Framed by problems and dialogues established in anthropology of religion, ritual studies, and Yi studies, this dissertation explores the processes of religious revitalization and knowledge transformation in contemporary southwestern China among the ethnic Yi people, one of China’s officially designated 55 minority groups. Utilizing ethnographic and visual methods during a 16-month long fieldwork (2016-2017) conducted in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in southern Sichuan, this dissertation examines the politics of religion and knowledge in the mapping of both the Chinese state’s modernist transformations of the 20th century and the ways that local Yi ritual specialists (mainly focused on the bimo priest-shamans) and lay participants wrestle with the emerging circumstances of social change. It draws on local discourses of mixin (“superstition”) as a site for untangling China’s historical problematization of “religion” and the concurrent public ambivalence towards the legitimacy and conceptualization of Yi ritual practices. It also tackles the theoretical debate on magico-religious practices and suggests an analytic approach to Yi bimoist ritual knowledge, practice, and power by undertaking a comparative framework of shamanic studies in South America and Inner Asia. In addition, this dissertation develops an ethnographic understanding of the assemblages and trajectories of objects, animal sacrifice, and the materio-socio-sensorial environment in Yi everyday and ceremonial lives. With this, it illustrates how a morally legitimate relatedness in light of a socio-cosmo-genealogical flow of power is casted in a history-in-the-making of an ethnic group.

English Abstract This M.A. thesis analyses the politics of indirect rule within the peripheral area of Liangshan in southern Sichuan, which the imperial court tried to implement thru appointment of hereditary offices of indigenous chieftains (ch. tusi or tuguan). It uses primary sources in classical Chinese from official histories, local gazetteers, ethnographic studies and other documents, as well as secondary literature in Czech, English, French, German and Chinese. This thesis is divided into three interrelated chapters. The first chapter outlines the origin, changes and development of systems of indirect rule in Southwest China. The final stage of the development this political mechanism was a so-called "native chieftain system" (ch. tusi zhidu), through which the central court managed peripheral regions of its empire during Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. This chapter focuses on the development of these systems of indirect rule from the Warring States era (5th century BC) to the beginning of 20th century. The second chapter explores ethnographic, historico-political and ethnohistorical descriptions of Liangshan region. This chapter will then define the Liangshan region through geographical, political (the imperial court), and indigenous (ethnic) perspectives and therefore finalizes a theoretical...