Pictographs, Efficacy, Power, & The Wonder of it All: Linguistic Art and Naxi Religious Memory in Southwest China

This paper examines the relationships between religious efficacy, the comprehensibility and ownership of religious art, the control of spiritual memory, and the dynamics of language and artistic agency in the colonial context of Indigenous Southwest China. The religion of the Naxi people survives in pictographs. Yet to what degree is spiritual language art rendered empty of meaning or even efficacy when divorced from spirituality and thus comprehensibility? Based on folk-religious fieldwork in Yunnan, this paper explores and problematizes agency and authenticity in the erasure of meaning from pictographs – initially through religious control, and later through the commercialization of decontextualized art.