**23. Conclusions**

The zhuiniu ritual documentation project at La Yi village in 2018 was a unique opportunity to access the collective memory of six influential badai from the region to reenact the ritual and cultural narrative. The gathering was a response, motived by dire circumstances. Miao traditions are threatened and need to be recorded before they vanish.

The zhuiniu ritual is a narrative embodied and conveyed through performance. It has survived to this day by being adaptative and modular as it served the practical and spiritual needs of a culture that has been historically besieged by war and colonization. Adaptability and functionality have been key to the Miao, a tenacious people who survived by cultivating the uninhabitable into fertile lands, making them their own, and flourishing. With a history of conflict and subjugation by the Han and interaction with other ethnic groups, they adapted to a diversity of social and cultural conditions, becoming a layered complexity of cultural influences. Miao belief, ritual practice, and the cosmological narratives they reference encode and bespeak their spirituality, history, and identity. Miao rituals also entwine and serve as an implicit form of political resistance by reiterating and reaffirming their distinction as place-based Cosmo-centric people.

The broadly shared cultural patterns and cosmology of Miao are best understood as an outline articulated and shaped to local contexts and expressions. Each village shares the narrative and the culture in its way to serve its own needs and conditions. Consequently, their rituals and cosmological narratives are, as the La Yi reenactment vividly demonstrates, as complex and varied as the forests, mountains, lakes, and rivers of the Miao homelands. There is no definitive zhuiniu, which perhaps explains why it has survived into the 21st century. It is personalized and shaped to local and individual need.

Pragmatism, resourcefulness, resilience, and adaptation remain essential for the Miao character and survival. How, what, and if rituals and traditions forged by historical circumstances will survive in a global world is uncertain. By considering the zhuiniu ritual we are like archeologists piecing together pottery shards. We ge<sup>t</sup> a glimpse of fragments, speculating on what was and possibly what the future will bring.
