce delicate silver headdresses, necklaces, bracelets, and earrings for women. Women used to spin and weave cotton and hemp for making garments but now buy cloth from local markets. They continue to spend a lot of time engaging in embroidery and batik to make traditional clothes.

Division of Labor. Men are responsible for the heaviest agricultural work, such as plowing, making terraces, and maintaining irrigation. Women contribute significantly to sowing, transplanting, weeding, and harvesting. The elderly and children take care of bullocks and goats, and women raise pigs and poultry. Both women and men contribute labor to domestic chores and childcare. Making garments is the sole responsibility of women, whereas men repair farm tools and household facilities. After collectivization ended in the early 1980s, labor exchanges and cooperation among households continued in house-building projects and collective ceremonies.

Land Tenure. Before land reforms in the early 1950s Ghung Hmung smallholders worked on part of their holdings with family members or hired labor and rented the rest to tenants, who also rented land from Miao and Han landlords. In addition to the rent that accounted for half of their total production, tenants often were required to provide free labor. Collective land ownership and production was practiced until the early 1980s. Farmlands were then assigned to individual households, which were required to pay grain taxes for land use.

Kinship

Kin Groups and Descent. Men trace patrilineal descent through native names that combine the last word of one's father's name with one's own. Reciting names linking the father and the son of each generation from the lineage founder more than thirty generations back is not uncommon. There are more than twenty patrilineal clans based on different Chinese surnames. Lineage differentiation within a clan is defined by worshiping the same sacred wooden drum, which represents the residence of ancestors in the same lineage. In ritual discourse the ideal number of lineage segments is five, which further breaks down into twenty-five subdivisions. The local segment of the lineage forms the residential corporate group and the major political and ritual body at the village level, but affinal kin groups, especially women's brothers in the matrilineal line, are also important social connections in daily life.

Marriage and Family

Marriage. Monogamy is practiced. Betrothal is arranged by the parents when a son or daughter is still an infant according to a practice called "baby-carrier marriage." The wedding takes place in the partners' late teens and involves paying bride-wealth and receiving the bride in the groom's home. The bride returns to her natal family in a few days and makes brief visits to the groom's home only during the high seasons of farming. The delayed transfer of the bride ends with the birth of the first child, and the dowry then is transferred to the groom's home at the child's first-month celebration. The bride then is completely incorporated into her husband's descent group. While engaged, young people are free to participate in singing and dancing courtship activities during festivals. Elopement of young lovers as an alternative to arranged marriage requires compensation to the arranged marriage partner's family. Divorce can be initiated by either side with mutual agreement and financial compensation, but the wife's brothers have the right to impose a divorce and seek compensation if wife abuse occurs. Remarriage of widows may involve the levirate, and the sororate is practiced when a betrothed woman dies before the wedding; both arrangements require the involved persons' consent.

Domestic Unit. The extended family lasts for only a short time, as a married son usually moves out to form a nuclear family after a younger brother gets married. The parents eventually join the youngest brother as a stem family. A son will be adopted if a family has only daughters, preferably from the husband's brothers or close kinsmen.

Inheritance. Upon family division family wealth is divided equally among the sons. The youngest son will remain in the house to take care of his aged parents, with part of the wealth being set aside for their provision. Agreements are made among the sons for contributions for the funerals of the parents and the marriage of unmarried brothers and sisters. A mother's silver ornaments are given to her daughters as dowry.

Socialization. Child rearing is handled by both parents and sometimes by the grandparents. In their early teens children help gather firewood and take care of livestock; later they help with farm work. Gender is marked at an early age when infant girls start being clad in batik and embroidered clothes and learn needlework from their mother, while boys are taught by their father to blow a bamboo reed pipe. Both girls and boys learn singing and dancing in their early teens by watching older siblings' courtship activities. Girls start preparing wedding dresses years before their weddings; married men form age sets for training in ritual reed-pipe music and dance. Formal schooling may require boarding far from home after primary school. When there is an unfavorable family economic situation, girls are more likely to be deprived of formal schooling than are boys.

Sociopolitical Organization

Social Organization. Family heads are predominantly males, and they constitute the leadership of local lineage segments according to birth order and seniority. Women who marry into a village establish networks among themselves by tracing their husbands' or their natal patrilineal descent relations. Kinship extends from the village to include related lineage segments and patrilineal clans connected by affinal relatives in other villages. Preliminary social stratification based on private land ownership and tenancy was eliminated by land reforms in the early 1950s. Family size, success in the agricultural economy, and educational and career achievements outside the village affect a person's social status.

Political Organization. Since decollectivization began in the 1980s, there has been a revival of the lineage organization in many Ghung Hmung villages. The lineage assembly for decision making involving local affairs and arbitration of disputes is organized in a dual system that includes the heads of lineage segments and the leaders of the team of lineage ritual specialists. Village cadres formed by election or government appointment are subordinate to a strong lineage organization but have more authority in multisurname villages where lineage organization is weak. The elite who hold government offices at the county and provincial levels play important roles in supravillage political organization, which traditionally relies on lineage networks across villages to deal with relationships among patrilineal clans and with neighboring ethnic groups and the state.

Social Control. Parental control over subsistence and the payment of bride-wealth deters young people's pursuit for free marriage, and the system of financial compensation forces families to hold to betrothals. Infringement of exogamous rules, adultery, divorce, and offensive behaviors are under the jurisdiction of lineage elders according to customary rules or divination. Accusations of witchcraft against women put them under the control of their husbands and their patrilineal descent groups.

Conflict. Miao encroachment forced the Ghung Hmung to settle in places with harsh living conditions, and they sided with imperial forces against Miao uprisings. Since 1949 the Ghung Hmung elite has had disputes with the Chinese state over their pursuit of official recognition as a nationality separate from the Miao.

Religion and Expressive Culture

Religious Beliefs. Supernatural entities include ancestors, ghosts, and animistic spirits such as those associated with stones, caves, trees, wells, and bridges. Ancestor worship focuses on a wooden drum that represents the residence of all of a lineage's ancestors. This wooden drum moves among individual families for propitiation in cases of illness or misfortune. Restoration of normal conditions requires careful divination and magic and/or propitiatory rituals conducted by different kinds of specialists to deal with angered ancestors, malevolent ghosts, evil spirits, or witchcraft.

Religious Practitioners. Many adults practice minor magic to ward off evil spirits and wandering ghosts. The male family head offers sacrifices to ancestors at home or at graves on special days. Different kinds of shamans perform rituals, sometimes in a trance or while possessed, to make divinations, cure illness, address misfortune, and conduct funerals. These are mostly male part-time specialists who receive a small payment in the form of food. Lineage ancestor worship ceremonies involve a special organization that includes the highest priest in charge of divination and reciting lineage genealogy and history, the chief of reed-pipe music and dance performances, a pair of male elders who represent the male and female ancestors to oversee ceremonies, and those ritual leaders' subordinates and trainees.

Ceremonies. According to the Chinese lunar calendar, the new year is celebrated by making glutinous rice cakes, killing pigs, propitiating family ancestors, and visiting relatives and friends. Blessings for agricultural production in the coming year involve specific religious rituals in the first half of the first month. Wishes for the harvest are expressed in the Eating New Rice Festival early in the seventh month. Family heads visit the graves of ancestors in the middle of the fourth month. In the mid-1980s, the first lineage sacred wooden drum was remade and ancestral worship rituals were resumed. The lineage's ritual specialists gather around the sacred wooden drum at the start of the new year, the sixteenth day of the seventh month, and the winter solstice to recite ancestors' names, offer sacrifices, and perform ritual music. The highest ceremony of propitiation involves the participation of the entire lineage around the sacred wooden drum put in the ritual square of the village for a three-day ceremony held once every twelve to twenty years. A person's birth, wedding, and funeral involve various rites of passage, and purification ceremonies for an individual family or the entire village are carried out on occasions of misfortune.

Arts. Needlework, embroidery, weaving, and batik are prized skills for women. Men's skills in reed-pipe music and dancing are essential for courtship activities and ancestor worship. Antiphonal singing of love songs in Chinese is popular among young people during courtship. Poetic songs narrating folk customs in the native language are the essential elements in many ceremonies. Oral traditions include folktales, myths, and lineage history. Since reforms were implemented in the 1980s, there has been a revival of native tradition and culture, including traditional singing and dancing and religious rituals and ceremonies.

Medicine. Bringing back the lost soul through divination and the exorcism of ghosts and evil spirits is the major therapeutic purpose of shamanism. People who seek help from herbal medicine specialists bring a box of rice to their homes to pray to the spirits of medicine at special altars and bring a rooster to offer at the last visit, upon the sick person's recovery. Other traditional treatments include massage and bloodletting. There are trained practitioners in many villages who provide basic treatments that involve modern medicine.

Death and Afterlife. The Ghung Hmung believe after death part of the human soul undergoes the reincarnation process; another part resides at the grave, which is located in a site whose geomantic value will affect the fortunes of the living descendants; the third part must be led safely by a ritual specialist in the funeral through a journey to rejoin the lineage's ancestors in the other world. Out of three routes, the journey requires the soul to take the correct one to arrive at the ritual square where ancestors dance around the sacred wooden drum. The other two routes are for the journeys of deceased Han and Miao people. A piece of cloth with fine embroidery in special patterns is put on the chest of a deceased man to protect his soul from attack by evil spirits. Cattle are killed for the funeral, and one brings a dog as a sacrifice to show the highest degree of respect for the deceased person. A bamboo stick is planted at the posterior end of the grave.

For other cultures in China, see List of Cultures by Country in Volume 10 and under specific culture names in Volume 6, Russia and Eurasia/China.

Bibliography

Cheung Siu-woo (1996). "Representation and Negotiation of Ge Identities in Southeast Guizhou." In Negotiating Ethnicitiesin China and Taiwan, edited by Melissa Brown. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

Fei Xiaotong (1951). "Shaoshu Zhongde Shaoshu" [The Minorities among Minorities]. In Xiongdi Minzu Zai Guizhou [Brother Nationalities in Guizhou], edited by Fei Xiaotong, pp. 76-88. Beijing: Joint Publishers.

Gao Guozhang (1997). Derun Bigeng [The Anthology by Derun]. Unpublished manuscript.

Han Yi (1988). Gezu [The Ge Nationality]. Unpublished manuscript.

Liao Chaolong (2000). Shengcun Fendou [Struggle for Survival]. Unpublished manuscript.

Rossi, Gail (1988). "Textile Reflections of a Warrior Past: China's Ge-Jia People," A Report from the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum, Fall, pp. 1-4.

SIU-WOO CHEUNG