RITUAL AND RELATEDNESS IN THE PREMI HOUSE 1 Koen Wellens University of Oslo (Draft) 20-09-2011 The township of Yousuo (a pseudonym) is situated in the south of Muli County in Sichuan, on the border to the province of Yunnan. It counts app. 3,000 inhabitants, constituting mainly of four groups, three of which are speaking a distinct Tibeto-Burman language: Premi, Naxi, Rek’ua (a local group related to the Naxi) and Na (also known by their Chinese name of Mosuo). While notions of ethnic distinctions exist and the state has divided these Tibeto- Burman speakers in three different minzu, the people of Yousuo intermarry and are rather similar in their form of social organisation. My research has mainly been concerned with people calling themselves Pre-mi, the White People. Especially since the publication in 1984 of Schneider’s seminal book “A Critique of the Study of Kinship”, the concept of kinship in anthropological writing has lost its aura as being one of the fundamental analytical categories for explaining the organisation of social life. Schneider demonstrates how anthropological views of kinship as a natural given fact are vested in Western cultural presuppositions (Schneider 1984: 196-198). Moreover, the biological ‘facts’ of reproduction and descent are not really that relevant if they are not socially recognised. Schneider opposes the view that kinship constituted a separate domain to be studied like religion or politics: ‘the arbitrary segregation of a rubric like “kinship”, taken out of the context of the whole culture, is not a very good way to understand how a culture is structured. These critiques fell neatly within a larger paradigm shift in anthropology (and the sciences in general), namely that from structure to process, from objective science to epistemic science and from part to the whole (Holy 1996: 3, paraphrasing Capra, Matus and Steindl-Rast 1991). The concern now turned to how the relationships which people in the West call kinship are culturally constituted. Kinship studies have experienced a remarkable revival in the last decade, but the shift in paradigm has entailed a shift in focus, to aspects such as gender, the body and personhood. In order to distance themselves from traditional kinship theories, several anthropologists have 1 Sections of this chapter appear in my book Religious Revival in the Tibetan Borderlands: the Premi of Southwest China, published by University of Washington Press in 2010.