 All right, first of all, let me thank Nathan and everybody who came here, it's my first time in Ireland and I love it so far. So I'm really glad that so many people came here to hear me talk into the oldest university in Ireland, if I'm not mistaken. So, on this Cosmovist project I joined only in April last year, so what I'm going to present today is something new and something very raw and very open-ended, let's say, because it a little bit differs from my previous research endeavors, but nevertheless it's related as well. So the title of the talk is Science, Scare the Ghosts and Spirits Away, Mountain Worship, Catastrophe Prevention and Environmental Protection, Mangdono Sui of Liang Shan. So on the first side you already see that there are few seeming contradictions, so like science and ghosts and spirits and like mountain worship and environmental protection and so on. So I will first begin from the bigger concepts and then get more to the particular, namely the most Liang Shan and their cultural practices. Here I'm going to be really simplistic, but I have to first talk a little bit about what I mean by science in this talk. What is the nature of science in the last, let's say 100 or 150 years in China, because it's very important for the explanation of some phenomena in Liang Shan. The science as we know it from the Western notion was imported into China in the late Qing dynasty. There were, this is going to be very simplistic, but there were periods or persons in particular who were really radical about westernization of China, let's say, they said the Chinese concepts are obsolete and should be replaced by the western ones. But what actually happened over the course of the time was that the science was not transplanted to China, but it was rather indigenized in China, meaning the local categories merged with those imported ones and created actually something new. Of course, when we talk about science, and it's not only in China, it's worldwide, but this is the global narrative of science, science is always connected to the notion of modernization and especially rationalism. So something which, you know, is logical, measurable, and as opposed to emotions and let's say beliefs that meant religious beliefs. But as we probably all know from our histories from China and outside that rationalism if taken to extreme in dogmatic way can be utterly irrational and can turn into some sort of religion, which we saw particularly in China, for example, in late 50s until late 70s with the Cultural Revolution, which was one of those radical breaks from the past and this, let's say, break from the past meaning, let's say Confucianism is bad and it's useless we should do the scientific, you know, ways like casting the iron and modernize and industrialize speedily the country, which of course leads to spectacular devastating failures. So, after this period of course in post 1980s, in late 1970s and 1980s, there was a political reform, economic reform and sort of revision of this of this approaches, while between late 50s and late 70s, for example, the ethnicity, or some cultural practices where even outlawed, banned, in 80s they returned and this political and economic and this opening up, Kaikou Kaifeng reform and opening up of course brought an unprecedented success. A lot of people are listed out of poverty, but there was also trade offs as always. So it also brought the continuous environmental destruction. Now, let's talk about a little bit about the environmental protection together with science here in Chinese context. So the notion of ecology as other of these concepts were also imported in the this time early 20th century through Japan, Shuntai Xue, Seitai Kaikou, but there was some confusion, confusion right from the beginning, because it did not really study living organisms, but it studied a lifeless world, meaning it didn't really study plants in their environment. You just approve the plant, bring it to the laboratory, dry it and categorize it. Okay, so there was this different indigenous version of ecology in China, which lasted quite long, and only sort of moved towards the environment, environmentalism since the 1980s. When following the Soviet Union and its own mention of ecological civilization, China later also developed its own concept of Shuntai Wenming or ecological civilization. And this concept basically goes the other way around with the big loop, which China did in the last 100 to 150 years. So when, let's say, during the Cultural Revolution or during the new cultural movement in late 1910s, there was this push for forgetting the Confucianism and its central place in the society. Suddenly, with the ecological civilization and the Confucianism is very useful because it, of course, stipulates or it says that it places the human inside of nature, regulates this healthy balance between the nature and the people. And also, from this point, you can draw ethical, spiritual, cosmological and also cosmological and also political dimension, because with this ecological civilization, it's something recently which China brings into the global stage. China now becomes this driver of, let's say, environmental protection. But this environment, environmental protection goes different ways. So it includes protection and revitalization, but also built up environment. So basically, when during the industrialization, then the environment got destroyed. Now the person or the people must build it back to make it work again. But of course, by building it back, you create in something else. That's a good example here, this sign, I took a picture in this huge natural park in Yangshan, southwest Sichuan area, it says Jiaqiangshan, Taijianshe, Weihu, Shantai, Anquan. So to strengthen the build up of the environment and to protect the environmental security in no man's land, basically. But the truth is that the forests in that area are all man-made. I'll talk about it a little bit later. And since the, let's say, 20 years ago, roughly 30, 20 years ago, the China also or the Chinese government started to, at least on paper, value the so-called indigenous or local knowledge. Well, this comes with the push from the United Nations, who in, I think it was 1992, they started to declare that people should pay more attention to so-called indigenous knowledges of the Amazon, indigenous people of Amazon, how they relate to their environment, how they live sustainably within their environment and don't really over excessively exploit it. And this actually brings us, this is just, this is the gardenification I'm talking about, this is the man-made Shantai, which you can see also in Qinghai Lake in Yangshan. So, when we talk about the indigenous people or China doesn't have the contact or doesn't really recognize the concept of indigenous people because the government says all the people in China are indigenous, including the Hanzu. So, there is not this dichotomy of colonizers and colonized. So, now let's talk a bit, who are the Yi? Yi people, this really broad exonym in Imperial China described mostly non-Han inhabitants of both highlands and lowlands across the southwest China. So, the Yi was really a generic term for these non-Han people. The Yi, as we know it today as the ethnic category, was starting to be built up during the Republic of China through the works of ethnic historians, anthropologists, like Ma Chang-so, Ma Xia-liang, and Lin-yao Huang. All of them Han Chinese, most of them studying with people who either get their anthropological training abroad or were students of somebody who did their anthropological research abroad. So, they tried to construct these ethnicities in order to plug them into the something which was to be a Chinese nation. During the PRC, actually, in anti-Tizis to ROC, where the goal of the ROC was to assimilate really these people into one strong nation because China, of course, was being attacked by the western powers and the intellectuals stressed the fact that we need a strong nation in order to protect our territory and integrity and so on. So, the southwest, so the ROC constituted of five ethnic blocks, Han, Tibetans, Manjoo, Mongols, and Hui, which was the generic term for Muslim population, but the people of the southwest including the Yi did not really exist in this paradigm. So, when the Kuomintang, the ROC leaders lost their civil war with Communist Party of China, the Communist Party of China actually kicked off. One of the first things they actually did was to run this monstrous campaign, which was probably one of the biggest social engineering campaign in the history of humankind. And within a very short time, they needed to find those identities for those nationalities as an anti-Tizis to this assimilation push of their sworn enemies, the Kuomintang. So, while the Kuomintang didn't want to recognize really the immense diversity, the communists on the first years came and said, no, we are a diverse nation and we will craft the identities for you in order that you have a voice and you have a political representation. So, in this map, we can see the Yi, but this area is big like three Francis, basically, and therefore you can imagine that there are over, there are dozens, probably close to 100 different Yi communities with their different way how they call themselves. So, there's this huge nationality, which is bigger than Tibetans, for example, or even the Mongols, the more exposed and known nationalities, but the Yi are not really coherent, let's say. The Yi from Yangshan couldn't use their own language to communicate with the Yi from Ailau Shan over here. Their cultural experience is completely different. When I traveled across Guizhou, Yunnan, and such one, and I tried to like, you know, I shared some pictures and some concepts, cultural concepts of the different Yi with another Yi that were looking at it and said, no, no, no, that's not right. This is not Yi. We are the real Yi. And of course, wherever I came, said, oh, we are the real Yi. Those other are fake. They are not Yi. That's pretending. Listen to us. So, the mutual differences among the various Yi communities was always there because they were constructed from this very, very differentiated pool of people and it persists until today. So my research actually, most of my research happens in this place called Yangshan. You can see that the concentration of the Yi in Yangshan is the highest. And this has really a reason because that area is very, or at least until recently was very hard to access. So historically, a lot of these communities were running away either from their clan rivals or from the state or for whatever reason, because of the local war, many of them actually found refuge in that place. For example, I'm not sure if you are familiar with the work of James Scott, which is called the art of not being governed. He talks about how the people from lowlands escape to the highlands in order to escape the bureaucratic state. This doesn't really apply to the Yi much because Yi, as I said, are both lowland and organized polities and also highland people. So there was this immense, immense migrations and therefore also the history or these oral histories of the Yi are a genealogical accounts of endless migrations across environment. The Yangshan therefore, because of this special place was perceived as remote and dangerous and impenetrable place. Henry Vickum Dolong, this army officer French from the beginning of 20th century even said that the Yangshan is the last indiscovered place in the world. We get went to the Papua New Guinea already we went everywhere but nobody ever went to the Yangshan because who entered never came out he was enslaved or killed or whatever. So this place had no central rule. And it was at least for the last 250 years until 1950s in perpetual intercontinental warfare. So there was no king, there was no llama who would unite the place. There were just mutually competing clans who raided the lowlands snatched, you know, either lowland Yi or Han Chinese or any other ethnicities drag them to the mountains to be their slaves. And therefore, not only that the Yi this category is immensely diverse across the Southwest, the Liangshan itself is very diverse as well, because of this. So we this is their autonym, they call themselves not so which means black people, because they're, you know, they live high in the mountains and they are exposed to huge doses of sunlight so their skin is a little bit black that's maybe one explanation. The other one their traditional aristocracy is said to have black heart bones. So therefore they call themselves black people. The nose in this research scientific research were made central because of ideological conditions of Marxist, but historical materialism which tells you that the society or the societal developments are based in history and you have these five periods from primitive society to slave society to feudal capitalist and socialist society. So the nosu among the all other E were designated because of their remoteness as the most ancient most well preserved ones. This is of course usually problematic because as I said those different e cultures of this are eosphere developed differently across the Southwest so it's really hard to say who are the authentic E So as I said this, there was no social order, very clan based society, but there was aristocracy who just intermediate between themselves, and there was like 6% of them and there was 94 commoners or slaves. What happened in 1956 the Communist Party of course went to the place and toppled this whole hierarchy upside down so they liberated the slaves, the slaves suddenly get the former slave or enslaved people got these positions in a scat race in government, and the former aristocracy were set out to toil on the lands, you know to experience the hardships of the of the life. So, from this period we are talking 5060s there was a really, you know, there was a beginning of the East stigma because they were seen as super backward fears, fears barbarians really who practice this feudal superstition And this was also of course this view was this radical rationalism infused by this Marxist Marxism Leninism basically in 1980s with the relaxation. There was the golden age for the E because there was a new emerging academic elite of indigenous E anthropologists who actually wrote about themselves. So it was not Chinese it was not foreigners will not English or French missionaries this was the first time that the E actually retrospectively looked at them on themselves and just tried to sort of emphasize different aspects of their society that they would destigmatize themselves. But the stigma of course never comes away because until recently they were seen in another light as as drug users and HIV carriers due to their backwardness also, of course. In the center of this identity building was a demo This person here who has the capability of read the script which is a unique writing system different from Chinese, and therefore he was made from this 1960s feudal superstition, superstition carrier into intellectual. So this is our intellectual that's our script we derive everything from those scriptures and from this person. So he became the main, let's say protector and carrier of this new identity. However, since the 1980s until now, there are various issues. It's still prevalent within within within this, let's say, nation building because you still have the very rationalist and atheistic ideology on one hand, but then you have this ethnic revival, if you can call it like that, which makes use of the cultural elements, which recently called were called feudal superstition. So there was also a big debate how to actually construct the belief, the animistic belief of the should it be religion, some of the intellectuals believe that if it will become official religion. We will get more protection of the state, which is really debatable if we know how especially I don't know Islam Christianity is nowadays controversy in China, and I always told to friends who are really ridiculous about it. Just, you know, be more low key. If you really construct this as culture it's much more, it's much more, you know, likely to achieve some sort of political power. Nowadays, for the last few years is intangible heritage search in China which is not the Chinese product itself it's indigenized from the UNESCO, which really cherry picks the elements of the nozzle or the, yeah, mainly the nozzle and project it on the all year southwest, meaning they create this hierarchy of what counts as a good culture, and what counts as a stimulus to prestige and so what we should keep and what we should go, let's go. Recently, there is this, this campaign, this is really local to Liangshan, which is really about this meaning even to change the style or to change some appearance and he's so means to simplify the customs, meaning you should not spend so much money for funerals don't be so wasteful and lavish eat less it may be Chinese food don't don't don't slaughter those so many pigs and cows for your feast and sacrifices. So this actually brings a fundamental question we have this local knowledge which should be used in environmental protection. In the meantime, some of this local knowledge simultaneously is branded as feudal superstition. And this really nice connects to what Igor presented here about the locality and the people. Prefectures 19 counties in total, they are topographically, climatically, and politically very different from each other. What does it mean some of these places are covered with forest, some of these places are bare, some of these places are more rural and some of them more highly. The political side of it in one county may be this ritualist culture or whatever we can, or we want to call it is seen as culture somewhere else in another country is seen as very different religion. In some other county they constructed as art, or like, you know, means we should nationalities are and in particular team young county wants to be very, let's say rationalistic so they constructed as feudal superstition. So you have all these narratives existing in this small place at the same time. Here on this side you have teacher from the mission. So it is really difficult nowadays to reconcile this contradiction between ideology and practical needs. But this local knowledge, connective environment environmentalism is might be potentially a new vehicle for preservation of the local practices if you actually sell it to the ideology in the right way. Now let's, let's have a look on some of these environmental challenges in Russia. There are many, of course, because in the last two decades, the young sun experienced an unprecedented boom and got gradually connected to this larger China let's say meaning new new roads were built new airports were built. There are ways and so I will talk about it later. But one of the first environmental challenges is mining is what you see here is mandal. It's a get particular, I get very, very famous one. And 10 years ago, the last time was covered by the illegal black mines. There were a lot of casualties among the miners of course because they were no safety standards, until the local government heavily cracked down on this issue. Another very big environmental challenge, as I said already before, is the gradual deforestation, which actually already happened during the Empire meaning Ming Qing dynasty, then continued through the ROC through the commercial logging. Igor was talking about this warlord Li Wenhui, one of his family members actually established a profitable business in Liangxian when he on the land he controlled he prohibited the traditional the way of burial cremation, and he stipulated that they will be buried down in the coffins. Therefore, he had the company who made coffins. And so he was actually mining the forest for the coffins in order to sell it to the to the people who were about to be buried. And during the PRC actually gradually slowly, this problem started to be tackled. Here we can see the very notable difference. This is me in this manmade forest and only this is 20 odd years old for us. It's monocultural, largely, and made of pine trees. Very different from the original, the jungle or original forest. And for this, of course, helps in some way in this carbon sequestration and so on but it also does a trade off because if you in this forest if you throw a cigarette but well, maybe something will flare up if it's dry enough, but it will eventually stop because it's so dense and humid that this wouldn't this is unlikely to break into huge fire if you in the summer throw something like this in this forest it will burn like immediate So this deforestation is actually visible all over the action. Also, that you see the stock for us are not really nice to serve this child. So you see my friend here standing in one of those edges of this original for us. Here is here used to be original for us. The stumps are probably maybe 5060 plus years old, those were very high quality wood which probably ended up maybe even a road. So, also, then also we were engaging in unscientific Sweden agriculture, but again, the Sweden agriculture doesn't have to be really unscientific depends on how many people you have to do it and what kind of forest or what kind of environment you do it. If you burn a patch of original forest, you actually plant your crops, then leave it fellow for another five years. The forest actually can recover it from that and it's even beneficial to the forest. But if you want to do something like this here, then of course you will damage the whole forest will just burn all the way down. So, the commercial looking was also cracked down on in 1990s, and it must be also must be pointed out that this contention over forests are very deeply historically in Belgium because as I will talk a little bit later in the last 10 minutes. There are patches of forest which are sacred for those who which they didn't enter and nobody should enter them, especially like in the video in terms of who there was also somebody talk about it like forest don't well kind they go through. So, the, the, so the nose who has the same, but actually very similar concepts to jarring Zanzu because they live in similar environment. So, another, of course trade off of this rapid development is the environmental impact of the development of highways and high school trailways and energetically infrastructure meaning how hydropower and especially wind farms and solar energy and also the monocultural cash crop introduction in different counties now different counties as this. You know, this may leading products or in the Indian County you have apples in label County you have oranges in another way don't county you have a fig and so on. This infrastructure actually started to penetrate deeply into those three society you see some traditional that state is this is about summer fire festival. It's all. If you if you go in ways in right swipe around this time to the wasting of my friends. Everybody just put, you know, the wind farms are literally everywhere right now. There are also some very layered kind of things so you have, you have a belly near Sichuan, which goes north south direction between Chengdu and me runs to perfection capital. Here you have the wind farm. Here you have the cash crop, the grapes. Yeah. And especially also in this in this in this. What is it? What is it called? Like, like a tent. You really plant everything you could be planting so you have the grapes up you have potatoes down. So this is all very layered then you have a lot of solar energy farms, which actually are merging with pastoralism, and so on. Now, this of course, all this development brings some unforeseen disasters as I was talking about this is a huge fire of over Sichuan over the lake you just saw in the different slide. This was also one of cultural forest which just burned down in three days and close to 15 or even 35 fighters actually died during mitigating that fire. Something similar happened in Muli County in Tibetan County before also it's claimed life of 32 firefighters. So these are actually blamed scientifically explained that, you know, it's all people's fault that they shouldn't, you know, smoke in the mountains and so on. But, you know, you can actually argue that this happens because of you brought the people outside of the mountains who actually manage this forest, these traditional communities and about the change of the nature of the forest. So, by trying to mitigate or to construct this environment you actually get rather trade offs and solutions. Now even a I is applied to actually monitor the forest if somebody is not starting some fire. Now, no so he has this their own traditional way this local knowledge way, how to mitigate disasters what does it mean disaster in the no sweet context. Of course the disasters are caused by malicious ghosts. That means diseases like let prosy one of the worst imaginable things is actually very rare ritual against let prosy you can see that one once in a few years because let prosy is not so prevalent anymore. The person who actually ordered this ritual didn't have a lot of let prosy it just had some rash he feared it's weapons he so he called to two of these be more to help him out with this problem through the mediation of course between the ancestral spirits. So, so the be more evokes ancestral spirits to come and battle the ghosts away. The game goes with the environment so landslides, for example, our thoughts or where it felt in the past, because, because you reached the sacred forest, meaning you went to the forest. It has a logical rationalist explanation you go to the forest you cut down the trees. Of course the erosion comes and bouncing false on your village. So, there is this. Okay, the bimo has thousands of rituals but they are there is this pool of rituals which deal with with the mountain worship. So, or it has different subsections like read that which is against the falling stones read that against the falling water or which is against the hail storm. This is to say we actually saw it today this is not really unique to know caring about the forest. You can see the dye people in Sichuan Banna, you can see them on all the Tibetans of Western Sichuan with earth to Tibetans and China Tibetans. You see them are me people of Muli and, you know, and so on. And you actually see it also with among the Chinese minority to the functionally function for us, which has very similar function. So, really quickly, I just, these are three stories I encountered along the way on one way during my recent billboard. And this is the first one is actually going to the title of my speech. So we went to this relative of my, my, my colleague, who is no soup. We're, I don't know 75 uncles because no so we are always really huge clans and families. And we wanted to know what's going on in their village because there was large infrastructure project of a highway going through it. And of course, and also the place notoriously suffered through erosion and landslides. So we were invited for this pixel and we were waiting for the pick to be made and then we were eating the chunks of meat of the pick. And we started to talk and we asked, so do you do this rituals here still. And the young people said no not anymore we, we just don't do that. One of the other person 70 plus years old, said, you know, the people, when they build the highway, they use this job done you know they use these bombs to, you know, go through the mountain and just blast the rocks. It scared the spirits and ghosts away they are not coming back plus they already entered the forests, and they left their garbage there so the forest they are gone. So, you know, we just follow the signs and not believe anymore. So there was his kind of view of the situation only couple of days later. Of course, I, we ended up in the county town and visited another good acquaintance of my colleague. And he told us the story that there was this family who get immensely rich by this black mining of the mana of this agate. And then the landslide came and that was the only house in the village that was swept away and everybody died in one night. The landslide went through the village didn't touch the other houses. So there is this recurring notion of science and so the people basically oscillate when nothing happens they say okay we don't believe this thing. But when something actually really happens the first thing they do they call the people to do something some rituals for them. And the third story happened again three days later. And it was with my good friend, which I haven't seen for a while. And I asked him about whether in his place, which is a seeded county it's close to the administrative capital. If they do this kind of rituals and he said, yeah, we used to do that, you know, we, and as I said the rituals really different according to the environment, the use of the plants differ, the use of the animals differ as well. And he said, yeah, we usually do this that we bring this meal into the mountains we sacrifice a dog. You know, and we invite our be more to go into the mountains and read the scriptures to appease the mountain and we make the contract with the forest and the mountain that nothing will happen the next year, but then actually the scientists came to our village and said, you are actually doing this by doing this you are attracting the hail storm, because of the heat you emanate from your bodies when you chant and run around the mountains. And when you chant there's this vibration you know which goes into the mountains and then makes the landslide and said and so they introduced us another thing how to mitigate the hail storm. Because they got is this hail storm cannon, which you actually come the cloud coming you just fire something into the air, some synthetic and basically disperse the cloud. So, funny thing was that the be more lost his purpose in this village, but another person who was the only one who can operate this kind of machine gained another fame and reputation so he was the only one who was able to blast those things. But one day he was not present in the village, the religious saw the cloud coming. And so somebody else tries to blast it and he blasted hello. And therefore, they have to call the demo back in order to do rituals, not to happen this again. So you can see how these things really interrelates. So I'm at the end of the talk, and just a few open dandy questions which might be also something you might want to ask for you have maybe more. And what does the science means actually, and is it elusive or compatible with the local knowledge because in Tibetan areas like Shanghai or the third she in the United. It's been 2030 years that this local knowledge was really implemented in the policies, but not in Lianshan. Why, this is probably something that we have to find out. What's the value of the local knowledge in Lianshan. You know, for me or at least for my life see this local, this local knowledge or these rituals are really bound to the immediate environment and once village it's not the entity, ethnicity or anything it's bound to the topography or orientation of the village which is something very similar what you were talking about with this spatial, spatial. Coordinates, which are different in different places. So my question also to you would be how this relates to animus practices or this semi religious practices how it's reflected in there. How this can coexist with the rationalist and largely atheistic ideology that needs definitely a lot of creativity. What are the scientific over rationalist visions, you know, this is a feudal superstition get rid of it really does it override the knowledge. And when encountering this scientific outlook, like, is there a way back to the local knowledge because this is the biggest problem right now. We don't need to pay attention to the local knowledge of Lianshan, but a lot of people say, we don't need it anymore we don't do it. You don't do the rituals. We want to obtain the local knowledge but many people just, you know, let it go. So is there something to obtain. Thanks for your attention. I was just a little bit of shameless promotion. This is our project web page we all everything we write this ethnographies so it might be readable for everybody. Hopefully, hopefully also interestingly, it's all open access. So hopefully also in the following years they will be growing the number of article that can answer at least some of these questions. Thank you.