Kam Erotic

Ask what marks a Kam village and the answer is usually architectural: a drum tower rising over the rooftops in stacked, flaring eaves, and a covered bridge spanning the river below. Both are built of fir, traditionally joined without nails, and both are social buildings first. The drum tower is where elders settle disputes, guests are received and people sit around the fire pit on winter evenings. The Kam, called Dong in official Chinese usage and Gaeml in their own language, number more than three million and live in the hill country where Guizhou, Hunan and Guangxi meet, with small pockets across the border in northern Vietnam. Their language belongs to the Kam-Sui branch of the Kra-Dai family. That makes the Sui, Maonan and Mulam close linguistic cousins and the Zhuang and Thai more distant ones, while the neighboring Miao and Han speak unrelated languages. Kam is heavily tonal, and song is where it does its most celebrated work. The kgal laox, or Grand Song, is polyphonic choral singing performed without a conductor or instruments, with passages that imitate birdsong and the drone of cicadas. UNESCO inscribed it as intangible heritage in 2009. For centuries song carried history, moral teaching and courtship in a language with no script of its own until a Latin alphabet was devised in the 1950s.

Villages and clans are the working units of Kam society. Clusters of villages once bound themselves into alliances, known in Chinese as kuan, sworn to shared customary law and mutual defense. Religion is local and practical: ancestor veneration, spirits of place, and above all Sa Sui, the grandmother goddess whose shrines stand at the heart of many southern villages and who is honored at festivals. Wet rice sets the calendar. In Congjiang County, fish and ducks are raised in the same flooded paddies as glutinous rice, a system the FAO recognizes as globally important agricultural heritage. Fish and pork cured sour in wooden tubs for months or years are a household point of pride. The sharpest internal divide runs between north and south. Northern Kam counties such as Tianzhu and Xinhuang took on far more Han influence in housing, dress and vocabulary. The southern counties, among them Liping, Rongjiang, Congjiang, Sanjiang and Tongdao, kept the drum towers, the choirs and the hand-dyed indigo cloth beaten to a metallic sheen. Roads and tourism now reach showcase villages like Zhaoxing, and many younger Kam spend long stretches working in coastal cities. That leaves the songs and the carpentry resting on whoever stays or comes home.