After the pandas in Chengdu I went back and re-read Berger’s “why look at animals” (pdf) – I had linked to it after all and thought I had better make sure I wasn’t posting complete codswallop. It turned out to be quite timely. In the south of Yunnan, as we finally got away from mega-cities, in both Yuanyang and in XIshuangbanna, we found ourselves looking at people that look at animals very differently to the way we do.
In both places the local villagers live cheek-by-jowl with beasts that are part of their daily life, above all providing food. In both places chickens were everywhere, roaming the village, often with chicks in tow, the cockerels crowing from VERY early in the morning. We stayed one night in a house in a village in the rubber plantations near the border with Myanmar. Here the houses are on stilts with the animals underneath – including the chickens that roost on the beams right beneath our matresses. BANG BANG BANG as they flap their wings against the floor (or jump up and down we will never know) and then COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO up close and personal (and definitely not “cocorico” as the francophones would have it). All starting at some ungodly hour. In Yuanyang oxen are still central to ploughing the rice paddies (I can’t tell you if they are really are oxen or something similar, as Robert MacFarlane points out as we become alienated from non-human nature we are losing our words for it). It was quite a shock to see a guy knee deep in mud and water, driving what I assume were a mother and calf to turn the earth in his paddy. Ten minutes later as we hiked in the paddies an older guy brought two oxen down to graze further down the mountainside.
Even the houses are built to house the family and their animals. In Yuanyang traditionally a “mushroom” shape, now mostly replaced by a cube, the animals at ground level, the humans next, the drying / stored crop on the top floor. In much warmer Xishabanna, a larger flatter home on stilts with pigs and chickens underneath. Bees in boxes on the joists.
Of course this means a different relation to meat. In Xishabanna we heard that there’s less meat in the villagers diet than a few years ago, swine fever being just one factor. In stark contrast we see piles of food and an abundance of meat in the cities – here at least it feels hard to spot the end of the era of cheap food that I have been reading about in the excellent (if long) Capitalism in the web of life. We are very flexible flexitarians these days. The pigs that live under the house all year in the Xishabanna village are slaughtered for the family and friends for new year. In a market on the way to a trek we see dog meat for sale.
Berger talks about exchanging looks with animals. Clearly the pandas dont even see us. As he points out, in their sterilised environment the only thing left to provide stimulation to captive animals is the keeper bringing food or a chance to mate. The humans beyond on the fence simply don’t register. So we watch them without them returning our stare – and we watch each other watching them, who else are the panda head bands for? But now in the country we find we are “looking at people” that look at animals differently than the way we do (I dont know how they receive their animals gaze). We cant help but feel a bit uncomfortable at the voyerism of watching people with this other relation to animals, and for that matter to crops. They live in many ways similar to our grandparents, but more likely our great and great, great grandparents (different in Valais, London, or the valleys of South Wales).
And we have the feeling these ‘country folk’ don’t return our gaze too much. There is a distinct difference to the non-verbal communication we enjoy with city dwellers (non-verbal plus “hello”, and less often “what is your name”, “pleased to meet you” and other half remembered scraps from school). In the city we exchange knowing glances and grins – I see you watching me watching you watching me.. a good game in which both are complicit. In the country we are usually basically ignored: nihao gets no response, smiles rarely a reaction. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that we are pretty irrelevant to these villagers, with long and physical days, lived to a different beat, working the rice paddies or the rubber plantations and the tea bushes. Not entirely different to our irrelevance to the pandas beyond the fences and moats.
Perhaps the biggest difference between 2019 and anything more than 10 years ago though is of course the mobile phone. As good tourists we snap and occasionally video. And we pretty often get photographed and videoed ourselves (less so in the south it seems to me and not by the villagers I think). And while we go earnestly about, respectfully valuing difference etc etc etc, the kick is how they are looking at us. Aram has spotted, more than once, locals, even in remote small towns, filming us with silly filters on. On the way into the jungle we stopped at a small town market and walked around looking at the eels, ducks, chickens, vegies and, for us other “exotic” stuff, for sale. Amongst the stalls and produce spread on mats, some shy smiles, and a lady filming us with her phone. Aram turned and saw the filter: me with enormous green hair, huge red ear-rings, fully kohl’ed up eyes, and exaggerated red lips. Looking at animals indeed. 🙂
Yuanyang – packing it in
Blogging is back! After a short break it is slightly strange to think back to the rice terraces of Yuanyang. Not only because we have done a lot since then but also because although we only stayed for 2 days / 3 nights but it was packed with sights and sounds and seems longer.
We arrived after our first proper bus journey: 3-4 hours in a small coach and then a minivan to the village. After wandering up and down the village for a while we found the guesthouse – a Havre de Paix with a french speaking owner and his english speaking wife. We were greeted with tea and urged to relax on the balcony or the roof terrace and enjoy the view. Nice to be in a small family guesthouse, even if we also enjoy the bustle of hostels.
That evening, keen to enjoy the clear weather (and warned that the weather can change quickly), we organised to go and see the rice paddies from the sun-set viewing point. Although the scale of the view was impressive (a whole mountainside as far as we can make out) the spectacle was a bit of an anti-climax, perhaps because the paddies were not all flooded at this tome of year and because it is such a photograped view. Still we amused ourselves until the sun set.
Next morning we peered out at 6-something to see if it was clear. Yes, groan, up for the sun-rise version. This time a short walk in the village rather than a short drive. A bit more like it. The reflection of the light on the paddies is constantly changing with the shifting clouds above and below us; and the only other tourist is our new friend Katrina. A young guy from the village records a time lapse of the « mer de nuage » and changing colours while older ladies carry baskets of ducks past us and down to paddies to pass the day.
After a relaxed breakfast we plot a hike through the paddies. We catch a collective mini-van to a view point where a group of Chinese tourists paint the paddies and set off on a well signposted train. The path descends from the level of the villages near the top of the hill, down into the valley through terraced rice paddies, and then climbs through more wooded landscape to a village and look-out. After an excellent lunch, where we chance upon Katarina coming in the opposite direciton, we decide to prolong the walk to the main village of the area. The afternoon is less picturesque but takes us through three villages. We finish the day hot, exhausted but happy, and relish a tea on the balcony and a delicious home-cooked dinner in the guesthouse.
The next day is market day in the main village so we jump in a collective minivan for the short trip to town. There we find a mass of people and the usual sights and sounds of a market, usual but still stimulating and interesting. Poultry for sale, masses of fruit and veg, locals doing the weekly shop (including the gang from the guesthouse and others from our village where most of the guesthouses are for now), locals eating and catching up with friends and gossip, older men smoking water pipes and one guy puffing away and selling knives.
In the afternoon we head for a nearby village with traditional « mushroom houses ». We skipped lunch so the walking up and down the village turns into something of a lesson on fasting. At the bottom of the village is a newly constructued lookout where an old couple seem to live and they make the most of the flat surface to dry their corn and the lady was spinning rope. The village is in the midst of renovation, and we later learn the government has allocated millions to it as uit was the poorest of the valley. Again the target is richer Chinese tourists and the renovations in that spirit. As if to prove the point we stumble on a tiny cafe in impeccable taste, if it were not for the view on the rise paddies we might mistake the stone walls, natural colours and fabrics, arty feel and potted plants for somewhere chic in the south of France rather than rural Yunnan. At the top of the village a fancy new hotel has the best view – in a year or two this village will be booming too.
And that’s it. two days packed full of sights and experiences to mirror the use of space by the local villagers using every availale space for rice or ducks or corn or something! A very long day travelling by bus to Jinghong awaits.
P.S. Construction tip – materials are dumped at the top of the village near the road and are then carried down through the village to where they are needed by the women of the village – we didnt see one male porter. The roof of the building next to ours was being finished off and seemed to involve half the village dumping stuff, raking, watering scraping and goodness knows what else. In a day it was done.
Looking at animals, and looking at people looking differently at animals
After the pandas in Chengdu I went back and re-read Berger’s “why look at animals” (pdf) – I had linked to it after all and thought I had better make sure I wasn’t posting complete codswallop. It turned out to be quite timely. In the south of Yunnan, as we finally got away from mega-cities, in both Yuanyang and in XIshuangbanna, we found ourselves looking at people that look at animals very differently to the way we do.
In both places the local villagers live cheek-by-jowl with beasts that are part of their daily life, above all providing food. In both places chickens were everywhere, roaming the village, often with chicks in tow, the cockerels crowing from VERY early in the morning. We stayed one night in a house in a village in the rubber plantations near the border with Myanmar. Here the houses are on stilts with the animals underneath – including the chickens that roost on the beams right beneath our matresses. BANG BANG BANG as they flap their wings against the floor (or jump up and down we will never know) and then COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO up close and personal (and definitely not “cocorico” as the francophones would have it). All starting at some ungodly hour. In Yuanyang oxen are still central to ploughing the rice paddies (I can’t tell you if they are really are oxen or something similar, as Robert MacFarlane points out as we become alienated from non-human nature we are losing our words for it). It was quite a shock to see a guy knee deep in mud and water, driving what I assume were a mother and calf to turn the earth in his paddy. Ten minutes later as we hiked in the paddies an older guy brought two oxen down to graze further down the mountainside.
Even the houses are built to house the family and their animals. In Yuanyang traditionally a “mushroom” shape, now mostly replaced by a cube, the animals at ground level, the humans next, the drying / stored crop on the top floor. In much warmer Xishabanna, a larger flatter home on stilts with pigs and chickens underneath. Bees in boxes on the joists.
Of course this means a different relation to meat. In Xishabanna we heard that there’s less meat in the villagers diet than a few years ago, swine fever being just one factor. In stark contrast we see piles of food and an abundance of meat in the cities – here at least it feels hard to spot the end of the era of cheap food that I have been reading about in the excellent (if long) Capitalism in the web of life. We are very flexible flexitarians these days. The pigs that live under the house all year in the Xishabanna village are slaughtered for the family and friends for new year. In a market on the way to a trek we see dog meat for sale.
Berger talks about exchanging looks with animals. Clearly the pandas dont even see us. As he points out, in their sterilised environment the only thing left to provide stimulation to captive animals is the keeper bringing food or a chance to mate. The humans beyond on the fence simply don’t register. So we watch them without them returning our stare – and we watch each other watching them, who else are the panda head bands for? But now in the country we find we are “looking at people” that look at animals differently than the way we do (I dont know how they receive their animals gaze). We cant help but feel a bit uncomfortable at the voyerism of watching people with this other relation to animals, and for that matter to crops. They live in many ways similar to our grandparents, but more likely our great and great, great grandparents (different in Valais, London, or the valleys of South Wales).
And we have the feeling these ‘country folk’ don’t return our gaze too much. There is a distinct difference to the non-verbal communication we enjoy with city dwellers (non-verbal plus “hello”, and less often “what is your name”, “pleased to meet you” and other half remembered scraps from school). In the city we exchange knowing glances and grins – I see you watching me watching you watching me.. a good game in which both are complicit. In the country we are usually basically ignored: nihao gets no response, smiles rarely a reaction. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that we are pretty irrelevant to these villagers, with long and physical days, lived to a different beat, working the rice paddies or the rubber plantations and the tea bushes. Not entirely different to our irrelevance to the pandas beyond the fences and moats.
Perhaps the biggest difference between 2019 and anything more than 10 years ago though is of course the mobile phone. As good tourists we snap and occasionally video. And we pretty often get photographed and videoed ourselves (less so in the south it seems to me and not by the villagers I think). And while we go earnestly about, respectfully valuing difference etc etc etc, the kick is how they are looking at us. Aram has spotted, more than once, locals, even in remote small towns, filming us with silly filters on. On the way into the jungle we stopped at a small town market and walked around looking at the eels, ducks, chickens, vegies and, for us other “exotic” stuff, for sale. Amongst the stalls and produce spread on mats, some shy smiles, and a lady filming us with her phone. Aram turned and saw the filter: me with enormous green hair, huge red ear-rings, fully kohl’ed up eyes, and exaggerated red lips. Looking at animals indeed. 🙂