Academic Research Fellowship Report - Yunfan Lai
Yunfan Lai is a Research Fellow in the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies. He was awarded a TRiSS Fellowship for his work on the Rgyalrongs, a group of people native to Western Sichuan, China.
Although they are recognised by the Chinese government as Tibetan ethnics, the Gyalrongs are genetically and linguistically distinct from the Tibetans. They are closer to that of the Tangut empire (1038-1227), the people who killed Genghis Khan. The Gyalrong languages, unwritten and vulnerable, are among the most conservative of all Sino-Tibetan languages. Scientists believe that they hold a key to the ancestry of the Sino-Tibetan family and to the worldview of the ancestors of Sino-Tibetan speakers.
The homes of the Gyalrongs are not only residences built with stones and timber with defensive and storage functions, but also the materialisation of Gyalrong society. The Gyalrongs mount into the prayer room on the top to fulfil their spiritual life, and have daily activities in the middle floors. Around the hearth, family members take their seats according to kinship hierarchy. Livestock is raised on the ground floor, where villagers start their day's work. In the pastures, Gyalrongs sit at the door of their log cabins, watching their yaks. The Gyalrongs compress their society into stone walls and wooden beams, and engrave their ancestry in their languages. Through houses and words, mysteries behind the Gyalrong world can be uncovered.
TRiSS Funding
The funding from TRiSS helped Yunfan in part, to hold an interdisciplinary workshop which aimed at gathering prominent young researchers from Ireland, Continental Europe, America and Asia, working on different aspects of the Rgyalrong world as well as other minority groups in China, including linguistics, architecture, anthropology, archaeology and literature.
"I wanted scholars from different fields to provide inspirations to each other in order to generate new research ideas and insightful outputs. It will provide an unprecedented opportunity to integrate different methods and analyses, which will facilitate the emergence of new research angles." Yunfan said.
His workshop speakers included:
- Shuyin Dong (Guangzhou), an expert on Gyalrong architecture with publications on Gyalrong buildings (Dong 2018),
- Shuya Zhang (Tokyo) who published a paper on Gyalrong kinship terms (Zhang 2020), will tell us more about the organisation of Gyalrong families.
- Jingming Fan (Paris), finalising her thesis in anthropology on Gyalrong women, spoke about female roles in the Gyalrong society.
- Jade d'Alpoim Guedes (San Diego, d'Alpoim Guedes 2016, Jacques et al 2021) portraited Gyalrong ethnobiology,
- Mario De Grandis (Dublin) presented local literature with stories around headmen's castles, and
- Gyalrong native, Yulha, who presented the complex relations between the people, the society and the language.