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HEROLD J. WIENS
the Miao, love vows between boy and girl are made through the exchange of girdle sashes."
Among the Miao, stilt houses with beds on the wooden or bamboo floor is the rule. Among the Yao a one-room house is usual, with a fireplace on the ground in the center of the room. Family members sleep around the fireplace. Sometimes the Yao have separate kitchen sectors for cooking purposes. Other aspects of the material culture of the Yao include browbands for carrying loads on the back, distinctive hairdos, and cross-bows which are also used by the Miao. The Miao material culture includes bronze drums, notched record sticks, and musical lutes made of multiple bamboo tubes. Neither Miao nor Yao possessed a written language of their own. Their religion is mostly animistic superstitions.10
The T'ai differ completely from the Miao and Yao in their exclusive love for well-watered valley bottom sites for paddy rice culture. For this they use yellow oxen or buffalo as draft animals, although such livestock has been more significant to them as a measure of wealth than for labour power. Vegetables, beans, tropical fruits, pigs, chickens and ducks all form part of their farm scene which is not much different from that of the Han Chinese. Their houses are akin to that of the Miao in being built on wooden or bamboo stilts, generally near a stream, and the T'ai also use crossbows. Tattooing of the skin is an ethnic trait of early times.
As with the Miao and Yao, free love before marriage accorded with social custom, especially during spring fertility rites, and, like the Miao, the T'ai lovers exchange girdles as love symbols. A bride stays with her own parents until the birth of the first child, when she goes to live with her husband. Little is known of the T'ai religious system before the introduction of Buddhism, but probably some form of animism associated with "nats" spirits attached to objects of nature or particular localities was common. Belief in and practice of sorcery are parts of T'ai superstition. Their dead are placed in coffins, but the coffins often are staked down with ropes on the surface of the ground rather than being buried underground.11 The writer has seen this form of burial along the Burma Road as late as 1940.
10 Eberhard, Kultur und Siedlung, 51-52.
11 Ibid, 53.
62
HEROLD J. WIENS
the Miao, love vows between boy and girl are made through the exchange of girdle sashes."
Among the Miao, stilt houses with beds on the wooden or bamboo floor is the rule. Among the Yao a one-room house is usual, with a fireplace on the ground in the center of the room. Family members sleep around the fireplace. Sometimes the Yao have separate kitchen sectors for cooking purposes. Other aspects of the material culture of the Yao include browbands for carrying loads on the back, distinctive hairdos, and cross-bows which are also used by the Miao. The Miao material culture includes bronze drums, notched record sticks, and musical lutes made of multiple bamboo tubes. Neither Miao nor Yao possessed a written language of their own. Their religion is mostly animistic superstitions.10
The T'ai differ completely from the Miao and Yao in their exclusive love for well-watered valley bottom sites for paddy rice culture. For this they use yellow oxen or buffalo as draft animals, although such livestock has been more significant to them as a measure of wealth than for labour power. Vegetables, beans. tropical fruits, pigs, chickens and ducks all form part of their farm scene which is not much different from that of the Han Chinese. Their houses are akin to that of the Miao in being built on wooden or bamboo stilts, generally near a stream, and the T'ai also use crossbows. Tattooing of the skin is an ethnic trait of early times.
As with the Miao and Yao, free love before marriage accorded with social custom, especially during spring fertility rites, and, like the Miao, the T'ai lovers exchange girdles as love symbols. A bride stays with her own parents until the birth of the first child, when she goes to live with her husband. Little is known of the T'ai religious system before the introduction of Buddhism, but probably some form of animism associated with "nats spirits attached to objects of nature or particular localities was common. Belief in and practice of sorcery are parts of T'ai superstition. Their dead are placed in coffins, but the coffins often are staked down with ropes on the surface of the ground rather than being buried underground." The writer has seen this form of burial along the Burma Road as late as 1940.
"Eberhard, Kultur und Siedlung, 51-52.
10 Eberhard, Kultur und Siedlung, 51-52,
11 Ibid, 53.
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