Dancing along the Rivers: Shared Cultural Identity and Musical Diversity among the Lisu 傈僳 of Yunnan Province, China

The Lisu are a trans-border ethnic group found in Yunnan, SW China and also in neighboring states including Myanmar, Thailand, Northern India, and the Philippines. This paper explores the processes through which Lisu in Yunnan create music and dance, and their musical cultural fusions and collisions with neighboring ethnic groups. It asks how Lisu identify themselves in such a multi-ethnic cultural environment, and in the broader contexts of Chinese governmental policies and a dominant Han culture, using case studies from three types of Lisu participant dances: waqi, achi mugua, and gaqie. I illustrate the distinctive characteristics of these three dances and reasons, then discuss how each is identified in its given contexts, and finally examine what dance and music reveal about the spirit and aesthetics of the Lisu people.