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and significance of their use of Daoist ritual traditions. As he shows, the “Yao” as a people are very much the result of interaction with and construction by imperial Chinese politics and culture. The modern category of the Yao as an ethnic group is the result of recent political events following 1949, but the same is true of past definitions as well. The very name “Yao” reflects the concerns of Han-Chinese officials, as well as of the groups themselves with freedom of taxation and labor service. Luckily, the name itself did not have strong pejorative connotations, as is also demonstrated by the author on the basis of careful analysis of the Chinese characters for Yao. This is an interesting difference with that other major southern culture, who are known to students of Chinese culture as “Miao” and who call themselves Hmong. “Miao” is undoubtedly derived from the name of one of the mythological enemies of the Yellow Emperor, the Sanmiao (Three Miao). The name Miao implies an abomination, which is indeed how Chinese officials perceived of local groups sharing this culture. Names matter, but not always in the way that we are accustomed to look at them! Now that Alberts has demonstrated that the name Yao is just one, albeit important, attempt at classification from a certain perspective, this should enable the future researcher to look at the historical as well as the ethnographical record in ways much less hampered by convention and tradition. It should enable us to see crucial similarities and differences between the Yao and other southern cultures, such as the Miao, the Hakka, or the She. In fact, it should free up researchers to look at all kinds of local cultural formations in a much more open way.
What we usually call “Daoism” played a crucial role in the formation of a Yao ethnicity, but not in the sense of the adoption of a “foreign” (exogenous) religious culture by an already existing local group/culture. A definitive analysis of the overall process for all southern Chinese cultures is not yet possible at the present stage of our knowledge of local Daoist traditions in the Yuan, Song, and preceding periods. Nonetheless, Alberts’ analysis suggests to me that in understanding the creation of southern Chinese groups such as the Hakka or the Cantonese, we need to take their use of