| Abstract: | Among the ethnic minority Lisu in the Nu River Valley on the China-Myanmar border, Christian missionization and Chinese development have led to cultural loss by paradoxically erasing and reifying Lisu cultural practices. Responding to loss, non-Christian Lisu men gather regularly to drink alcohol, a practice denigrated by state and Christian discourses. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this article argues that alcohol drinking is a form of melancholic play – a mode through which non-Christian Lisu men objectify and refuse cultural loss. Revising conventional understandings of melancholia, in which people are said to be haunted by loss, I analyse how the men exert a haunting force through melancholic play. Incorporating forgotten rituals and summoning abandoned spirits, they reverse hegemonic hierarchies, reshape communal boundaries, and remember lost lifeworlds. By illuminating how melancholia constitutes an active refusal of loss rather than a pathological return of the repressed, this article contributes to understanding how people transform loss into social creativity, agency, and political action. |
