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"Our man in China"
Editor Mike Edwards.
Photographs Michael S. Yamashita.
Archive photos Joseph F. Rock.
GULUKO'S plain houses of wood and stone cluster beneath the towering Yulongxue Shan-Jade Dragon Snow Range. The village has changed little since Rock's day, although it is now called Yuhu, Jade Lake, for a nearby body of water. It was summer when I went there, and in the fields women, along with a few men, were bent at the waist, scything grain. Rock had noted that women did most of the daily labor; a Naxi tradition that survives today. o Rock's first article as GEOGRAPHIC expedition leader was about the Naxi dongbas, shamanistic priests who conducted fantastic rituals-dancing, leaping into bonfires, dipping hands into burning oil - to drive evil spirits from a sick person.
Soon he began to translate ancient picto-graph manuscripts that recounted the Naxi history and described their religious beliefs and rites, which are rooted in the ancient Bon traditions of Tibet. In this he relied heavily upon dongbas, for only those shamans had learned to read the pictographs.
Eventually, supported in part by Harvard University, he completed two copiously footnoted Naxi histories and a 1,094-page Naxi dictionary.
"What Rock did was very important," emphasized Yang Fuquan, a Naxi specialist in the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences in Kunming, the provincial capital. "Today we can't get information like he got from those passed-away priests."
The Naxi culture suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976, when Naxi religious practices were banned and shamans were outlawed.
But in the more relaxed China of today scholars want to explore that culture, and officials say the Naxi may return to their old beliefs if they wish. Rock's efforts to record Naxi lore are reckoned so important that Yunnan plans to erect a memorial to him.
