On the Verge of Legibility

The question at this stage

An accepted presentation asking how endangered textual worlds become readable through Chinese, Zhuang, and Vietnamese frameworks.

Conference abstract

Original submitted abstract. Corpus figures and phrasing belong to this version.

This paper explores Zhuang ritual manuscripts from Guangxi, Yunnan, and the China–Vietnam borderlands, viewing them as everyday border archives on the verge of legibility. These hand-copied texts are not merely marginalized remnants of Chinese writing, but also exist at the intersection of script and voice, collective memory and cross-border history. We investigate how these manuscripts become comprehensible only when multiple textual worlds are interwoven.

Drawing on a collection of 139 Zhuang manuscripts, including 40 with explicit links to Vietnam, the paper analyzes reign titles, toponyms, variant Chinese characters, ancient Zhuang script forms, traces of Chữ Nôm, genealogical claims, colonial-era expressions, and oral interpretations. This paper introduces “cultural rhythm” as a provisional analytic tool for uneven textual temporality: the rates at which graphs, names, and ritual formulas persist, change, and become legible again across social worlds.

The analysis is structured around three patterns. First, preservation describes older forms that remain active outside standardized writing systems. Second, refunctioning refers to recognizable graphs that acquire new local, ritual, or semantic work. Third, cross-border legibility explains manuscripts that can be read only through the lens of Chinese, Zhuang, and Vietnamese frameworks.

These cases challenge the assumption that border regions merely absorb culture from a center, that non-standard writing is residual or lacking, and that a manuscript belongs to a single national or script tradition. Instead, Zhuang manuscripts illustrate how local practitioners actively reengineer textual authority through practices such as chanting, copying, correction, and custodianship.

Thus, their fragility is not only material but also relational. When ritual specialists die, family archives disperse, or younger generations lose access to local scripts, entire interpretive systems approach disappearance. By placing these manuscripts between visibility and readability, this paper asks how anthropology might study endangered textual worlds without freezing them as relics or speaking over the communities that sustain them.