OLD AND NEW
The Deng people’s balancing act between modern and traditional
Life has changed so drastically and so quickly for the Deng people that Alusung, a former tribal chief, says he has personally witnessed his people leap from primitive society to modern life.
In the 1950s, Alusung inherited his father’s position, becoming a teenage tribal chief. The 70- year- old is now the village head in Shaqiong village of the Tibet autonomous region’s Zayu county.
Well- known for his colorful anecdotes, Alusung has long been the public face of the Deng people, the nation’s smallest ethnic tribe. Deng people, also called Dengba, are not among the 56 officially recognized ethnic groups in China.
“The column for ethnicity on our identity cards reads ‘ others’,” Alusung says.
Deng people live mainly in the mountainous regions at an average altitude of 1,000 meters east to the Himalayas and west to the Hengduan Mountains.
From the 1940s, some members of the tribe have been migrating to the valley in lower Zayu. The Deng population in Zayu has grown from about 200 people, to more than 1,800.
According to Alusung, Deng people used to lead a primitive life on the mountains. They grew simple crops such as corn. When food was short, they would go hunting or dig for wild vegetables.
Since the 1950s, most Deng people have moved from the mountains to open ground. Over the years, they have connected with the rest of the world.
With 55 households, Shaqiong village is the largest Deng habitat in Zayu.
Today, the village enjoys many of the amenities of modern life. Most houses are well built and equipped with tap water, solar heaters, and TV sets. There is even a village library. With improvements in traffic and living environment, the village has become a tourist destination. Alusung is the richest man in the village. The 50- some ox skulls hanging on his wall are a sign of his wealth.
According to villagers, ox skulls are a traditional symbol of wealth. They can only be kept when the owner kills the bulls to share the meat with other villagers. Alusung often kills bulls and shares the meat with the poor in the village.
Alusung is very proud of being the only person permitted to bring a knife into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing as a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in the 1980s.
It’s a Deng tradition for men to carry a knife. The elder villagers still carry them today. Like other Deng males, Alusung was given a hunting knife when he was a child and has carried it on his hip ever since.
Historic housing
Though most Deng people have built modern houses, a traditional residence is kept for show in Shaqiong village.
The two- story wooden house with a thatched roof is lifted on stilts covered with vines. The upper floor is for people, while the ground is for livestock.
It is structured like the sleeper carriages of a train. The gate facing the east is reserved for men in the family, whose hunting weapons are hung on the door. The hallway ends at the western wall, where another door is opened for women.
The hallway connects many windowless cells, which are living rooms and bedrooms. The easternmost room is for the family’s master, while the rest are distributed to each of his wives — Deng people followed polygamy traditions.
The house is structured so it can be extended westward when the man gets more wives, says Alusung, who had seven wives and 25 children. He later divorced six of them as monogamy gradually became the accepted norm among Deng people.
Ox skulls are often hung on the wall of the living rooms. Each room will have a stone fireplace and a simple bed, as the wives live and work separately.
Unlike their Tibetan neighbors who eat tsampa, a roasted barley, and butter tea as their staple fare, Deng people usually eat rice and the local “chicken’s claw” grain.
A rice dish eaten with fingers is the traditional meal eaten at festivals or offered to guests.
The dish is made of locally produced rice, and chicken slices or other meat stewed with ingredients such as ginger and scallion. People use their hands to crush the rice into balls and eat together with the chicken, which is prepared in a very special way and has a unique taste when combined with the rice.
Both Deng men and women have an affinity for tobacco and wine.
Men usually smoke cigarettes, while women often smoke home- grown tobacco leaves in their smoking pipes, which they almost always have in their mouths.
They favor a special low-alcoholic drink, which is made of the “chicken’s claw” grain, and is offered to guests.
No writing system
Deng people have no recorded history. They have two dialects that divide them into two major subtribes. It is said that their family names are assigned according to the places they live. People of the same family name own the forests together.
Having no written language, they used to make a record of events by tying knots on ropes or carving wood. For example, when inviting someone for a sacrifice in five days time, a string with five knots is sent and the receiver cuts one knot off each day as a reminder.
The Deng people use no calendar and do not keep note of their own ages or birthdays.
In Xiani village, another Deng community with a population of about 200 in lower Zayu, some Deng traditions are still observed.
When a disease is hard to cure, villagers used to resort to the local wizard for a cure. A few people still follow this practice, says villager Xiong Weilong, 39.
The senior wizard in the village died in 2008. There are several junior wizards, who can only kill pigs but not oxen.
Xiong says in 1991, 20 cattle were killed for a great sacrifice; villagers invited their relatives from nine nearby villages to share the meat. They stayed in the village for three days to finish all the food, says Xiong.
According to Xiong, they have lots of taboos. For example, it is forbidden to mention someone’s name after he or she dies. People of the same family name must stop working for some time after a death to mourn and pray for harvest, or else there will be disaster for the people and reduction in farmland yields.
Nowadays, weddings are the most important events in the village. Cattle, which are the main property, are still used for the dowry. The groom’s family has to give five or 10 live cattle, depending on their financial status, to the bride’s family.
In the past, some poor men who didn’t have cattle would find it difficult to get a wife, while rich people could “buy” more than one wife with cattle, explains Xiong.
For weddings, the wealthiest families might kill 20 pigs to share with the villagers.
The Xiani villagers depend on crops like rice and corn, and collecting cordyceps sinensis. The household incomes vary from 10,000 to 70,000 yuan ($1,634 to 11,437) a year.
Xiong is happy to see the positive changes to his village. It is now connected to the county town with a newly built road, and the local government has subsidized each household with 8,000 yuan for renovating their houses.
In the past, few people in the village visited even the town. Now some of them have been to Lhasa, Chengdu and other cities, to visit modern doctors or access other services, Xiong says.
“The roads have been improving and our lives are getting better. We’ll gradually have whatever people elsewhere have now,” he adds.
LikeXiong, Alusung is content with the current life of the Deng people. However, he is still concerned about their official identity.
“I have been making efforts in the past years including proposing to the National People’s Congress to add Deng people as the 57th ethnic group of China,” he says.