A History of Daoism and the Yao People of South China By Eli Alb ...

and, as such, has set the groundwork for this chapter. Cushman mined the entire corpus of imperially sponsored documents available to him, extending back to the Song dynasty, and thereby attempted to disclose all available evidence pertaining to Yao culture. Comparing traditional historiographic source material with modern ethnographic work, he maintained a critical and skeptical attitude toward many of the conclusions reached by earlier scholarship on Yao culture and history. His work also helped to shed light on the problematic nature of the majority of historical works employed, which, as official sources, reflected the consciousness of a specific class or field of pre-modern Chinese elite society, and not necessarily of the non-literate mainstream of whose concerns we have very little evidence. As Etienne Balazs has argued: “History was written by officials for officials.”⁶⁰

Modern referents, such as Yaozu (Yao nationality), minzu (ethnic group or nationality), and shaoshu minzu (minority nationality or ethnic minority) imply the notion of Yao and other non-Han groups as being single, homogenous, and marginal ethnic communities. All are in fact modern Chinese equivalents of Western anthropological and political notions, and only superficially correspond with pre-modern historical realities in texts and on the ground. In actuality, there are a great number of Yao subgroups, if they can be so termed, none of who call themselves Yaozu.

Since 1949, Chinese scholars have adopted a single graph to refer to the Yao “ethnic minority,” thereby simplifying terminological confusion and eliminating negative connotations associated with earlier graphic representations. Cushman explains that in the 1930s and 1940s Chinese scholars, “influenced by Western anthropology,” changed the graph to with a human radical, with a double human radical, , or simply dropped the radical.⁶¹ However, his presumption that yao was originally written with a dog radical (as most scholars argue), is inaccurate. On the contrary, there is ample textual evidence that it was written with a human or double human radical in its earliest manifestations.

Confusion surrounding the term yao and related terms makes study of Yao culture problematic. A major hindrance to this investigation—one