Wealth, Goods And Beliefs

The Miao people are well known for their elaborate silver ornaments. In Shi-Dong, a town by Qingshui River located in the southeast of Guizhou, famed in the region for silver ornaments, which are large and heavy, and in history for trade routes on waterways, where I conducted my fieldwork, the silver used as a currency for a long time in Chinese history have become a symbol of wealth. In this study, I take the silver ornaments in Shi-Dong as properties interweaved with magical power. The Miao in Shi-Dong have a tradition that the daughters inherit silver ornaments from their mother, while the house and land belongs to the sons. In ancient Miao's Cross-cousin marriage, the silver ornaments are always kept within the same family. Even though this marriage form is rarely seen nowadays, the remains still exist in the kinship terms and in marriage ritual practices. I suggest that these silver ornaments are not only possessions which are kept by their owners from one generation to the next within the closed context of family, but also transcendent treasures that authenticate the powers associated with a group or an individual's connections to their ancestors. However, with China's reform and opening-up mind,"to get rich is glorious'", today some Miao women in Shi-Dong even sell their inherited silver ornaments to tourists driven by the desire for money. The "family heirloom" has become a commodity. I argue that the use of silver ornaments by Shi-Dong people reflects their worldview of treasure, history and morality. In light of the role of silver ornaments in the Miao's inheritance between females and the materialistic reality, I suggest that the Miao's silver ornaments works both as the recognition of the Miao's romantic past and a reconfirmation of the power of money in contemporary China.