*Article* **Zhuiniu Water Buffalo Ritual of the Miao: Cultural Narrative Performed**

**Thomas Riccio**

> School of Arts and Humanities, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080, USA; thomas.riccio@utdallas.edu

**Abstract:** The zhuiniu 椎牛 ritual is one of the most elaborate of the Miao people of western Hunan, China. Zhuiniu means "kill the buffalo with a spear" and traces its origins to the worship of spirits and natural elements. Sponsored by a family to repay the spirits, the ritual was a village-wide event that culminated with the sacrifice of a water buffalo and a community celebration. The zhuiniu, estimated to be several thousand years old, is rapidly vanishing from cultural memory. In July and August of 2018, six master badai-spiritual specialists of the Miao—were gathered in La Yi 腊 乙, a village in the Wuling Mountain by the cultural bureau of the Xiangxi Tujia-Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Hunan Province to reenact and document the ritual. Using performance ethnography as research methodology, the author employs on-site observations, interviews, field notes, audio, and video to document the reenactment and describe its significance in the words of its practitioners. This essay argues that the zhuiniu has no definitive expression but is an adaptative and interpretative cultural narrative adjusting to circumstances and practice. The ritual exists today as it had historically, in many and varied expressions and interpretations shaped by local need, geography, and subject to the vagaries to orally transmitted forms of practice. Although fragmentary in performance expression and interpretation, the zhuiniu ritual narrative serves as a mythologically-based script that organizes a series of dramatic events that invites community awareness and interaction. In so doing, this sacred ritual has sustained its importance in conveying, embodying, and encoding a spiritual, social, and cultural record of Miao cosmology, culture, and history. Performatively conveyed—using song, music, costumes, dance and movement, props, and set pieces—the zhuiniu has been efficiently and sensorially reimagined in order to reiterate and reaffirm cultural knowledge. With rural modernization, dissolution of cultural context and need, and the aging of its practitioners, the traditional role of the zhuiniu is now in question.

**Keywords:** Miao culture; ritual; performance studies; performance ethnography; indigenous studies; folk traditions; mythology

OctoberAccepted: 28 March 2022 Published: 31 March 2022

 2021

https://doi.org/

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**Citation:** Riccio, Thomas. 2022.

Zhuiniu Water Buffalo Ritual of the

*Religions* 13: 303.

Academic Editors: Xiaohuan Zhao

Received: 25

and Arndt Büssing

10.3390/rel13040303

Miao: Cultural Narrative Performed.

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

**1. Contexts**

In late July 2018, in the village of La Yi 腊乙, deep in the Wuling Mountains of the Xiangxi Tujia-Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Hunan Province Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, Hunan, China, six Miao badai gathered to enact the zhuiniu 椎牛 ritual. The ritual, one of their most complex and sacred, culminates in the sacrifice of a water buffalo and is considered the penultimate offering to the gods. Once commonly practiced, it is today quickly fading from cultural memory. Orally transmitted for hundreds of years, the ritual and traditional narratives it encodes and reaffirms have proven to be no match against the prevailing forces of modernization, urban migrations, and the shift to a cash economy.<sup>1</sup>

Massive commercial and aestheticized versions of the ritual have been governmentally sponsored to stimulate the local economy, create jobs, and stem migrations to crowded industrial cities. Museums and various Miao cultural heritage parks have been developed to draw domestic tourists to the region, employing hundreds of Miao dancers, musicians, and

artisans (Figure 1). Theatricalized badai shows worthy of Las Vegas are what is presented. A large-scale zhuiniu ritual, which included a sacrifice, was part of the local government's tourism and employment initiatives. These initiatives were shaped as sensationalized entertainment ye<sup>t</sup> careful to downplay "superstition" or ethnic identity, two issues the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has deemed anathema to its efforts to modernize and unify the nation under party rule.

**Figure 1.** A theatricalized performance depicting Badai. Created and presented by actors for tourists and without any spiritual or ritual significance. Shanjiang Miao Tourist Village in Fenghuang County. 2018. (Photo: Thomas Riccio).

Annual Miao festivals are a central component of the region's widely promoted tourism attractions. All festivals are organized and overseen by governmen<sup>t</sup> offices or representatives, from elected village committees for the village-based events to prefectural or provincial cultural affairs bureaus for large-scale parades and performances. Ethnic tourism, cultural heritage preservation, and rural development intersect in the state, provincial, and prefectural-level programs for the region and play a hyper-visible role in evidencing the projected beneficence and desired successes of national, ethnic policies and agendas (Chio 2019, p. 541).

The most recent theatricalized tourist rendering of the zhuiniu ritual in impoverished Fenghuang County failed to sustain interest or profitability despite best efforts. Heavy rains, rising costs, and poor attendance the previous years forced the cancelation of the event in 2018 and 2019, with the pandemic indefinitely halting future plans.

Knowing my interest in the ritual, Ma Mei, the director of Xiangxi Tujia-Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Hunan Province Tujia-Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Hunan Province Cultural Ministry and longtime research collaborator, organized a gathering of six respected badai in her home village of La Yi. A five-day re-enactment and documentation project of the zhuiniu ritual was prompted by the rapidly transforming and threatened ritual.<sup>2</sup> The gathering of the six badai was unprecedented, serving as an ad hoc summit to discuss, pool, and exchange knowledge through the step-by-step re-enactment of the zhuiniu ritual.

Each step of the ritual was re-enacted, explained, and discussed to identify each action's details, meaning, and significance. What emerged, and what this paper documents, was a unique scholarly opportunity offering a vivid and considered examination of a ritual from the perspective of its practitioners. Extensive discussions, documentation, and interviews allowed for a thorough examination of the ritual, Miao culture, and badai practice.

Badai practice is orally transmitted, with practitioners adhering to the dictates of their training. For the most part, badai work in isolation or with similarly trained badai. To openly share their ways of working and understanding of the zhuiniu, its meaning, mythology, and importance were revelatory. As diverse understandings emerged, so too did a cosmological narrative of Miao culture that the ritual contained and conveyed. The zhuiniu is essentially an immersive sensory retelling of Miao history, values, beliefs, and society. The zhuiniu is a medium and embodied cultural text that performed and encoded the Miao way of being in and with the world. The zhuiniu has survived to this day by adapting and adjusting. How far it will continue before it passes into history remains to be seen. This paper is a record of an event occurring from 26 July to 1 August 2018.
