Naxi

Consapevoli del fatto che molti studiosi hanno trascorso tutta la propria vita per raccontare anche soltanto una piccolissima parte della storia della Cina e delle sue etnie, ci stiamo impegnando a mettere il nostro tempo e la nostra volontà al servizio della ricerca… Vorremmo riuscire a contribuire anche in una parte infinitesimale a raccogliere materiale e testimonianze che riguardino le molte " minoranze etniche " , purtroppo ormai quasi estinte, che hanno trovato origine o si sono stabilite sul territorio cinese lasciando un segno più o meno evidente nella storia di questo paese. …per non dimenticare che essere umani è quanto di più vario eppure uguale possa esistere in natura. Gli articoli che seguono sono l'inizio di un percorso che parte da un viaggio fatto da xiulung due anni fa nel Sichuan. Questa breve relazione sulle etnie cinesi, in particolare la Naxi, costituisce quindi un primo passo in un percorso di studio e di esperienze che si sta continuamente trasformando, attraverso cui abbiamo avuto modo di contattare persone che hanno già riversato da parecchi anni grande impegno e passione in questa stessa ricerca… …piano piano un universo si sta schiudendo dinnanzi a noi e tutto ciò, quanto meno, ci porterà ad arricchire il nostro mondo interiore… Voglio quindi ringraziare Stefano per l'impegno che ci mette e per avermi coinvolto in questa avventura…

Alessandro Ferro - Tiebaozi

Wushu ed arte rupestre cinese.
Appunti di studio delle evidenze artistico-rupestri cinesi relazionabili alla storia ed alle iconografie del Wushu.

Questa raccolta di appunti è inerente allo studio delle evidenze rupestri dei siti della Cina che possono essere messe in relazione con la storia antica del 武术Wushu – arti marziali, in particolare con alcune iconografie e pratiche associabili alle arti marziali cinesi, alla storia ed alla cultura del Wushu.
Dopo acluni appunti focalizzati sullo studio delle nozioni, della terminologia e degli aspetti fondamentali del Wushu, il focus della ricerca verte sull'analisi dei principali aspetti e della bibliografia dedicata alla sconfinata materia di ricerca quale l’arte rupestre cinese, dove per “cinese” s'intende un vasto sistema ecologico-culturale caratterizzato da open e globular clusters  di nicchie culturali ed ambientali diffuso nei territori coincidenti e limitrofi alle regioni ed alle provincie della Cina attuale, che sono anche il criterio di organizzazione del materiale di studio presentato come excursus dei maggiori siti di arte rupestre soffermandosi sulle raffigurazioni che posso essere ritenute pertinenti all'ambito dell’analisi storica del Wushu.
A queste evidenze è talvolta associata un’ulteriore documentazione ed in alcuni casi l’approfondimento di peculiari aspetti di manufatti e cultura materiale proveniente dagli scavi archeologici.
Altra peculiarità ivi annottata e presentata è l’analisi nelle sue pertinenze al Wushu della tradizione manoscritta 东巴Dongba propria della minoranza etnica 纳西Naxi (regione di 丽江Lijiang, provincia dello 云南Yunnan) interpretata come ramo espressivo di un filone della pittografia direttamente relazionabile con l’arte rupestre.
Nelle conclusioni si tenta di sketchare un quadro riassuntivo di quanto sembra possibile evincere dalle fonti analizzate.

This book is a study of European-language translations of Naxi ritual manuscripts, the ritual literature of a small ethnic group living in southwest China’s Yunnan Province.

The author discusses the translations into European languages (in English, French and German) from the late nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century, revealing a history of fragmentary yet interconnected translation efforts in the West. By exploring this network, he shows how translation can be understood as a metonymic “recreation” of textual worlds.  As Naxi manuscripts are semi-oral texts representing an oral-formulaic tradition, their translation involves a metonymic relay of partial incorporations from manuscript/image to reading/spoken language. Therefore, the book engages in a series of textual excavations to uncover the previously occluded contemporaneous readings that would have led to the translations we can consult today, particularly in an attempt to understand how the Naxi literature came to be part of Ezra Pound’s Cantos.

Stefano Zamblera, 2018: "A Dongba Pictographs Dictionary with Iconographic Index Plates"
Dictionary of Dongba pictographs implemented in categories sorted by iconographic index plates of BASIC pictographs.

Iconographic and graphic study of such corpus of glyphs evinced two distinguished sets of pictographs which could be named BASIC and COMPLEX.
BASIC PICTOGRAPHS are those glyphs made by one and just one iconographic unit (signifier) that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to the physical object meant.
BASIC PICTOGRAPHS are assembled together making COMPLEX PICTOGRAPHS, alias COMPLEX UNITS OF SIGNIFIERS.
As any BASIC PICTOGRAPH consists in a signifier written by a minimal graphic unit,  identification of BASIC PICTOGRAPHS categories to gather them coincides with the study and identification of a set of ICONOGRAPHIC PRIMES into Dongba pictographs corpus.
ICONOGRAPHIC PRIME is then used in the making of iconographic index plates for BASIC PICTOGRAPHS.

纳西语的描写研究和历史语言学研究均开展较早。已有的描写研究以西部方言为主，东部方言近年来受到关注。在类型学框架下的全面描写和专题讨论是今后的研究趋势。纳西语历史语言学研究中的重要问题是纳西语的历史地位。学者们先后提出了声调的创新演变、声韵调全面对应、综合考虑语音、语法、词汇的相似等标准。近年来基于多个方言的层级比较研究初步构拟了原始纳西语，为深入讨论纳西语历史地位问题打下了基础，也是进一步研究的方向。语言研究是文化研究的基础，纳西语言研究有利于推动纳西文化研究的深入。
The descriptive and historical study on Naish languages has a relatively long tradition. Most existing descriptive studies are on the western branch while the eastern branch has been drawing more attention in recent years. Comprehensive description and discussion on special issues in typological framework will be the trend in future study. In historical linguistic study of Naish languages, an important problem is their genetic position. To solve this problem, scholars have proposed criteria such as innovation in tonal system, complete correspondence in initials, finals, and tones, and comprehensive criterion of similarity in phonology, lexicon, and syntax. Based on multiple Naish languages/dialects, Proto-Naish has been reconstructed to help interpret the genetic position. This work is to be improved in future study. Linguistic study is the base of culture study, therefore, the study of Naish languages will promote the study of Naxi culture.

Abstract: Laze is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in the county of Muli, in Sichuan, by a population of less than 1,000. The article proposes a synchronic account of Laze phonology, supplemented by a list of about 1,400 words in the Appendix. A phonemic analysis is proposed, with an inventory of syllables that brings to light the synchronic distributional properties of Laze onsets and rhymes–properties that are crucial to ongoing research into the historical phonology of the subgroup of Sino-Tibetan to which Laze belongs.

Elise Scharten (1876–1965) was a pioneering Dutch missionary who translated texts into and out of the language of the Naxi people, a Chinese minority group living in the Himalayan foothills of Yunnan province. She was the first to translate the Naxi creation story into English, and the only translator of a western text into Naxi. Her legacy has, however, been overshadowed by the achievements of more prominent Naxiologists. Today, Scharten is almost completely unknown. Nevertheless, Scharten's unique contribution to the transmission of cultural knowledge between westerners and the Naxi has been preserved in museum and library archives. From these sources we can build a clear picture of her importance to the study of this unique people.

Wushu ed arte rupestre cinese.
Appunti di studio delle evidenze artistico-rupestri cinesi relazionabili alla storia ed alle iconografie del Wushu.

Questa raccolta di appunti è inerente allo studio delle evidenze rupestri dei siti della Cina che possono essere messe in relazione con la storia antica del 武术Wushu – arti marziali, in particolare con alcune iconografie e pratiche associabili alle arti marziali cinesi, alla storia ed alla cultura del Wushu.
Dopo alcuni appunti focalizzati sullo studio delle nozioni, della terminologia e degli aspetti fondamentali del Wushu, il focus della ricerca verte sull'analisi dei principali aspetti e della bibliografia dedicata alla sconfinata materia di ricerca quale l’arte rupestre cinese, dove per “cinese” s’íntende un vasto sistema ecologico-culturale caratterizzato da open e globular clusters  di nicchie culturali ed ambientali diffuso nei territori coincidenti e limitrofi alle regioni ed alle provincie della Cina attuale, che sono anche il criterio di organizzazione del materiale di studio presentato come excursus dei maggiori siti di arte rupestre soffermandosi sulle raffigurazioni che posso essere ritenute pertinenti all'ambito dell’analisi storica del Wushu.
A queste evidenze è talvolta associata un’ulteriore documentazione ed in alcuni casi l’approfondimento di peculiari aspetti di manufatti e cultura materiale proveniente dagli scavi archeologici.
Altra peculiarità ivi annottata e presentata è l’analisi nelle sue pertinenze al Wushu della tradizione manoscritta 东巴Dongba propria della minoranza etnica 纳西Naxi (regione di 丽江Lijiang, provincia dello 云南Yunnan) interpretata come ramo espressivo di un filone della pittografia direttamente relazionabile con l’arte rupestre.
Nelle conclusioni si tenta di sketchare un quadro riassuntivo di quanto sembra possibile evincere dalle fonti analizzate.

The Tenth Karmapa Chöying Dorjé (1604–1674) was both a famous artist and leader of the Karma Kagyü School of Tibetan Buddhism during a formative period in Tibetan history. The religious and institutional shape of modern Tibet was decided in the turbulent conflicts and dramatic reorganization of Tibetan society in the seventeenth century. With Mongol support, the Fifth Dalai Lama took control of Central Tibet and projected Gelukpa power far beyond Lhasa. As is often seen in the writing of history, the victor exerts its authority in its telling. Thus the preceding ruling polity and its leading lama, the Tenth Karmapa, have often been neglected. Chöying Dorjé’s life is well documented in Tibetan sources which provide an alternative historical narrative of the tumultuous seventeenth century.

This publication brings together specialists in literature, history, religion, and art to discuss the historical context of this seminal Tibetan figure, situating him and his life’s work within the juncture of history, art and civilization, and Tibet’s place in the larger world of the seventeenth century.


Contents:

Introduction
Elliot Sperling


1. A World Upside Down: Religious Prelates and Secular Rulers in Seventeenth-century Tsang
David Templeman


2. The Seventeenth century Tsang Rulers and Their Strategies of Legitimation
David Templeman


3. The Biography of the Tenth Karmapa in the 1775 Uncensored Edition of Kam tsang’s Golden Rosary and Other Important Material on His Life
Tashi Tsering


4. Vajra Melodies: Approaching the Tenth Karmapa’s (1604–1674) Songs (mgur), Poetry, and Poetics from a Tibetan Perspective
Gedun Rabsal


5. In Living Memory: The Tenth Karmapa in the Folklore of the Naxi People
Yang Fuquan


6. Inspired by the Past: The Art of Chöying Dorjé and Western Himalayan Sculpture
Christian Luczanits


7. A Survey of a Willow-branch Guanyin Attributed to the Tenth Karmapa in the Palace Museum and Related Questions
Luo Wenhua


8. A Brief Note on a Tangka Painted by Chöying Dorjé, Tenth Black Hat Karmapa of Tibet, in 1655: The “Oath-bound Great Being” (Dam can Skyes bu chen po)
Heather Stoddard


9. From Hand of the Master to Workshop Production: Paintings Attributed to the Tenth Karmapa
Karl Debreczeny


10. The Role of Mongol Elite and Educational Degrees in the Advent of Reincarnation Lineages in Seventeenth Century Amdo
Gray Tuttle


11. Medicine as Impartial Knowledge: The Fifth Dalai Lama, the Tsarong School, and Debates of Tibetan Medical Orthodoxy
Stacey Van Vleet

This article is a pan-Himalayan story about
how the turtle, as a cultural symbol within
Sino-Tibetan divination iconography, came to
more closely resemble a frog. It attempts a
comparative analysis of Sino-Tibetan divination
manuals, from Tibetan Dunhuang and Sinitic
turtle divination to frog divination among the
Naxi people of southwest China. It is claimed that
divination turtles, upon entering the Himalayan
foothills, are not just turtles, but become
something else: a hybrid symbol transformed
via cultural diffusion, from Han China to Tibet,
and on to the Naxi of Yunnan. Where borders are
crossed, there is translation. If we go beyond
the linguistic definition of translation towards
an understanding of transfer across semiotic
borders, then translation becomes the reforming
of a concept from one cultural framework into
another. In this way, cultural translation can
explain how divination iconography can mutate
and transform when it enters different contexts;
or in other words, how a turtle can come to lose
its shell.

This paper will show the interplay between language and identity in the writing of Sinophone Chinese minority writers, who write what can be envisioned as a form of postcolonial literature. It is postcolonial in the sense that they are transposing their native, subaltern culture into Chinese for a Han Chinese audience. The focus of the discussion is on Naxi minority writers such as Sha Li and Niu Gengqin who are writing their own racial identity in Chinese. They are essentially “translating” the cultural metatext of their home (Naxi) culture for a dominant-culture (Han) audience. It is argued that the use of foreignising literary strategies allows the Naxi writers to negotiate the space that has been created by the convergence of Naxi and Chinese language and culture: they have created a distinct form of Chinese, a Naxi-influenced, ethnic Chinese that represents a translated identity.

Tibetan author Alai's Chinese essay, Yi di shui jingguo Lijiang (一滴水经过丽江 [A drop of water passes through Lijiang]) is a piece of travel writing that describes the city of Lijiang (home to the Naxi minority of Yunnan province) and its environs from the perspective of an anthropomorphic drop of water. The essay has been subsequently translated back into the minority Naxi language of Lijiang by Naxi scholar Mu Chen, and both versions are presented as a lapidary inscription in a tourist square. Writing travel from the reverse perspective, i.e. translating the writing from the minority perspective of the place being travelled, is perhaps a way of counteracting the genre's inherently epistemic appropriation of the 'other'. I believe that a comparative approach can act as an antidote against the monolingual, ethnocentric tropes of travel writing. In this essay it will be observed that through back-translation of the travel writing into the Naxi culture being observed, cultural specifics can be reintroduced into a text, and a minority culture can reclaim the power to speak for itself.

This essay considers the orality of ritual texts written in the Naxi dongba script from southwest China. Historically, the inherent orality of these texts has been largely ignored in favor of seeing them as a kind of visual “hieroglyphics.” Here, a case will be made that the Naxi texts represent an intermediary stage between the “oral” and the “written,” questioning the existence of a stark divide between orality and literacy.

Dongba pictographs dictionary with Index Plates. Third category of pictographs - C: Anthropomorphic deities.

Stefano Zamblera, 2018: "A Dongba Pictographs Dictionary with Iconographic Index Plates"
Dictionary of Dongba pictographs implemented in categories sorted by iconographic index plates of BASIC pictographs.

Iconographic and graphic study of such corpus of glyphs evinced two distinguished sets of pictographs which could be named BASIC and COMPLEX.
BASIC PICTOGRAPHS are those glyphs made by one and just one iconographic unit (signifier) that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to the physical object meant.
BASIC PICTOGRAPHS are assembled together making COMPLEX PICTOGRAPHS, alias COMPLEX UNITS OF SIGNIFIERS.
As any BASIC PICTOGRAPH consists in a signifier written by a minimal graphic unit,  identification of BASIC PICTOGRAPHS categories to gather them coincides with the study and identification of a set of ICONOGRAPHIC PRIMES into Dongba pictographs corpus.
ICONOGRAPHIC PRIME is then used in the making of iconographic index plates for BASIC PICTOGRAPHS.

There is a well-documented history of translation between India, Tibet and China beginning in the seventh century and continuing for almost a millennium. The transmission of the Buddhist canon that took place during this time has been perceived as one of the world’s greatest cultural exchanges. But what about the transmission of the non-Buddhist Tibetan canon (if indeed it can be called a canon), that is, the ritual tradition from early Tibet that has been classified by some as “Bon”? In the mid-twentieth century it was suggested that the explication of the still-extant religious literature of a small tribe in southwest China, the Naxi, would lead to a fuller understanding of the Tibetan Bon tradition. But there has still been little comparative study between these two lineages. Analysis of the Dunhuang manuscripts, in particular the textual references to the archetypal ritualist, gShen-rab myi-bo, reveals a common through line from old Tibet, to Bon tradition, to Naxi ritual manuscripts, which feature prominently a chief ritualist known as Do-bbaq sheel-lo.

I suggest that the Naxi manuscripts show an inheritance from early Tibet – perhaps before the formation of an organized “Bon” religion. In this essay I posit that the existence of an archetypal ritualist in the Naxi canon is a continuation of a narrative theme (that of the well-versed ritual practitioner), and indeed possibly of specific ritual personages themselves, from the old Tibetan manuscripts, filtered through the lens of cultural translation, across the borders from the Tibetan empire into southwest China

A script can be a window into a language and all the culture contained within it. China’s minority peoples have a multitude of scripts, but many are in danger of falling out of use, a decline spurred by the adoption and promotion of standard Chinese across the country. Nevertheless, efforts are being made to preserve minority writing systems. This article reveals how the primarily logographic Naxi dongba script (often labelled the world’s ‘last living pictographs’), used in China’s southwestern Yunnan province to record the Naxi language, can be practically used as a modern writing system alongside its more widely known traditional role as a means of recording religious rites, and what exactly separates these two styles of writing. The efforts that have been made to achieve the goal of modernisation over the past decades are reviewed, including the longstanding attempts at Unicode encoding. I make some suggestions for the future development of the script, and employ plenty of examples from recent publications, alongside phonetic renderings and English translations. It is hoped that overall awareness of this unique script can be raised, and that it can develop into a vernacular script with everyday applications.

Two unusual characters appear in the closing lines of Ezra Pound’s Canto CXII (from his “Drafts and Fragments”), characters that may offer up the most complete example of Pound’s much-discussed “ideogrammic method”. The characters discussed in this paper belong to the Naxi dongba script, the logographic writing system of a tribe in China’s south-western province of Yunnan. Pound’s sources are analysed and a new theory of the origin of the two characters—from Joseph Rock’s translation of a Naxi ritual text—is put forward. The two Naxi dongba characters in Canto CXII unlock the meaning of the canto within which they appear, and echo themes that run through the Cantos when taken as a whole. But we can also see Pound using both pictorial and phonetic elements of the script to create a “cumulative ideogram”, and through this comparative Poundian lens we can update our historically limited understanding of the Naxi writing system.

Comparison of English with two Asian tone languages (Naxi and Vietnamese) suggests that lexical specifications (phonemic contrasts and lexical accentuation) and intonation stand in a relationship of resource-sharing: the former provide the framework within which intonational variation takes on its meaning. Typologically, each language arguably allows speakers a given degree of freedom; Naxi (4 lexical tones) appears more constrained than English, and also than Vietnamese (although the latter has 6 tones). The experimental results (which include an estimation of voice quality by electroglottography) hint at the presence of a superposition of several phenomena, rather than one single prosodic structure. They allow for a discussion of a question raised by the autosegmental-metrical framework of intonation studies: do accentuation and intonation converge to shape a tonal string for the utterance (in all languages)? The results suggest that the latter view may be an oversimplification.

Dongba pictographs dictionary with Index Plates.
Firts category of pictographs - A: man and his occupation.

Dictionary of Dongba pictographs implemented in categories sorted by iconographic index plates of BASIC pictographs.

Iconographic and graphic study of such corpus of glyphs evinced two distinguished sets of pictographs which could be named BASIC and COMPLEX.
BASIC PICTOGRAPHS are those glyphs made by one and just one iconographic unit (signifier) that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to the physical object meant.
BASIC PICTOGRAPHS are assembled together making COMPLEX PICTOGRAPHS, alias COMPLEX UNITS OF SIGNIFIERS.
As any BASIC PICTOGRAPH consists in a signifier written by a minimal graphic unit,  identification of BASIC PICTOGRAPHS categories to gather them coincides with the study and identification of a set of ICONOGRAPHIC PRIMES into Dongba pictographs corpus.
ICONOGRAPHIC PRIME is then used in the making of iconographic index plates for BASIC PICTOGRAPHS.

Stefano Zamblera, 2018: "A Dongba Pictographs Dictionary with Iconographic Index Plates"
Dictionary of Dongba pictographs implemented in categories sorted by iconographic index plates of BASIC pictographs.

Iconographic and graphic study of such corpus of glyphs evinced two distinguished sets of pictographs which could be named BASIC and COMPLEX.
BASIC PICTOGRAPHS are those glyphs made by one and just one iconographic unit (signifier) that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to the physical object meant.
BASIC PICTOGRAPHS are assembled together making COMPLEX PICTOGRAPHS, alias COMPLEX UNITS OF SIGNIFIERS.
As any BASIC PICTOGRAPH consists in a signifier written by a minimal graphic unit,  identification of BASIC PICTOGRAPHS categories to gather them coincides with the study and identification of a set of ICONOGRAPHIC PRIMES into Dongba pictographs corpus.
ICONOGRAPHIC PRIME is then used in the making of iconographic index plates for BASIC PICTOGRAPHS.

Translating across scripts does more than raise the issue of what
constitutes writing; it can expose bias and prejudice against
writing systems. This article suggests that the first translation into
a western language of a ritual text from the Naxi people of
southwest China by a late-nineteenth century French explorer
signposts the beginning of a translation tradition that is
characterized by what Derrida called “logocentrism”: a form of
cultural imperialism not limited to the traditional oriental/
occidental divide, that imposes a way of writing, and a way of
thinking, on the culture being translated. To better understand
and translate these minority texts, we must break through our
logocentric bias and move toward non-linear ways of reading and
writing.

Naxi is a Sino-Tibetan language close to the Burmese-Yi subgroup; its precise genetic affiliation is still a matter of debate. After a short review of some earlier publications on Naxi, this paper offers new data (the syllabic inventory of a Western Naxi dialect, based on first-hand fieldwork), and a guide to an older resource: the correspondences between our transcriptions and the script invented by the ‘botanist-explorer’ Joseph F. Rock are set out, offering a practical tool for deciphering the somewhat perplexing, idiosyncratic romanised transcription used in his Na-Khi—English Encyclopedic Dictionary, a book of historical importance in Naxi studies.

The Western dialect of Naxi has four lexical tones: High, Mid, Low and Rising; the latter is rare in the lexicon. Rising contours on monosyllables are frequent in connected speech, however, as a result of a process of syllable reduction: reduction of a morpheme carrying the High tone results in re-association of its tone to the syllable that precedes it in the sentence, creating a rising contour. An experiment (with one speaker and five listeners) establishes that there is not only one rising contour that originates in tonal reassociation, as reported in earlier descriptions, but two: Low-to-High and Mid-to-High—as could be expected by analogy with phenomena observed in Niger-Congo languages and elsewhere. A second set of experiments (same speaker; six listeners) investigates the reduction of Mid- and Low-tone syllables: they reduce to [ə̄] and [ə̀], respectively, and coalesce with the preceding syllable (in Naxi, syllabic structure is simply consonant+glide+vowel). Unlike High-tone syllable reduction, this process stops short of complete tonal de-linking. These experiments aim to provide a complete picture of syllable reduction patterns in Naxi. It is argued that the notions of floating tones and tonal reassociation can be usefully applied to the Naxi data.

本文依据第一手调查介绍云南省香格里拉县（前中甸县）三坝乡东坝村次恩丁自然村纳西语的音系。通过对这个方言的研究，可以得到关于纳西语比较构拟的新知识。/ This is a phonemic analysis of the Naxi dialect of Ciending hamlet (Sanba township, Zhongdian prefecture; now renamed 'Shangri-la prefecture'). An appendix offers a word list. Among other uses for further research, this article provides information for the historical reconstruction of the Naxi language.

Musiche e danze Naxi

Lijiang ha da sempre offerto uno splendido e variegato paesaggio musicale creato attraverso l’interazione di una moltitudine di realtà e di fattori etnici, religiosi, economici, politici, tecnologici.
Nell’area di Lijiang vi è una costante verità, valida oggigiorno come da secoli: poli diversi di due realtà distinte quali l’etnia e cultura Naxi e la cinesizzazione della regione si interscambiano in un continuum visibile già dalla convivenza dei remoti villaggi Naxi montani alla città di Dayan, e dalle zone rurali di Lijiang in cui si interseca e penetra il fiume Jinsha.
In questo setting ambientale vi è la convivenza di due gruppi sociali principali, Naxi e Han, e la coesistenza di altre realtà etniche minori, convivenza che generò e ancora oggi mantiene legami ed influenze visibili, ad esempio, nella produzione letteraria popolare di leggende e storielle in cui è evidente quanto “le minoranze etniche […] sono più o meno tutte in contatto con le minoranze vicine, così come con gli Han” (Mc Khann 1997:2).
L’importanza dei contatti e delle influenze interetniche è assolutamente evidente anche negli studi cinesi di musicologia, ed in questo caso particolare, sebbene vi sia stata nella storia una certa tendenza degli storici musicologi cinesi a parlare in termini pacati e discreti circa le minoranze etniche Naxi, Pumi e Lisu, da sempre per questa regione è stato riconosciuta la peculiarità della produzione musicale come risultato di questo processo di permeabilità ed interazione fra contatti e produzioni artistiche interetniche (Shi Xiao 1985; Liang Yu 1986).
Per quanto sia conveniente suddividere i tipi musicali tra i principali prodotti secondo un’appartenenza etnica, l’importanza delle influenze interetniche non deve essere assolutamente dimenticata per un così peculiare frammento sud occidentale di Cina…

This article investigates public textual inscriptions in China’s Naxi minority region and the role they play in projecting power. Cliff inscriptions in Chinese minority areas may be an attempt to enforce the hegemonic project of the “civilizing centre,” which sees Han culture as a civilizing force on the “barbarians” that live in China’s border provinces. Despite the nominal equality of China’s ethnic minority groups, the language and writing system of the Han majority occupy an undeniably privileged position in the country’s linguistic hierarchy. But powerful writing does not necessarily have to emanate from the centre of political control, and I argue that there are examples of graphic pluralism where the hierarchy is upturned. One such example of powerful, informal public text acts are the graffiti found on the walls of a cave in an ethnically Naxi township of Baidi in Yunnan province. The most powerful and prestigious graffiti inscriptions are those that are written in the native Naxi logographic script. An analysis of these inscriptions may help to reveal the social implications of writing in heterographic situations, showing how the ritual act of writing Naxi inscriptions on the wall inculcates Naxi values and suggests that China’s linguistic hierarchy is not immutable.

Indice:
INTRODUZIONE
UN CONTINENTE CHE ABBIAMO CONTRIBUITO A SCOPRIRE..................................9
Luisa M. Paternicò
CENTRO, PERIFERIE E IDENTITÀ LOCALI: LA CINA DELLE MINORANZE .............15
Valentina Punzi
IPPOLITO DESIDERI E IL TIBET ...........................................................................29
Marco Passavanti
LAMONGOLIA INTERNA
CROCEVIA DEI RAPPORTI TRA ORIENTE E OCCIDENTE.......................................39
Davor Antonucci
L’OCCIDENTE INCONTRA L’ALTRA CINA:
TESTIMONIANZE DEI PRIMI ESPLORATORI EUROPEI SUINAXI DELLO YUNNAN...51
Cristiana Turini
ANTROPOLOGIA MISSIONARIA E MAPPATURE COLONIALI A CONFRONTO:
IL CASO DELLE COMUNITÀ TRIBALI
MIAO E YI NELLA CINA SUD-OCCIDENTALE.........................................................61
Tommaso Previato
TUJIA, L’OTTAVA MINORANZA................................................................................73
Maria Omodeo
ISLAM E IDENTITÀ ETNICA IN CINA.
DALLA FINE DELLA DINASTIA QING ALLA REPUBBLICA POPOLARE.....................83
Francesca Rosati
LE LINGUE SINITICHE........................................................................................ 93
Bianca Basciano
I PRIMI OCCIDENTALI ALLE PRESE CON LA LINGUA CANTONESE.........................109
Luisa M. Paternicò
I DIALETTI MIN MERIDIONALI.............................................................................121
Giorgio Francesco Arcodia
IL CONTRIBUTO DEI GESUITI ALLO STUDIO DEI DIALETTIWU............................133
Emanuele Raini
I DIALETTI HAKKA................................................................................................145
Giorgio Francesco Arcodia

This paper is focused on giving a short description of Naxi language sounds panorama with a grammar and phonetic sketch.
It is moreover oriented into the definition of a Naxi – Dongba system of romanization with IPA annotation according to most important historical studies focused on Naxi people and Dongba tradition, as a guideline of the romanization orthography system of the Dongba Pictographs Dictionary with iconographic plates – 东巴常用字词典含象形索引表.
After a brief introduction on Naxi and its classification into Tibeto-Burma languages family a brief description of Naxi dialects is briefly introduced, followed by a draft grammar sketch of Naxi language.
Romanization solutions and IPA chart is finally presented with examples, if available, of western languages approximate sounds for each letter of Naxi system.

A pictographic writing system is a symbolic system that represent words by pictures. It combines language and image, auditory and visual senses, and typically embodies the contradictory unity of language thinking and image thinking. “Fused Ideogram-Phonogram Pictorial Group” is a special small category of written word forms in the early stage of pictographic writing systems. This type of pictorial group enables phonograms to intervene in the imagery composition of the ideogram, forming an “integral” “pseudo-image”. This writing method, on the one hand, highlights the nature of verbal-visual dual-codification of pictographic writing systems (that is, the nature of audio-visual mixed media), and on the other hand, it reflects the visable language’s persistence of imagery.
Keywords: Pictographic Writing, Ideogram-Phonogram Pictorial Group, Word-image relation，Semiotics of Chinese characters

The British Library holds a modest but important collection of religious texts from a lesser-known people: the Naxi of the Himalayan foothills in southwest China. Among China's officially-recognised ethnic minorities, the Naxi are a relatively small group, especially when compared to their more populous neighbours to the north, the Tibetans. But the Naxi are nevertheless significant, not least for the unique way in which they record their religious literature: the dongba script...