Introduction: Naxi studies,Naxiology and making the global case for a discipline

Those of us in what we may call “Naxi studies” are scholars without a fixed home. We have no departments to call our own, and no specialist periodicals in which to publish. But we straddle disciplines and publish where we can, making the case for our own field as we do so. The legitimacy of Naxi studies is predicated on its perceived cultural value, and the discipline, the “institution”, so to speak, can only exist if we will it into existence. Jacques Derrida (2008: 22) wrote of his own more mainstream institution of comparative literature in a way that suggested it derived its right to exist from an act of historical creation:Like many institutions, comparative literature did not wait for me, it did not wait for us, in order to exist. Nor did departments of literature in the West and elsewhere. To exist, for an institution, is to affirm its right to existence; it is to constantly refer, more or less virtually, to a legitimacy, but to a certain type of particular legitimacy, a historical legitimacy, an entitlement that has its origin in a historical act or in historical acts of foundation.It sometimes feels that international Naxi studies, ¹ unlike Derrida's comparative literature, is waiting for us to exist, waiting for that foundational act that affirms a historical legitimacy. If not us, then who? Joseph Rock, so prolific throughout four decades of the 20th century, almost brought Naxi studies to life single-handedly with his exhausting, exhaustive writing on this small Tibeto-Burman minority people in China. He was no doubt drawn to the Naxi by their pictographic script and rich corpus of religious texts. But since his Herculean efforts, only a scant few outside China have taken up the mantle of making the argument for the existence of this discipline with much force. Naxi studies – or indeed, “Naxiology”, a semantic distinction that at first may seem trivial but that we shall expound upon shortly – can only gain legitimacy if we affirm its right to that legitimacy in the academe.

We point to the first decade of the current century as the real flourishing of Naxi studies within China, a point at which such scholarly work began to coalesce around a number of like-minded individuals. It was with the publication of the 18-volume “Collected Essays on Naxi studies” (纳西学论集, published between 2008 and 2009) that Bai Gengsheng (2007: 1), one of the foremost proponents of contemporary Naxi studies, offered a simplistic definition: “纳西学，就是以纳西族为研究对象的学科” [Naxiology takes as its subject the study of the Naxi people]. This very broad description makes Naxiology sound like a sub-branch of Chinese ethnology. Naxi studies in both East and West arguably began with Rock, and in the subsequent decades has most often featured in the domain of the social sciences – most notably, anthropology. In China, Naxi studies has thrived as a sub-discipline of ethnology and ethnolinguistics. Poupard (2022) has previously attempted a distinction between Naxi studies as a general term for the field and the dreaded “-ology”, in this case, “Naxiology”, as a more philologically focused sub-branch of this field. Allow us to resurrect that definition here:

Naxiology is philology concerned with the Naxi texts. Classical Sinology is first and foremost characterized by a strong textual and philological approach (in the sense that it seeks to establish the meaning of texts, mostly with translation purposes), but is also supported by analytical tools from the social sciences and humanities. Naxiology, I believe, can be seen in the same way. (Poupard, 2022: 421)

Nevertheless, there have been several written attempts at bringing international Naxi studies together into a more cohesive whole; not least Michael Oppitz and Elisabeth Hsu's compilation, Naxi and Moso Ethnography: Kin, Rites, Pictographs (1998), and the comparatively more recent Ancestral Realms of the Naxi: Quentin Roosevelt's China (2011) by Christine Mathieu and Cindy Ho; both volumes still being primarily ethnographic in outlook. But we would like to go back to the late 1980s to investigate perhaps the true genesis of a “post-Rock” international Naxi studies of a more interdisciplinary nature. In 1989, the Chien Chao and Nicholas Tapp published an edited volume “Ethnicity & Ethnic Groups in China”. In this volume, there were three chapters dedicated to the Naxi (thus making the Naxi something of an unspoken core focus of the book): Anthony Jackson's “Naxi studies: Past, present and future”, a more avowedly Naxiological contribution from Harald Bockman, “The typology of the Naxi Tomba script”, and Charles McKhann’s (1989) “Fleshing out the bones: the cosmic and social dimensions of space in Naxi architecture”, something of a precursor to his excellent (1992) PhD thesis. Each of these articles is valuable in its own way, but let us focus on Jackson's (1989) piece, which attempted to be a survey of the state of the art as it was in the 1980s. Now, some 35 years later, it is important for us in this still fledgling field to review where we are, how far we have come, and what work there is still to do. With this in mind, what follows is a revisiting of the past, present and future of Naxi studies.

In his essay, Jackson (1989) begins by stating the core issue of Naxi studies, which is what he calls “the problem of the mss.”, which is (beyond being perhaps a general descriptor for philological pursuits in all languages), put succinctly, that people outside of the oral tradition cannot fully read the Naxi manuscripts, thus necessitating the assistance of a trained ritualist in any act of reading. This is the problem of writing, which is addressed from various angles in this issue (see the contribution in this volume Zihan Li (2024)). This would be a greater problem if all the Dongba were in fact “dead”, an extinction-level event to which many scholars, starting with Joseph Rock himself, have intimated. It is clear that we are no longer facing such dire straits. We may bemoan the lack of so-called “great Dongba” (Da Dongba 大东巴), the masters who have command of an overwhelming number of ceremonial traditions and their associated manuscripts, but scholars still have access to ritual experts who can read the manuscripts and provide their specialist interpretations of them. The wellspring of oral tradition can still be tapped.

Rock has been indispensable to the Naxi scholarship, and there is much left to quarry in his voluminous works. Jackson treats Rock with respect, but not reverence: in his most direct critique, he states that “He was no good at analysing his own work nor seeing the rituals in perspective … he assumes that the Naxi have an undifferentiated culture which is the same all over the Lijiang plain” (1989: 139). While we do not dispute the accuracy of this statement as it pertains to the Lijiang plain, we would point out that Rock did pioneer the study of the Rerko [ʐvr⁵⁵r^ha³³] (variously written in Chinese as Ruoka or Ruanke) texts found in areas of Sichuan's Muli county in a 1937 article, in which he rightly pointed out that these manuscripts are distinct from Lijiang manuscripts. The study of the Rerko mss. has become something of a trendy topic within contemporary Naxi studies (despite the definition of “Rerko” texts and “Rerko” Dongba still being somewhat hazy). For more on regional variations, which are of increasing importance in Naxi manuscript studies, see for example Linjun Yang and Ting He’s (2024) contribution to this issue.

While it is important to not take Rock's work at face value, it is still useful to Naxi studies scholars today. Rock-bashing may be a favourite part-time of some anthropologists, but we offer some concrete evidence of the philological value of his work when it comes to the “problem of the mss.”, that is, the problem of reading. Rock's oeuvre still helps us to access the manuscripts: we can use his works to “read” contemporary Naxi ritual texts, by virtue of the voluminous notes and careful transcriptions of Naxi language found within. Rock's translations are classics of Naxiology. As a case in point, let us take a sentence from a contemporary manuscript and see if Rock can help us to read it – essentially, can Rock help us solve the “problem of the mss.”? In Rock's “The romance of K'a-mä-gyu-mi-gkyi”, published by the Bulletin de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient, the heroine k^hæ³³me³³ʥə²¹mi⁵⁵ʨi³³, or Kaimeijjeq milji, describes her lover thus: “adjoining the village (there is) a handsome boy, he never had intercourse with three of many girls, and of these three I am one” (1939: 31).

This is depicted in the pictographic script as follows, in two panels (see Figure 1).

Rock shows us the “original” graphs in his zincographic reproductions of panels 7 and 8 (30). We see a total of eight graphs (some of which, like the first in panel 7, are compound graphs). Rock also provides, via his Naxi informant, the phonetic rendering of a reading:

vii) ¹Na-²mo-²mbe ³dtu-²dtü, ¹chwua-¹gyu ²zo ²nnü ²muan ²bä ²ggŏ,

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Excerpt from Rock (1939: 31).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Excerpt from a contemporary lv³³bər³³lv³³za²¹ manuscript.

In International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and Naxi pinyin, this would be written thus:

IPA: na²¹mo³³be³³tu⁵⁵tɯ³³, tʂua²¹ʥə²¹zo³³nɯ³³mə³³be³³gə³³,mi⁵⁵ha⁵⁵sɿ⁵⁵kv³³ʥy²¹,dɯ³³kv³³mi⁵⁵o²¹ʦɿ⁵⁵.

Naxi pinyin: Naqmobbei dvlddee zhuaqjjeq sso nee me bei gge, mil haq seel gv jjiuq, ddee gv mil waq zeel.

Locating the same sentence in a contemporary manuscript (see Figure 2) is fairly simple, as the story has not changed in the intervening three quarters of a century.

At first glance, much seems different: suddenly we are faced with 20 graphs, over double the number that is recorded in the Rock manuscript. But we can still read this modern text by following along with Rock's transcription: each of the 22 syllables he records is represented here, apart from tʂua²¹ʥə²¹ (zhuaq jjeq), handsome (Rock's ¹chwua-¹gyu, also not written in Rock). The final graph is a Dongba equivalent of the Geba graph (both read ʦɿ⁵⁵) that appears in Rock's text, and one wonders if this pair would have made it into He Siquan's compilation of equivalent characters (see Mu Chen’s (2024) article). Remarkably, the reading has not changed at all in the 80-odd years that separate the two manuscripts, and we do not necessarily need a Dongba to read a text that belongs to a ritual tradition that Rock has already provided a comprehensive translation for. Of course, it should be noted these are both Lijiang manuscripts; if we leave Lijiang and look at lv³³bər³³lv³³za²¹or Lvbber lvssaq texts from Ludian, Baoshan or further afield, the differences will be more pronounced, and Rock's annotated translation will be less useful. Regional differences have sometimes been neglected in our field.

He Guowei uses an unusual graph for be³³, to do, a depiction of a wooden board: (see Li, 2001: 211), instead of the more commonly seen . The problem is that Rock only published a handful of these complete translations – but this kind of detailed annotated translation has not ceased, and in fact has continued apace in certain institutions of Naxiological repute: notably the Dongba Culture Research Institute in Lijiang and Southwest University in Chongqing. To repeat: the reading is the same. We can trace every single syllable in the transcription of Rock's Dongba assistant to the graphs in the modern document written by He Guowei. In fact, there are times when Rock's translation informs us how to read the modern version more fluidly. Just reading the He Guowei text, we would see the character in the top-right as tɯ³³ , drink, which makes little sense (perhaps as a third-person pronoun?), but only by reading Rock could we interpret it as mil, that is, the girl (or in this case “I”). Read as mi⁵⁵, the graph tɯ³³ becomes a corrupted form of the Geba graph, mi . The example perhaps reveals something of the tendency toward more complete representation of the spoken text in the more recent manuscripts (although this is not an absolute rule), but also a great stability of oral tradition within the same region. In short, Rock's research is still helpful to Naxiologists today, despite being almost a century old. We aim here not to give a complete scholarly appraisal of Rock's contribution, but merely to suggest that his work remains relevant today. We should not discard or dismiss Rock's contributions.

Beyond Rock

Beyond Rock, however, what has been done? Jackson's assessment of the “current situation” of global Naxi studies in the late 1980s is eye-opening, and worth updating some 35 years later. He singles out the Dongba Culture Research Institute's landmark project (100 volumes of “four-way comparison” siduizhao 四对照 format translations) but suggests “[t]heir chances of publishing their results before the turn of the century are remote” (1989: 142). As we now know, they did in fact manage to publish the 100-volume compendium of translations before the dawn of the 20th century, just one year before, in 1999 (DBWHYJS 1999, hereafter “Collection”). Since Since then, scholars at the institute have been engaged in a number of translation projects. They have not rested on their laurels, producing numerous translations and research articles, specifically a series of translations of the Harvard Yenching Naxi manuscripts.

In discussing the Collection, Jackson recycles the old myth about the extinction of the Dongba: “A worrying factor is that we do not know what the quality of the translations will be like since they will not become available until after all the Dtombas [Dongba] are dead” (1989: 142). Also interesting to note is Jackson's limited understanding of the research value of translation – especially where the Naxi manuscripts are concerned: “The Institute is also supposed to conduct research but they have not got around that yet since they are still translating” (1989: 142). Such a sentiment surely denies the value of translation, relegating it to mere preparatory work for the research to come. It would be worth re-iterating here, we feel (and not just because the primary affiliation of one of the authors is with a Department of Translation), that translation of this nature is, in fact, research. It is not a simple process of transfer from language A to language B, but a delicate negotiation between languages, cultures, and scripts – and of course the multiple semiotic systems that the traditions embody. It involves in-depth fieldwork and collaboration with learned ritual practitioners. The work of translation will never be finished. It is a process so time-consuming and fraught with difficulty – and with results so often inconclusive – that the extant mss. will never be fully translated. But that does not mean we should not continue translating in various ways, via scholarly “thick” translations or more free-form literary translations. We can also hope to categorise and catalogue the collections, both large and small, and use such catalogues to aid in more focused avenues of inquiry.

But what of Naxi studies internationally? Work has continued, but in a piecemeal fashion, in fits and starts. International scholars have all come up against an initial difficult: writing the language. Jackson exhorted in 1989 that “it is unfortunate that there is no agreed phonemic system for Naxi transcriptions” (p. 146). French Tibetologist Jacques Bacot compiled a Dongba script dictionary based on a combination of French and other Latin alphabets. The Bacot phonetic system is characterised by its lack of distinction between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, does not record tones, and a single word may correspond to multiple pronunciations. Berthold Laufer (1916) criticised Bacot's Naxi phonetic system for not adhering to strict phonetic principles and merely using French alphabet pronunciations to mark Naxi sounds. Dutch missionary Elise Scharten, taking the Lisu script created by missionary James Outram Fraser as a reference, translated the Gospel of Mark into Naxi. Even more influential was Rock, who, in the context of the undeveloped and unpopular IPA of the time, created the “Rock phonetic system” based on Latin letters. Rock mentioned in the preface to his Dictionary (1963) that he had found that IPA as it existed in his time could not accurately record Naxi, so he devised a new phonetic system for annotating Dongba characters in his works. He even included a comparison table between his system and IPA in his book. The IPA used in the Dictionary differs significantly from the IPA we use today. Overall, Rock's system records the Naxi language in detail, but it is quite complex and hard to use. The Sanskritist Klaus Ludwig Janert, aiming for more efficient transcription of Naxi, designed the Köln script based on both IPA and Rock's system. His initial design was for a syllable to be represented mostly by two letters, sometimes three, and if including an aspirated sound, four inputs would be necessary. However, his method of adding extra diacritics to letters, in a similar vein to Rock, resulted in few efficiency savings. The aforementioned international scholars invented and created scripts referencing their native languages, but the accuracy in recording Naxi varied. Scholars today use either IPA or Naxi pinyin (or, as in this volume) a mixture of both.

Compared with the complex situation in western language scholarship, China's process of documenting Naxi has been relatively straightforward. The historical text, “Records of Lijiang Prefecture” used Chinese characters phonetically to record the Naxi language, a natural choice given the universal use of Chinese characters in China. Even in early 21st-century Naxi studies, Chinese characters were still used to record Dongba scriptures, such as Bai Gengsheng's “Research on Dongba Mythology” (Bai, 2002), where Chinese characters were used for ease of typesetting. It is important to note that Chinese characters, which are far removed from the pronunciation of Naxi, often lead to confusion when used to record Naxi. When IPA reached China in the last century, it was used to record ethnic languages, including in the dictionary compiled by Fang Guoyu and He Zhiwu (1981), and Li Lin-ts’an et al.’s (1953) dictionary (cited herein is the 2001 reprint). By the late 1950s, amid a large-scale survey of ethnic languages, Naxi pinyin was created and promoted locally, only to be discontinued in 1958. During the 1980s, He Zhiwu, Jiang Zhuyi, and others revised Naxi pinyin, and the system became widely used locally. The revised Naxi pinyin, referencing the development of Chinese pinyin, adhered to the five principles of minority script design. Naxi pinyin played a significant role in local literacy campaigns, ethnic language education in schools, and cultural dissemination, with numerous publications to its credit. The 1980s saw a slew of Naxi pinyin folk tales published in China, including Coq Lvl Maf (牧象女, 1986) and Kee Keel (猎歌, 1987), both by Li Jishan 李积善 and He Xuecai 和学才, Ddduq'aiq Svq'aiq 黑白战争 by He Zhiwu 和志武 (1987), and a Naxi language coursebook in pinyin, Naqxi tei'ee kolbei (LJNXZZZXWYH 1985). The Lijiang Naxi language newspaper, Liljai bal or Lijiang Naxiwen Xiaobao 丽江纳西文小报, was a bilingual Naxi-Chinese paper that saw its first issue published on 1 June 1985, although the print run was limited. Among Chinese scholars, there is a convention to use IPA for documenting Dongba manuscripts and in traditional linguistic research, while Naxi pinyin is used in other scenarios. More precisely, in China IPA is used in academic research, particularly in the field of linguistics, while Naxi pinyin has primarily served to facilitate cultural dissemination locally, especially in government newspapers, pamphlets, and on local TV programmes as a standardised written language. Naxi pinyin is undoubtedly the easiest system to use, but it is not as phonetically rigorous as IPA.

The question then becomes one of how seriously one wants to document the phonetic reality of the language: it seems that scholars such as Bacot, Jackson, Janert, and even Rock would have indeed been better served with modern IPA, but a standardised written language is still a necessity for Naxi considering the current movement toward digital input methods. Throughout the history of documenting the Naxi language, scholars have sought to accurately record it, but, on the whole, only IPA and Naxi pinyin have persisted (some academics, such as Toni Huber [2020], still use Rock's notation, primarily from an over-reliance on his work). We believe that IPA and Naxi pinyin serve different historical missions in different domains, and they each have their own role to play as Naxi Studies develops.

Jackson talks of an “International Society for Naxi Studies” founded in Zagreb, the main objective being to liaise with Chinese scholars and build a global network of scholars. It appears, by now, to be defunct. In Germany, the Koln programme spearheaded by Klaus Ludwig Janert and Yang Fuquan to create a new romanisation and publish texts using it has long been defunct. In Jackson's words, “the publications are likely to come out, but one wonder if they will be of any use?” (1989). Indeed – the publication (Yang, 1988) came out, but it seems the transcription system was somewhat dead upon arrival, for it has not been adopted by anyone else. The Koln script was developed and used in the Yang Fuquan’s (1988) publication, “Stories in Modern Naxi” and indeed seems usable enough, but the reason why anyone would actually use it instead of Naxi pinyin is sadly never explained by Janert or Yang, who seemed intent on reinventing the wheel (and adding square corners to said wheel in the process). Consider the following in the Koln script: “më1, dü2, nýi1me1, he1me1, lv1, dze1”. Now in Naxi pinyin: “mee, ddiuq, nimei, heimei, lv, zzer”; in IPA: mɯ³³, dy²¹, ȵi³³me³³, he³³me³³, lv³³, ʣər²¹; and in English: “heaven, earth, sun, moon, stones, trees”. As can be seen, it takes the two of the worst aspects of Rock's romanisation system: the cumbersome numbering of tones, and the arcane diacritics. Actually typing this script is a real test of one's patience. The publication is a sad sort of book, devised without much of an audience in mind, based on a collection of Chinese Naxi folk stories subsequently translated into Naxi. Surely it would have been a better idea to record and transcribe folk stories as told by Naxi people, directly into their script? Nevertheless, there has been progress, and in recent years a working group based at the University of Hamburg has produced a fine volume on the connections between Naxi and Bon manuscripts (see Helman-Ważny and Ramble, 2023).

Beyond Europe, Japan has been the site of much fruitful research over the past few decades, primarily from the pen of the hardworking Naomichi Kurosawa黑泽直道, who has published detailed translations of the Naxi love suicide story (2011) and the creation myth (2006) in Japanese, with additional anthropological context. More recently, Naomichi Kurosawa and He Limin 和力民 have published The Compilation of Place-names in Naxi Language (2020), a book that should be heralded as a major achievement in producing a useful reference work for Naxi studies. Besides the name in Naxi pinyin (Western Naxi 纳西语西部方言) and IPA, this book offers a variety of additional information, including the Chinese place name, alternative names in Naxi (including those found in Rock's Ancient Na-khi Kingdom of Southwest China), linguistic analysis of the Naxi place name in Naxi pinyin, the official administrative address and locale in Chinese, page references to the listed sources, extra location information in Chinese if necessary, and finally some additional historical information (if required). As an example, on page 55, the location “goqssobu [ko²¹zo³³bu³³]”, is listed in Chinese as 蚂蝗坝子, and Gko-zo-mbu in Rock's Ancient Na-khi Kingdom of Southwest China. The compilers provide page references to Rock, as well as other ancillary information on these names, such as administrative addresses.

This is a landmark publication and an essential reference tool for all of us in Naxi studies, and could potentially be especially useful in recording the provenance of manuscripts, with one major caveat. Despite all the scripts and transcription systems in use in this book, Dongba script is not given. This is perhaps the greatest difficulty of Naxiology – connecting the spoken language with the traditional written script (“the problem of the mss” rears its head once more). But lots of these place names have been written in dongba script in manuscript colophons, and this would certainly have been a useful, if extremely time-consuming, addition to the book.

Within China we have seen a remarkable number of publications from a plethora of excellent scholars both from Naxi areas and the country as a whole – indeed, so much work has been done in the mainland that there is not the space to discuss all the manifold achievements of Chinese Naxiologists in this article. What follows will instead mention a few highlights in the realm of comparative study. He Jiquan has tried to identify links between Naxi and Bon texts, with some fascinating results of interest to those in the field of Tibetology. Zhang Chunfeng and Zhu Jianjun (2023) have worked on a similar avenue of inquiry, but instead tracing the connections between traditional Taoism and the Naxi manuscripts. Such studies open up the field to those in neighbouring disciplines, and show the value of comparative research. Yang Jiehong has been hard at work in the area of folklore, connecting Naxi tradition with westerns scholarship on oral traditions. This research has been productive, culminating in the 2018 monograph, 东巴叙事传统研究 (A Study of the Narrative Tradition in Dongba).

The group of scholars at Southwest University headed by Yu Suisheng have finally published their long-awaited collection of glossed texts, the Naxi dongba wenxian zishi heji 纳西东巴文献字释合集 (2023), the culmination of decades of work. It is, apparently, a great improvement on the Collection, which was not representative of Dongba manuscripts as a whole, as it contained texts hailing mainly from three regions only. This work is perhaps the biggest achievement in contemporary “Naxiology” as a philological pursuit, a 50-volume compendium of annotated texts in the zishi style (i.e. offering explanations of individual characters) that can be traced back most readily to the scholarship of Fu Maoji (1948). ²

In defence of “Dongba culture”

The essays in this volume are not an attempt at a foundational act, but they do show a wide range of methodological approaches, from the anthropological (i.e. Naxi Studies in its familiar guise) to the more explicitly philological (i.e. Naxiology proper). What connects them all is the focus on what could be termed “Dongba culture”. Emily Chao (1996) has written of the “invention” of Dongba culture, specifically highlighting the establishment of the Dongba Culture Research Institute as the beginning of the promulgation of the term “Dongba culture”, a kind of catch-all category that describes the activities of Dongba ritualists, but with a grammatological focus on writing (McKhann has coined a related term, “Dongba consciousness”, also with reference to more contemporary revitalisation efforts; see McKhann, 2010: 188). The opening of the Institute was, for Chao, “a foundational moment … aimed at bolstering Naxi ethnic identity and prestige” (1996: 211). Mu Chen's fascinating contribution to this volume stands as an excellent counterargument, proving that there was, even as early as the 1940s, a desire from within for the Dongba to be seen as men of letters (with a unified script) and not uncultured hedge wizards without a standardised tradition. That is to say, the transition from religion to culture and associated avenues of scholarly enquiry predated the birth of modern China. Chao has written of the transition in terms of “state legitimacy”: “But like the Jesuit followers of Matteo Ricci, who were shunned as priests, Dongba could cross the threshold of state legitimacy only by donning the robes of scholars” (2012: 55). Mu's article presents an attempt by one Dongba in particular, He Siquan, to unify Dongba script in a bid to futureproof it, and presumably not as a means of acquiring legitimacy from the state, but for a global scholarly regard. He writes: “As for individual collections of scriptures, please continue to recite them as you originally learned. Scholars will appreciate our work, while the ignorant might reject it. However, as there are many paths in the world, people will eventually converge – ignorant ones will gradually gain knowledge”.

This was a prestige project, but also an early attempt at codifying a standardised script and hence a learned, literary culture – in short, it was an attempt at being both “modern” and “scholarly” that predates the institute by 40 years. “Dongba culture” as it stands today is ultimately just a label used to describe various cultural activities: a label that can and should be questioned, to be sure, but the script unification attempt of the 1940s suggests that it is not the invention of Dongba culture per se that tried to idealise the written heritage of the Naxi.

In any case, the mere label of “culture” does not necessarily essentialise. Naxi culture and Dongba culture can also be multifaceted, as the variety of publications on this topic in contemporary China attest. The exact nature of “Dongba culture” is today still under negotiation in Lijiang and further afield – and rightly so. Just like the ethnohistorian sees “not one fixed Naxi identity but an ever-continuing process of construction and reinterpretation of identities in response to changing historical circumstances and opportunities” (Michaud 2011: 98), and the linguist studies “not one Naxi language but a complex landscape of interacting languages and dialects – each dialect lending itself, in turn, to an analysis of a variety of speaking styles” (Michaud ibid.), “culture” should not be essentialised, but at some point, we do need to label and categorise, and at this superficial level the term “Dongba culture” is useful as a kind of superordinate. In short, the term itself may be artificial, but much of what it can be used to encapsulate is not. Dongba culture in all its guises is a major component of Naxi studies.

Where to from here? Michaud (2013) has previously referenced the “three treasures” as described by Sun Tianxin (2007: 103) that linguists can contribute on the basis of in-depth fieldwork, namely: (i) a dictionary, (ii) a reference grammar, and (iii) a collection of glossed texts. In Naxi studies, we have these “treasures”, but all are waiting to be polished. Most pressing perhaps is a dictionary of phrases in the traditional register, for the common combinations of graphs would help us to read texts more effectively. Grammars of Naxi exist in Chinese language, as do plenty of glossed ritual texts. As always, more contemporary texts could be glossed as well, and the Chinese language material should be made more accessible to international scholars: no reference grammar is available in English, and the glossed texts still rely on photographic reproduction instead of digital encoding. Digital methods are paramount, as Jackson grasped 35 years ago. Xu Duoduo has been at the forefront, alongside numerous scholars within China, of connecting Naxi studies and digital humanities, an approach that can be seen in her (2023) paper “Digital approaches to understanding Dongba pictographs”. We can only achieve the breakthrough of digitisation and script encoding by working together.

Naxi studies is a cooperative venture, and we speak for all contributors to this volume when we say that we hope scholars from all corners can come together to push the discipline forward. After all, to paraphrase Jackson one last time, “it is a tribute to the Naxi that so many scholars are interested in their language and culture” (1989: 143). In lieu of a truly foundational act, then, we offer instead this volume as a meagre contribution to our own particular field. It is a convergence of our manifold paths, and, we hope, a bold statement for the future of Naxiology as a global interdiscipline.