An epic narrative poem known as Hnewo tepyy (Book of Origins) holds a central place in the mythic and ritual imagination of the Nuosu people of southwest China. Existing both as oral performances and oral-connected written texts, the narrative relates the origins of the sky, earth, geographical features, and life forms—culminating in the origins of the forebears of the Nuosu people. Animals and plants populate the landscape of the narrative world, clustering in the categories of wild and domestic. Individual species tend to be associated with specific niches in the natural and human-modified landscape, their origins occurring in a dynamic of creation and destruction throughout the ages. Among the forerunners of living beings in the present age are the "tribes of snow," catalogued in taxons comprised of wild plants and animals. Moreover, many portions of the epic feature domesticated stock and crops that are associated with, and in some cases even sanction, Nuosu customs current today. In an approach drawing on folkloristic theory and ecocriticism, this article introduces and outlines a hitherto undocumented version of the Hnewo tepyy, examines how select images of life forms in the text relate to historic and contemporary Nuosu culture, and suggests that in the traditions of the Hnewo, boundaries between the realms are conceptually mitigated by the ultimate origin of all life in the sky.

Keywords: Yi—Nuosu—origins—myth—animals—plants

Mark Bender
Ohio State University

“Tribes of Snow”: Animals and Plants in the Nuosu Book of Origins

Asian Ethnology Volume 67, Number 1. 2008, 5–42
© Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture