Ethnic minority people in Yunnan: Naxi culture and the role of women

The Dongba is the ceremonial master of sacred rituals celebrated by the Naxi. As a medium interconnecting the present world with spiritual hemispheres, the Naxi Dongba has been a very important person in teaching and passing on Naxi culture as the Naxi pictographic script is the nucleus of Dongba culture. A saying goes that "A Dongba does not pass on his knowledge to women, but only to men." But, ironically enough, there is a female saint honored in each and every Dongba script. The name of this goddess is Pancisamei. Among the many saints in the Naxi belief system, she is the master of divination rituals. The knowledge and skills of divination is passed down through sacred scripts to each Dongba. Whenever conducting a divination ritual, a Dongba makes a sacrifice to invite Pancisamei to attend.(3) The reverence of a goddess, however, is not unique to Naxi culture. The majority of inscriptions on bones or tortoise shells dating back to the historical Han Chinese Shang and Zhou Dynasties are, in fact, documentations of divination rituals conducted by Wuxian -- a female Han Chinese divination master. This "Female Emperor" and ritual master eventually disappeared in later historical records. Instead, the Shang Dynasty emperors are mentioned among the more than a hundred divination ritual masters found on bone or tortoise shell inscriptions. No word about the former goddess. In due course, female ritual mediums' powerful intuition and foresight were less and less respected. Divination rituals, which used to be considered an important source of wisdom, have become to be stigmatised as "unscientific" and "superstition." In recent years, Yunnan Province's cultural heritage and biodiversity have been recognised scientifically and commercially. While the commercial value of the exotic "Otherness" of ethnic minority people is being exploited, local and international non-government organisations (NGOs) try to protect the people's livelihoods and natural resources from non-local investors' profit-oriented influence. Lijiang City has been assigned the status of a triple World Heritage Site, bestowed on the old City's architectural heritage, the Dongba script cultural heritage, and the "Three Parallel Rivers" heritage. Being a World Heritage Site gives Lijiang City a special status among other ethnic minority communities, and could play an important role when it comes to answering the question of whether an ethnic minority cultural heritage could be protected or not, an