The Age of Wild Ghosts

In Erik Mueggler’s powerful and imaginative ethnography, an Indigenous community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the period that began with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continued through the 1990s as the “age of wild ghosts.” Their stories of this age converged on a dream of community—a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and spectral reawakening of a local political and ritual system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language of this community, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including of the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that came to haunt it. To exorcise “wild ghosts,” he shows, is nothing less than to re-imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to articulate demands for justice and longings for reconciliation.