"Vanishing Shaman" (1996), a 28-minute documentary about Lao Beizhi, one of the last living bi (比), also called shibi (释比), or shamans, of the Qiang people (Chinese: Qiang zu, 羌族), an ethnic minority of Sichuan province in southwest China numbering approximately 306,000 as of the 2000 census, whose origins may trace back as far as the late Shang Dynasty (c. 11th century BC). The film explores the everyday life of this aging shaman who has no apprentices who might carry on his work, and explores the disruption caused to traditional Qiang spirituality by the spread of communist ideology to this isolated area beginning in the early 1950s, during the time of Lao's childhood and apprenticeship.
Filmed in rural northwestern Sichuan province, southwest China, c. 1995.
The filming was apparently done by documentary filmmaker CHEN Zhong (陈忠), also known as Chen Xinzhong (陈心中), Zhong Chen, or Xinzhong Chen, and the English translation, voice-over, and captions prepared by Dr. Emma Zevik (1957-2006). The film's ending credits list its year of completion as 1995 or 1996, while Zevik's website gives the year as 2001. Zevik's website (which went offline in 2001, but is still available in its last iteration, dated April 17, 2001, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine) lists this film as "A Maypole Studios Production" (Maypole Studios being Zevik's own production company, named for her scholarly preoccupation with the history of the maypole tradition).
Zevik, who in addition to being an ethnomusicologist was also a composer, visual artist, and poet, was a visiting professor of music composition and musicology at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music in Chengdu, Sichuan, China from 1995 to 1997. She also served as adjunct professor of music at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States; and as a research associate at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. Zevik's ethnomusicological work in Sichuan was supported by an Asian Cultural Council Fieldwork Research Grant (1996-1997), and she served as a United Board Scholar-in-Residence through that organization's China Program from 1995 through 1997. She established an organization called the Sichuan Cultural Studies Project, for which she presented film screenings and lectures, and also maintained businesses called Maypole Press and Maypole Productions.
This rare film was digitized from a VHS tape in the archive of Dr. Terry E. Miller, emeritus professor of ethnomusicology from Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, United States.
In addition to the cultural damage suffered by the Qiang people during the second half of the 20th century, they were severely affected by the Sichuan earthquake of May 12, 2008, whose epicenter was in Wenchuan County (汶川县), Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture (阿坝藏族羌族自治州), northwestern Sichuan province.
More information:
tinyurl.com/y9lvsa8m
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