Wa Grotesque: Headhunting Theme Parks and the Chinese Nostalgia for Primitive Contemporaries

ABSTRACT

The Wa people have long occupied a special place in the state-directed political spectacle of minority nationalities, in both China and Burma. This fascination builds on older views of the Wa as dangerous barbarians, and closely evokes other primitivisms from around the world. In China and in neighbouring countries, state policy has recently combined with commercial entrepreneurism to cultivate a new, selective nostalgia for ‘primitive-exotic’ peoples like the Wa. In this paper, I discuss mainly China, and how the ‘wild’ Wa headhunting paraphernalia prohibited by the Chinese in the 1950s now reappear as kitsch. Some Wa of older generations see such revivals as dangerous, but younger people may embrace the revival. I discuss the new Chinese repackaging of primitive violence and the different Wa understandings of these staged exoticizations of their culture, including ways the staged representations are taken up in Wa attempts to revive aspects of their cultural past.