Moved to distraction: the ritual theatre of the Fire Festival in Southwest China

ABSTRACT What does it mean to be ‘moved to distraction’ by ritual theatre? Each year the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group of Southwest China, may be moved by their Fire Festival competitions, pageantries, and ‘extravaganzas’, but not necessarily by the Chinese nationalist elements within them. Simulating the pageants of Chinese megacities, Fire Festival extravaganzas meld Nuosu myth-history, animistic imagery, and ‘minority culture’ with the Chinese Dream of prosperity, the party-state’s efforts at generating cohesion, and the soft power of stadium rock concerts. Many Nuosu are abducted into the mood of performances that evoke what is archetypically human for them, including their myth-historical relationships to Tibetans and Han Chinese. But while some Nuosu may experience frisson and the giddy sense of being moved to distraction by spectacles that celebrate China as a socialist superpower, many turn away from ritual theatre that challenges their cosmopolitics and their sense of what it means to be human.

that ushers in prosperity and fertility. Sometimes simply evoked by a Nuosu term that can alternately mean 'celebrating a festival' or 'repaying a debt' (zie ꊒ), the expression 'Fire Festival' is derived from the phrase 'passing [a certain time of the year with the use of] fire' (duzie ꄔꊒ). 2 One of the Fire Festival's iconic practices, the carrying of live torches at night, has also inspired its descriptive moniker in Chinese, which means 'Torch Festival' (Ch. Huobajie 火把节). Each summer on astrologically auspicious days that fall close to the harvest of bitter buckwheat (Fagopyrum tataricum), the Nuosu dietary staple, the Fire Festival is held so that it maylike the Nuosu winter 'New Year celebrations' (kushyr ꈎꏅ) 3unfold as an important season of cosmic renewal. Famous for its many competitions, in country villages the Fire Festival is often an occasion for children to strike up informal games among themselves, whereas in towns and cities, it is commonly celebrated as a week of playful pageantries in which children, youth, and adults openly compete in sports, arts, and beauty events before panels of judges and live audiences. Since the early 1980s, cadres across Liangshan have helped to organise Fire Festival competitions and pageantries subsidised by the party-state of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Many of these spectacles have grown substantially over the years and may feature a grand finale that wraps up the competitions. But the celebrations in cities and towns also tend to culminate in a much larger Fire Festival extravaganza filled with multimedia performances designed to graft Chinese nationalism onto the social and cosmic orders of Nuosu and other 'minority nationalities' (Ch. shaoshu minzu 少数民族) of China's southwest. While some Nuosu may be deeply moved by these extravaganzas, their love for them does not necessarily extend to the Chinese nationalist elements they contain. This is particularly true for Nuosu who live in the countryside and have less chance to partake first-hand in Xi Jinping's 'Chinese Dream' (Ch. Zhongguo meng 中国梦) of acquiring prosperity (cf. Mohanty 2013;Brown 2016;Bakken 2018). However, Nuosu who live in cities, or who frequently travel between them and the countryside, are more prone to being moved by the Chinese patriotism and growing prosperity they encounter in cityscapes. Similarly, Nuosu public intellectuals and scholars who routinely meld their culture with Chinese nationalism in their everyday work tend to be more easily moved by patriotic sentiments (cf. Harrell and Li Yongxiang 2003;Swancutt 2012aSwancutt , 2012bSwancutt 2016a, 150-152).
Being moved to distraction is the classic response to emotive forms of ritual theatre among Nuosu, whose autonym can alternately mean the people descended from the 'noble' (nuoho ꆈꉼ) patriclans of Liangshan or the 'black people'. Known also by their Chinese ethnonym of Yi, many Nuosu experience ritual theatre in ways that resonate with their polyvalent term vo (ꃰ), which may mean 'to fly', be 'moved and distracted', 'vary in mood or feeling', or 'moving without stability', but can alternately mean a 'human being', member of 'our kind', or 'snow'. Vo frequently evokes the myth-history and personhood of Nuosu who, according to the Book of Origins (Hnewo teyy ꅺꊈꄯꒉ), a popular history of creation tales, had tone has no marker). The Fire Festival (Duzie ꄔꊒ), for example, is a compound word composed of a syllable with a high tone followed by a syllable with a mid tone, which appears as 'Dutzie' when written with tonal markers. All Nuosu terms are also rendered in Nuosu script. Chinese terms are preceded by 'Ch.', transliterated into pinyin, and rendered in Chinese characters. 2 I am grateful to Jan Karlach for lively discussions about the probably recent folkloric roots of the Nuosu term for the 'Fire Festival'. 3 Kushyr (ꈎꏅ) literally means 'to rip away the year'. originally transformed along with certain animals and plants from snowfall into one of the 'twelve sons of snow' (vonre sse cinyi ꃰꎝꌺꊰꑋ) that populate the Nuosu world today 4 (Bender 2021, 438; see also Bender 2008;Bender, Aku Wuwu, and Jjivot Zopqu 2019). While the Book of Origins presents Nuosu as the archetypal humans who make up 'our kind' (vodi ꃰꄃ) 5 , it also contains genealogies for Tibetans, Han (China's ethnic majority), and sometimes 'foreigners' (yiery ꑷꏝ), all of whom are considered to be both related to Nuosu and yet ultimately not-Nuosu (Bender, Aku Wuwu, and Jjivot Zopqu 2019, 62-68). Many Nuosu even consider themselves to be the 'archetypal Yi group' within China (Mullaney 2011, 112). This notion of an archetypal Yi-ness was largely popularised by the Chinese anthropologist Lin Yaohua, who produced seminal research on the Nuosu in the 1940s and led much of the teamwork for Yunnan's 1954 'ethnic identification project' (Ch. minzu shibie 民族识别) that shaped the ethnonyms and ethnic identities in Southwest China today (Mullaney 2011, 112-113;cf. Lin Yaohua 1961[1947).
Recitations from the Book of Origins have long been a form of entertainment and even ritual theatre devoted to archetypically human themes in Nuosu homes, where hosts and guests engage in 'verbal duels' (kenre ꈍꎞ) from opposite sides of the household hearth (Bender 2008, 11;Bender, Aku Wuwu, and Jjivot Zopqu 2019, lvii-lxiv). Pairing speech with movement, verbal duels traditionally required that men wear 'woven wool-fringed capes' (vala ꃭꇁ), or borrow them if needed, before getting up from their seats to improvise witty refrains and dance around each other back-to-back. 6 Many verbal duellers now exchange speech riffs with movement on themes that go beyond the Book of Origins, are deeply moving to their audiences, and unfold in a variety of outdoor contexts. Nuosu funeral parties, for example, often include groups of three men who wear woven wool-fringed capes and exchange speech riffs as they approach the funeral bier. These men may perform a sidestepping shuffle that moves them alternately clockwise and anticlockwise around a circle of their own makinga form of movement that they may enliven by springing and lunging combatively at each other all to enhance their verbal duelling for the deceased, who needs to be emotionally moved by archetypically human activities before departing from the world of the living to the 'afterlife world' or 'heavens' (shymu ngehxa ꏃꃅꉬꉎ).
Emotive speech riffs such as these are performed in the verbal duelling events for the Fire Festival, where, however, the mostly male competitors (many of whom sport a Nuosu cape that is not always of the woven wool-fringed type) stride across outdoor stages to move audiences and judging panels alike. Competitors formulate speech riffs on a variety of themes that touch on what it means to be archetypically human, including the ineffable qualities of the heavens and the genealogies of the twelve sons of snow. But Fire Festival competitions are not meant to unfold as a ritual proper in the manner of, say, the temple dances, dramas, or shamanic ceremonies that feature entranced spirit mediums in Bali (Geertz 1991), Sri Lanka (Kapferer 2002(Kapferer , 2004(Kapferer , 2013(Kapferer , 2014, or elsewhere across Asia (Kendall 2008(Kendall , 2009(Kendall , 2017Kendall and Ariati 2020;Vitebsky 1993Vitebsky , 2008. Nor are the verbal duels, songs, or other pageantries of the Fire Festival equivalent to the speech riffs that Nuosu priests (bimo ꀘꂾ), male shamans (sunyi ꌠꑊ), and female shamans (monyi ꃀꑊ) may compose based on the Book of Origins and other legendary tales when exorcising ghosts, unwanted spirits, illnesses, and misfortunes from the home (Bamo Qubumo 2001). Public celebrations for the Fire Festival are instead designed to 'abduct' Nuosu competitors, judges, and audiences into the mood and sense of what it means to be a member of 'our kind' (Gell 1998). Many Nuosu therefore experience the Fire Festival through the mode of 'bodily engagement' and aesthetics called 'corpothetics', in which they feel 'the sensory embrace of images' (Pinney 2001, 158). When executed with beauty and aplomb, the Fire Festival calls to mind what it means to be an archetypal human beinga lofty theme that may generate frisson and the giddy sense of being moved to distraction.
Elsewhere, I describe Fire Festival competitions in the town centre of the Ninglang Yi Autonomous County of Yunnan province, which is a Nuosu-majority county that I hereafter refer to in Nuosu as 'Nila' (ꆀꆿ) (Swancutt 2016b;Swancutt forthcoming). Since 2007, I have conducted fieldwork in Nila, where, at the request of certain of my Nuosu ethnohistorian research partners, I acted as a guest judge in the 2015, 2016, and 2019 state-sponsored Fire Festival competitions. 7 Often held in public squares used for recreational activities such as social dancing or basketball, these open air competitions are visible to live audiences and Ngeti Gunzy (ꉬꄚꇳꌅ), the sky god who resides in the heavens and receives them as ritual blandishments. Most competitions tend to last for a couple of hours, but some exceed this. The highly popular singing competitions, for example, frequently attract large numbers of candidates who undergo lengthy elimination rounds to whittle them down to a manageable number. Spectators may arrive in the hundreds for both the competitions and the grand finale because the week of Fire Festival celebrations in Nila is largely treated as a public holiday. As the Nuosu anthropologist I call Tuosa explained to me, Fire Festival competitions evoke a myth-historical wrestling match from the Book of Origins in which the spirit emissary of Ngeti Gunzy was accidentally killed by a human hero. Ngeti Gunzy has retaliated each year since by making Nuosu people's souls go missing, frequently by imprisoning them in his netherworld jail during the weeks leading up to the Fire Festival. Each festive event is therefore somehow meant to please Ngeti Gunzy, call his attention to the intended levity of competitions, and repay a debt for the ancient wrestling match. But since lost souls cannot be reclaimed without a proper sacrifice, Nuosu in Nila join 7 While my discussion in this article is specific to Nila, I travelled in 2019 with several Nuosu research partners who hailed from Yunnan to other areas of Liangshan during the Fire Festival season. Our trip took us to Meigu county (Limu Moggu ꆺꃅꂿꈫ), Yanyuan county (Cemo ꋂꂿ), and Xichang (Labbu Orro ꆿꁮꀒꎂ), which is the seat of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan province. We found that while Fire Festival extravaganzas have become increasingly common, there are important differences in how the Fire Festival competitions and sacrifices to Ngeti Gunzy are carried out across Liangshan. These differences are traced to a legend, which we learned in Limu Moggu but appears to be widespread across northeastern Liangshan, that ominous red snowfall fell in the area many years ago during the Fire Festival. Many Nuosu in northeastern Liangshan seek to avoid summoning the red snowfall again and have modified their Fire Festival celebrations accordingly (Swancutt forthcoming).
their household members after the competitions have ended for a day that typically starts with sacrificing a chicken to the 'earth spirit' or 'land spirit' (musi ꃅꌋ) so that the coming year will be prosperous. Some of this chicken sacrifice is shared with the household's ancestors, who also watch over and facilitate the household's prosperity. Many Nuosu then slaughter a large animal, such as a sheep, to Ngeti Gunzy as a sacrificial debt that is exchanged for the release of their souls. I learned from the Nuosu ethnohistorian I call Misu that one or more householderswho are ideally childrenshould burn the feathers of their sacrificial chicken some days later to keep away crop-destroying insects, ghosts, illnesses, dirty or impure things, hunger, and the cold attributed to a lack of clothing. They also summon back the souls of their livestock animals, which are lost during the Fire Festival season, while burning the chicken feathers. This use of fire to ward off the many threats to household prosperity echoes the popular Fire Festival activity among children (and some adults) of carrying torches made of 'artemisia' (hxike ꉇꈌ) or various kinds of wood, which are lit with live flames in the evening hours and carried from place to place. Altogether, then, the Fire Festival unfolds through what the editors of this issue consider to be the key features of festivals in Asia: 'play', 'patronage', and 'reverence' (a more apt term in the Nuosu context than 'piety'). The Fire Festival evokes play through its competitions and pageantries, while it receives the patronage of the Chinese state or spirit beings such as the ancestors, land spirits, and Ngeti Gunzy, and it promotes a reverence for what is archetypically human. However, the new Fire Festival extravaganza does this through a pyrotechnical production that merges Nuosu myth-history, religion, and the cultures of the twelve different nationalitiesincluding the Hanthat reside together in Nila with the theatre of 'soft power' (Ch. ruanshili 软实力) that celebrates Xi Jinping's Chinese Dream. Performed on an outdoor stage erected specifically for it, the Fire Festival extravaganza is a roughly three-hour event which, since around 2019, has been held directly in front of Nila's recently built Performance House. It takes place before an audience of thousands that far outnumbers the spectators at the grand finale. Arguably, soft power performances such as this have more than seventy years of history within the PRC, since as early as the 1950s, the Chinese party-state urged people across the country to view their own cultures as both distinct versions of wider Chinese culture and as elements mixed into the Chinese bloodline writ large. Many cadres amplified this soft power message from the 1980s onwards by encouraging minority nationalities to hold colourful ethnic performances for Han tourists, and as the years passed, for audiences that included both foreign visitors and China's ethnic minorities (Oakes 1993;Gladney 1994;Chao 1996;Schein 1997;Litzinger 1998;Hill 2001, 89-90;Mueggler 2002;Komlosy 2004;Walsh 2005;Makley 2010). Chinese scholars would therefore have had a keen sense of how soft power works, both internationally and at home, long before they borrowed the term from Joseph Nye who developed it in the late 1980s (Edney 2012, 900-902). 8 By the early 2000s, Nuosu and other minority nationalities in Nila were harnessing tourism as a distinct mode of soft power to build up their own revenues (Guo Xiaolin 2008, 258-263). Large-scale extravaganzas that exude traces of soft power have also been incorporated into Nuosu and Chinese festivals across Liangshan since at least 2010 (Karlach 2023). 9 Through ritual theatre like this, cadressometimes in concert with event organisers from outside of the areahave promoted the Chinese party-state and 'its plan for domestic "cultural construction", [which includes] widening its relevance beyond the realm of foreign affairs and connecting it to the propaganda authorities' role in using the management of the cultural sector to pursue nation-building goals and foster "social cohesion"' (Edney 2012, 900).
Soft power saturates the Fire Festival extravaganza in Nila, which features professional performers from outside of the area who sing and dance on multi-panelled stages flanked by giant LED video wall screens. 10 Upstaging the homegrown grand finale that puts the spotlight on Nila's amateur acts, the new extravaganza pairs animistic imagery of the Nuosu world with scenes of Chinese industrial, developmental, agricultural, military, and technological achievements. The overall effect is to position Nila's inhabitants within the party-state's rhetoric of prosperity, all to the tune of a 'hyperreal', and 'simulacra'-filled, yet family-oriented stadium rock concert (Baudrillard 1994;cf. Mazard 2011). Tuosa told me that cadres in Nila outsourced the making of the 2019 extravaganza to event organisers from outside of the county. It is possible that these cadres, the event organisers, or both chose to promote Chinese patriotism and soft power in Nila as a way of enhancing their own careers. Whatever the case may be, the new extravaganza melds stylised archetypes of Nuosu and other minority nationalities together with China's narrative of being a socialist superpower. Audiences at Fire Festival extravaganzas are therefore invited to enter into China's 'cultural repertoire of participatory fandom [… with the understanding that] as fans' devotion cannot be mandated but must be given voluntarily, the most effective forms of propaganda are not manufactured by the state, but generated in a participatory fashion by citizens themselves' (Wong et al. 2021, 3-4).
Mixed emotions surround this participatory fandom, not least on account of the recent history of Liangshan, which was shaped by the Democratic Reforms (Ch. minzhu gaige 民主改革) of 1956-57 that saw the People's Liberation Army (PLA) dismantle the Nuosu practice of keeping itinerant fieldhands, serfs, and household slaves who often came from non-Nuosu backgrounds, and especially the Han (Harrell 1995, 49-50;Heberer 2007, 28-29). But while the PLA brought the nation's southwest under the auspices of the Chinese state, it never fully overturned the socially ranked lineages of Nuosu nobles and commoners (Pan Jiao 1997;Hill and Diehl 2001). Former captives, their descendants, and any Nuosu-ified families from other ethnic backgrounds that managed to claim a Nuosu surname for themselves still tend to lack any lineage affiliation except where they have elided the social memory of their origins and obtained membership in a Nuosu family line . In the wake of the Democratic Reforms, Chinese ethnologists and officials also harnessed the rhetoric of Karl Marx, whose own theory of historical materialism was inspired by the work of early anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, to present the Nuosu as exemplars of a 'slave society' that the party-state would lead down the road to communism (Hill , 1034; see also Harrell and Fan Ke 2003, 3). Two museums filled with historic photographs of Nuosu slavery, the long winding march of the PLA entering Nila for the Democratic Reforms, and items like shackles, as well as a graveyard to commemorate fallen PLA soldiers, have since sprung up in the Nila county town. Locally aired television programmes produced by Nuosu who work in the Nila Television Station frequently co-opt the official imagery and rhetoric of their own history of keeping captives, which, however, is widely considered taboo to voice in front of anyone with a 'slave' past. Despite, or perhaps because of the spectacle surrounding their history, many Nuosu in Nila extol the wealth in slaves held by their ancestors, their former battles against (or sometimes with) the PLA, and the material benefits that the party-state now bestows on them and other minority nationalities (cf. Swancutt 2021, 573). Given this, audiences at Fire Festival extravaganzas across Liangshan often show enthusiasm for the performative elements that feature 'minority cultures' (Ch. shaoshu minzu wenhua 少数民族文化). But when faced with overblown, exaggerated, and hyperreal evocations of Chinese nationalism, audiences tend to respond with varying degrees of perplexity, scepticism, disinterest, jovial mockery, or even the disdainful, scornful, and bitter sense of irony called 'sardony' (Feuchtwang 2011, 57). Yet this does not stop the cadres or event organisers who produce these extravaganzas from encouraging audiences to re-envision the Chinese party-state as their ultimate cosmopolitical source, and even arbiter, of prosperityabove and beyond the Nuosu ancestors, the land spirits, Ngeti Gunzy, and other spirit beings or figures from their myth-history. Probably loosely modelled on the open-air musical 'Impressions of Lijiang' (Ch. Yinxiang Lijiang 印象丽江), which was directed by renowned Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou and features heavily clichéd ethnic minority songs, dances, and simulated rituals from Yunnan, the Fire Festival extravaganza is designed to foster 'unity between the nationalities' (Ch. minzu tuanjie 民族团结) in a newly prosperous China (cf. Xinhua News Agency 2006). 11 The extravaganza also evokes similar sentiments to those that were once characteristic of the poetic duelling festivals held by China's Kazakhs in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), where minority nationalism had been 'allowed to be embodied as a self-representation and pursuit of authenticity in the saturated context of ethnic cultural development for China's soft power' (Salimjan 2017, 275). However, soft power in Liangshan is notably different to the forms of power now used by the party-state in the XUAR, Tibet, and certain other regions of the PRC, such as the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, which, 'in some ways, are treated by the central government as occupied territories' (Harrell 2007, 224).
To show how Nuosu are moved to distraction by performances that meld their sense of what is archetypically human with Chinese soft power, I offer an ethnographic analysis here of the 2019 Fire Festival extravaganza in Nila. I start by discussing how Misu's son, the young singer I call Yie, performed at Nila's grand finale and then dreamed of moving an even larger audience to distraction during the extravaganza. This sets the stage for my discussion of how the Fire Festival celebrations in Nila interweave the Nuosu sense of 'our kind' with a Chinese nationalism that is grafted onto the social and cosmic orders of minority nationalities. My ethnography suggests that Nuosu may be movedparticularly if they are city-dwellers, elites, and intellectualsby performative elements that weave China's soft power together with their own myth-historical relationships to Tibetans, Han, and sometimes foreigners. The celebration of China as a socialist superpower also holds some attraction for Nuosu because it signals that they are members of a powerful state (Karlach 2023). There is, though, a tipping point at which Chinese soft power loses its grip on the imaginations of many Nuosu, who filter out the elements presented to them in an overblown and hyperreal light. Ultimately, then, I propose that Nuosu tend to be deeply moved by ritual theatre that emotively evokes their cosmopolitics and their own sense of what is archetypically human.

Performing archetypes of 'our kind'
On the evening before the 2019 Fire Festival extravaganza in Nila, I took a seat beside Misu, his wife, and Yie on the steps that flank either side of the county town's Old Square. Perhaps a hundred people had congregated there under the night sky to watch the grand finale take place on a stage erected specifically for the season's competitions and pageantries (Figure 1). Yie, who was in his early twenties, had been a finalist in the singing competition that served as a highlight of the grand finale. Although he still yearned to be singing on stage, only the first-place winner had been given that honour. We watched the grand finale draw to a close and I asked Yie, who was still wearing a Nuosu embroidered jacket with his entrant's number pinned to it for the competition, about his dream of becoming a professional singer. Eagerly, Yie confirmed this was his dream and added that rumours were circulating in Nila about the Fire Festival extravaganza on the following evening. Some local singers, he said, might be invited to join the professionals on stage who, however, had been recruited almost entirely from outside of Nila. Our conversation called to mind the posters I had seen taped to streetlamps around the town centre of Nila, which showed the cast recruited for the professional line-up. My ears pricked up as I heard Yie wistfully repeating the rumours under his breath while looking across the Old Square, and towards the New Square and the Performance House located next to it, which would provide the backdrop to the Fire Festival extravaganza. It was clear that he hoped for the chance to move a large audience to distraction. Moments later, one of his friends joined us and the two of them quickly prepared to go sing at a local nightclub. Overcome with curiosity, I asked if I could join them and Yie, who was both surprised and touched, agreed. But he warned me that the venue would be loud and that the kind of singing he would do there would be different from the Nuosu ballads performed at the grand finale.
After a brief taxi ride, we arrived at the club, climbed several flights of stairs, and entered a room with a small, raised stage backed by a screen that hadas a Fire Festival themed design the Chinese phrase for 'firepower' (Ch. huoli quankai 火力全开) projected onto it. Seating me at a table with some of his friends and one of his sisters, who I call Nravie, Yie disappeared backstage, only to reappear moments later in a black tee-shirt and jeans. Picking up the microphone and surrounded by bandmates, he launched into singing the night away, not in the style of a traditional Nuosu ballad, but in heavy metal inspired numbers (Figure 2). Almost immediately, club-goers sprang from their seats, gravitated to the centre of the dance floor, and formed a mosh pit. Several revellers opened plastic water bottles and swung them rapidly overhead in a circular motion to spray the whole room. Straining against my camera's reluctance to shoot in the low light and ducking occasionally to avoid the water hitting my lens, I took numerous photographs throughout the evening. The revelry was patently subversive, yet rolled a celebration of the Fire Festival, its 'firepower', and rock star glamour into a rebellious mix of youthful dreams about the future.
I met with Yie, Nravie, and their older sister who I call Hxiesa on the following evening when walking towards the VIP section for the Fire Festival extravaganza with a ticket that Tuosa had gifted me. They were milling with the crowds as I strolled through the New Square in which the Nila Television Station, New Museum, and several government offices are based. But they urged me to find my seat in the adjacent VIP area, explaining that the sea of spectators would prevent us from being all in the same place at once. So, I trailed after two of Tuosa's students who had also received VIP tickets but had raced ahead of me. Carving my path through the throng of people, I took in the view of the Performance House and the outdoor stage erected on the spacious lawn in front of it, which had been claimed as the VIP area for the evening's event. Within minutes of entering the VIP area, I was unexpectedly called over by senior members of the Nila Television Station, who had recognised me from previous Fire Festivals and my work on an ethnographic film with Misu, which I edited with Nravie using their offices, computers, and specialist software (Swancutt and Jiarimuji 2016;Swancutt 2018). My old friends insisted that I forego my seat further back and sit near to themperhaps only ten rows from the frontwhich meant that I not only had full view of the production as it unfolded but was able to observe the reactions of staff at the television station. Once settled in front of a long table with them, I picked up a complementary one-page, double-sided programme for VIPs that was written almost entirely in Chinese and printed on a bright red card. A single line of Nuosu script announced the title of the event at the top, which can be rendered approximately into English as 'The 2019 Nuosu Fire Festival Song and Dance Extravaganza for the Ninglang Yi Autonomous County' (Nila Nuosu zyjiejuddexie ggurgga mu 2019 ku Nimu Duzie dugge yiehxo bieqie ꆀꆿꆈꌠꊨꏦꏱꅉꑤꈮꈜꃅ2019ꈎꆀꃅꄔꊒꄔꈩꑵꉙꀛꐂ). 12 Centred on the page, directly beneath an illustration of a torch flame, there was also a welcoming phrase written in calligraphy styled Nuosu script, which can be glossed into English as 'playing with fire burning brightly for the beautiful and colourful Nuosu homeland' (dugge bbojjiede nravie nishapu ꄔꈩꁨꐞꄑꎔꃨꆀꎭꁍ). 13 Each VIP seat came with a . 13 This welcoming phrase contains the term for 'Nuosu homeland' (nishapu ꆀꎭꁍ) and may even suggest that Nila is a kind of homeland. Support for this interpretation comes from the first glyph in this term, ni (ꆀ), which is both an arcane term for 'the Nuosu people' (ni ꆀ) and the initial glyph for the term 'Nila' (ꆀꆿ). Tuosa told me that 'Nuosu homeland' complimentary rain poncho, which we quickly donned, as it was the wet season and the rain had set in for the evening. Looking around and behind me, I surveyed an audience of probably several thousand that had gathered for the occasion. Many spectators were seated or stood on the false grass covered hilltops that had been erected along the entrance to the New Square. Evoking the Nuosu leisurely pursuit of relaxing in the Liangshan mountains, these faux hills offered elevated vantage points for watching the performance, albeit at some distance from the VIP area. Perhaps six giant LED video wall screens were lined up in front of us, which played footage that I recognised from the Nila Television Station's archive as a kind of scenesetting for the extravaganza. A panoply of images from Nila's past to the present rolled before our eyes, giving the impression of an ever-expanding and prosperous county town, accompanied by soft nostalgic music. The audience was treated to shots of newly widened local roads, state-subsidised apartment complexes, an expanding range of shops, the building that houses the Nila Television Station, a landmark statue of the culture hero, Zhyge Alu (ꍜꇰꀉꇐ), which evoked the particularly Nuosu character of this ethnically autonomous county, and the local airport that is a source of pride and an emblem of the county's development (Figure 3). My television station friends assessed their work with the critical eyes of professionals and wondered whether they had created something that was 'moving' and memorable (cf. Swancutt 2018, 100-101;Swancutt and Jiarimuji 2021, 183-185). They asked me what I thought of it, and I gave the typical compliment that it was beautiful. Many people around me had grown contemplative watching their own town, with its well-known corners and highpoints, take on the shape of a visual narrative that called attention to its increasing size, wealth, stature, and reputation. Moments later, a poster image of the evening's professional line-up appeared on the central video wall screen as the booming stereo surround system was testedalong with live flame flares and dry icewithout any of the minor hitches that often accompanied the speakers in the Old Square during the local competitions (Figure 4). To prepare the audience further, a simple version of the evening's schedule was beamed onto the video wall screens, complete with the extravaganza's title and the welcoming phrase from the VIP programme. I noticed that the welcoming phrase also appeared on the stage set mounted above the central screen, where, however, it was crowned by an image of a fiery flame and the number 70 to mark the seventieth anniversary of the PRC. Fiery images of a numerical countdown, more flame flares, and dry ice were then used to kick start the extravaganza as the evening grew dark. Only the camera workers from the Nila Television Station who were filming it revealed the strain of working under live conditions, as they scrambled to cover their lenses and lights with extra rain ponchos that glowed in bright shades of plastic.
Soon the production began at an almost deafening volume with an opening sequence that enacted the early days of the cosmos. Silhouetted male dancers in stylised Nuosu (nishapu ꆀꎭꁍ) is, however, entirely interchangeable with the phonetically similar term for the 'Liangshan homeland' (nieshapu ꆃꎭꁍ), which encompasses both the 'Greater Cool Mountains' (Ch. Da Liangshan 大凉山) in Sichuan and the 'Lesser Cool Mountains' (Ch. Xiao Liangshan 小凉山) that span Nila and the western parts of Sichuan, such as Yanyuan county. The Chinese version of this welcoming phrase, which was also printed on the VIP programme, closely approximates these meanings. It is composed of eight characters arranged into a two-part allegorical saying, which could be rendered into English as 'dancing with fire for Ninglang, the most beautiful Yi hometown' (Ch. huowu Ninglang, zuimei Yixiang 火舞宁蒗, 最美彝乡). Ironically, this version of the welcoming phrase evokes both the song and dance elements of the Fire Festival extravaganza and the once popular bonfire circle dances in Nila that were recently prohibited due to China's Fire Control Law.
attire drew the audience's attention to what appeared to be the image of the myth-historical priest, Awo Shubu (ꀊꊉꎺꀮ), projected onto the central video wall screen with snowcovered China Fir trees (shu ꎺ) behind him 14 ( Figure 5). This image conjured up the time  when Liangshan was about to become seeded with forests and inhabited by the twelve sons of snow. The projection then changed to reveal Awo Shubu flanked by a dark image of the sky from which he had, according to the Book of Origins, brought seeds and creatures to fill the earth with life ( Figure 6) (cf. Bender, Aku Wuwu, and Jjivot Zopqu 2019, lxviii, see also lxxxv and 15-17). Seconds later, the stage lit up further to mark the entrance of a man dressed as a priest, who stood before the projection of Awo Shubu and a now fiery backdrop. Notably, this backdrop evoked a subsequent moment in Nuosu myth-history when a 'spirit talisman' (nijju ꆀꐪ) fell from the sky and started a raging fire on earth, which transformed red and yellow snowfall into the twelve sons of snow (Figure 7) (cf. Bender, Aku Wuwu, and Jjivot Zopqu 2019, lxx, see also lxxi and 31-39). It became clear that the performers were enacting the continuity between ancient and contemporary Liangshan as well as the links between priests, fire, and its celebration in Nuosu culture. Just over five minutes were devoted to this ritual theatre, which anchored the extravaganza in the Nuosu sense of what is archetypically human. I heard some people in the VIP section murmuring to each other what sounded like Awo Shubu's name throughout the opening sequence, as they confirmed among themselves what they were watching. They did this in the subdued, respectful, and even reverential tone of voice that many Nuosu use when priests or shamans hold rituals.
Several masters of ceremony then guided the audience through the different acts as they appeared. One emcee, who for years had served as a judge in Nila's Fire Festival competitions, was the only local to sing and perform in the line-up of professionals ( Figure 8). Revealingly, the distance between the professional performers and the sole local performer mirrored the gulf between China's aspirations on the world's stage and the much more modest display of prosperity within Nila. Throughout the first three-quarters of the production, for which there was no interval, the programme featured famous singers who alternated between solo acts (with or without backup dancers) and duets. Some all- dance numbers enlivened the entertainment as well. Each routine was done in the style of one of China's minority nationalities, most of which were represented in Nila's own population. Many artists therefore wore ethnic-inspired clothing and performed melodies associated with their nationalities but sang Chinese versions of their lyrics so they would be intelligible to the whole audience. A good number of performers were paired  with computer-generated animations and light projected images of ethnically specific backdrops. The scenery included artwork featuring Nuosu musical instruments, aerial shots of the Liangshan highlands and uplands, and photographs of snow-capped Tibetan mountains that had 'the Shangri-La effect' of evoking the earthly paradise coveted by countless Chinese tourists since the late 1990s (cf. Guo Xiaolin 2008, 255-256). Even a few Mongolian singers and horsehead fiddlers appeared with yurts and grasslands projected behind them, which showcased an ethnic identity that had become associated with Yunnan as a historical accident of the 1954 ethnic identification project (cf. Mullaney 2004, 213;Mullaney 2011, 71). Amid this vibrant spectacle, camera crew from the Nila Television Station tossed foam light wands to audience members seated near to where they were filming. Caught off guard for only a moment, these spectators soon turned on their light wands, waved them side to side, and enjoyed playfully mimicking the concert-going style of China's megacities for the benefit of the television crew.
Having eagerly awaited one renowned Tibetan singer, many in the audience were thrilled when she appeared for an extended performance that was billed as the highlight of the evening (Figure 9). She created a sensation when descending from the stage to sing and stride among the front rows of the audience (Figure 10). To her surprise, though, some starstruck men took the opportunity to capture a whit of her rock star glamour by reaching out to make contact with her costume and herself. Visibly indignant, she pushed them away and continued to stride and sing, only half-hiding an expression of chagrin that suggested she would rather have been performing to a more sophisticated crowd. I wondered to myself whether she might have revealed a certain 'prejudice against a third-party ethnic other', such as her Nuosu fans (Sum et al. 2022, 568). 15 Security guards quickly surrounded the singer, but her admirers, who had been moved to distraction, followed both the singer and her security, and even encircled them to get a better view of her act, until she managed to return to the stage (Figure 11). Exhilarated by  minority ever to hold that post ' (2007, 229). Although he enjoyed some success, Lovu Lapo 'was at first resisted by prominent Tibetans', probably because the Nuosu, as members of the Yi nationality, 'were a slave society before Liberation, and the Tibetans were a feudal society' (Harrell 2007, 229).
having come nearly face-to-face with a celebrity member of 'our kind', many of her Nuosu fans ambled about in an unsteady and giddy way that revealed how deeply they had been moved. Taking little, if any, notice of the irony that most Tibetans do not consider themselves to be a minority nationality of China's southwest, these spectators allowed themselves to be moved by the soft power message that all members of 'our kind' contribute to China's might as a superpower. In so doing, they indulged in a more flexible interpretation of the Nuosu archetype of what it means to be human.

Soft power falls flat
Adulation for the Tibetan singer, however, dissolved almost instantly when she switched to Chinese patriotic songs that brought the production to its climax. Suddenly the LED screens behind her turned vivid red and yellow as a flurry of dancers bearing Chinese flags dashed in from the wings and snaked their way downstage in a formation reminiscent of Zhang Yimou's 'Impressions of Lijiang'or perhaps the photographs in Nila's museums that show the PLA entering the county during the Democratic Reforms ( Figure 12). A palpable tension descended upon the audience, which had lost any sense of giddiness or frisson. Spectators stared blankly at the stage and less perceptible swaying became evident among the crowd with the light wands. One middle-aged man left his VIP seat to stand in a walkway aisle between the benches with his arms folded across his chest and legs akimbo. Wearing an incredulous and quizzical expression on his face, he turned around from time to time, looking behind him and to all sides, as though to ascertain who else found that the production had turned in a predictable, but less palatable, direction. This spectator staged an ostentatious critique of the patriotic climax in plain sight of many in the VIP section. Other audience members assumed puzzled, amused, or impatient expressions. At this point, the extravaganza morphed from a predominantly song and dance concert into a rapid fire of light projected images featuring China's industrial sector, construction work, megacity skylines, land surveillance, agricultural harvests, shipping containers, aircraft manufacture, military jets streaking across the sky, drones, radio telescopes, and other engines of the prosperity that presumably would one day reach Nila. Cadres and people of political standing were brought on stage to show their patronageand perhaps even to evoke the People's Leaderby shaking hands, accepting awards, and exhibiting social cohesion together with the main cast, while many dancers waved small Chinese flags as images of the Chinese Dream unfolded behind them ( Figure 13).
Immersed in this theatre of exaggerated soft power, many spectators grew bored. Realising that the production had been designed to move them to distraction through an eclectic assemblage of Nuosu myth-history, animistic imagery, minority culture, the Chinese Dream, and the party-state's initiative of generating social cohesion, they ignored most of the closing acts. Standing up in their seats to make small talk with friends even as the final scenes were still in full swing, the spectatorsmuch like the man who stood in the walkway aisle of the VIP section with arms folded and legs akimbolargely turned their attention away from the production that no longer evoked what it means to be a member of 'our kind'. Many started to disperse before the crowds became too intense. Allowing others to leave first, I overheard some Nila Television Station crew members joke among themselves as they said their goodbyes. One particularly lively crew member gleefully danced and sarcastically mimicked the songs from the closing act of patriotism, right in front of the stage, and then laughed loudly when exiting the empty VIP area. Being moved by what is archetypically human Tellingly, many spectators at the Fire Festival extravaganza had been deeply moved by the Tibetan singer's songs, which evoked both the Nuosu sense of being archetypically human and the Chinese ideal of ethnic unity. No one, though, seemed to have anticipated that the Chinese Dream would upstage the singing, dancing, and playful partylike atmosphere of the Fire Festival in such a patently exaggerated, and even hyperreal, way. Nor did anyone seem to imagine that Chinese nationalism would overshadow the ritual theatre of the opening sequence to the extravaganza, which re-enacted Awo Shubu's seeding of life on earth and the transformation of ancient snowfall into the twelve sons of snow. The audience had been primed instead by the posters advertising the extravaganza, its opening sequence, and the celebration of ethnic minority life that followed it for a colourful tribute to the Fire Festival and the Nuosu sense of being human. Many in the audience therefore anticipated showing their appreciation not only for the performers but also for the organisers and patrons of the extravaganza when it ended. This, after all, is how each Fire Festival competition, pageant, and especially the grand finale in Nila tends to conclude, with the winning competitors being joined on stage by the judges and organisers, who lead the audience in giving rounds of applause. However, the extravaganza went much further by staging a climax in which the Chinese Dream appeared to eclipse the Nuosu sense of being human.
Here, the tension that descended upon spectators during the final moments of the extravaganza was revealing. It showed that many Nuosu were unwilling to let their cadres, the event organisers, or the party-state usurp the key purpose of the Fire Festival. Whether critiquing the extravaganza's closing sequence like the man who stood with arms folded and legs akimbo, ignoring it like the spectators who raced to pack up and leave early, or jubilantly mocking it like the Nila Television Station worker, the audience pushed back against the notion that Chinese nationalism could be grafted onto their social and cosmic orders. Choosing instead to take perhaps the simplest path of resistance to this display of patronage and patriotism, many spectators hastily returned home to rest up for the sacrifices they would hold to Ngeti Gunzy, the land spirit, and their ancestors early on the following day.

Concluding thoughts on the cosmopolitics of ritual theatre
Prosperitywhether celebrated in the form of a Fire Festival extravaganza or by any other meansis something that many Nuosu attribute to their own hard work and the help of spirit beings such as their ancestors, the land spirit, Ngeti Gunzy, and occasionally other myth-historical figures, such as Awo Shubu, that evoke their sense of what is archetypically human. During the Fire Festival, many Nuosu associate these spirit beings with cosmic renewal and the intimacy of ritual celebrations held with family and friends. Ngeti Gunzy also calls to mind the inherent risks of the Fire Festival since this is when he decides whether, or not, to return people's lost souls and allow them to keep on living. The Fire Festival is, then, a seasonal celebration in which many Nuosu seek to feel an emotive connection to their cosmopolitics and to the world at large as members of 'our kind'.
Yet as I have shown throughout this article, both local cadres and non-local event organisers seek to promote patriotism, cohesion, and ethnic unity through the Fire Festival extravaganzas staged across Liangshan. These extravaganzas invite spectators to meld the Nuosu sense of what is archetypically human with wider Chinese culture, the ethno-national Chinese bloodline, and whatever the current ideological trend in China happens to be. Many spectators are encouraged to envision the party-state as the ultimate cosmopolitical source and arbiter of prosperity. But while these extravaganzas may rally a certain amount of patriotism and yearning for the Chinese Dream of prosperity, Nuosu tend to be transported by performative elements that bring to life themes that are vo, or deeply moving and quintessentially human to them. Soft power unfolds here in subtle ways, including through Tibetan songs that evoke the richness of minority lives across China's southwest, which spectators may playfully interweave with the genealogical relationships between animals, plants, Nuosu, Tibetans, Han, and sometimes even foreigners that animate the Book of Origins. This melding of Chinese soft power with the Nuosu sense of being human is what abducts many Nuosu into the mood of a 'ritual theatre' that would likely be unmoving to most Tibetans, who do not consider themselves to be a minority nationality of China's southwest.
There is, though, a limit to how far Chinese soft power tends to shape the Nuosu sense of 'our kind'. Many Nuosu harness patronage, play, and reverencethe triptych of themes that the editors of this issue identify as being central to festivalsto bring to life their own personal vision of the cosmopolitics of being human. Going further, some Nuosu may unleash patronage, play, and reverence in the hopes of moving others to distraction, whether during the Fire Festival or in life at large.
Beyond the games, competitions, and iconic torch-bearing night walks of the Fire Festival are the pursuits of youth, such as Yie, who dream of more than winning local singing competitions. They dream of moving whole audiences to distraction by performing on stage as equals to the professionals from outside of their area. Yie and his bandmates know that performers who make audiences giddy with admirationlike the Tibetan singer at the Fire Festival extravaganzamay momentarily become figures of admiration themselves, and in this respect, they may become 'patrons' to their fans. Devoted fans may, in turn, playfully or even reverentially envision their favourite performers as being more emblematic of what is archetypically human than their local cadres, event organisers, or the party-state. Young Nuosu performers who become figures of admiration, then, may act 'as an agent of expression for [Nuosu] Yi youth in their concern to stake a legitimate place in the Chinese nation' (Banfill 2020, 301). Seen in this light, Yie's dream may have been motivated by what is arguably the most important element of ritual theatre: the act of moving people to envision the cosmopolitics of being human in a new light. I suspect that this is what, in part, moved Yie to bring me along to the 'firepower' event at a Nila nightclub where he sang the night away. Up on stage, Yie and his bandmates could playfully move their audience with a rock star glamour that fuelled the atmosphere of the mosh pit, the spray of revellers' water bottles, and a foreign anthropologist's photoshootall of which were forms of reverence, or at least simulated versions of it. Here, the cosmopolitics of the Fire Festival are not reducible to the Chinese Dream or to any effort at consolidating soft power; they are instead the elements of ritual theatre that are the most likely to move 'our kind' to distraction. ORCID Katherine Swancutt http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9838-2849