Writing to Rule: Performative Textuality in the Daoist Rituals of the Lanten Yao of Laos

Abstract

The Lanten are a branch of the Yao ethnic minority who traditionally practiced swidden cultivation in the mountainous border regions straddling China, Vietnam and Laos. Communal and religious life of the Lanten is structured around intense ritual activity derived from Daoist liturgical traditions, in which textual acts embody the authority of the Daoist master to command, dispatch and transform spirits in a celestial bureaucracy, enacting an administrative ritual and cosmic order that heals the community and expels harm. All young males undergo a three-day initiation ceremony and older men seek prestige and moral authority by becoming ritual experts and accumulating a collection of hand-copied ritual and magical manuscripts. These ceremonies involve an extraordinary amount of production, recitation and burning of paper texts, petitions, orders, money and documents in the Chinese script, a language used exclusively in ritual contexts among the Lanten. This paper will draw on scholarship on textual usage in Chinese Daoism and on my ethnographic research conducted among the Lanten Yao in Luang Namtha, Laos, as well as emerging scholarship on iconic and performative textuality, to reflect on methodological and theoretical issues in the “textual ethnography” of Daoism. [Project funded by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong SAR, China]