Lamu Gatusa (Gaofeng Shi) is an associate professor at the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, in

Kunming Kunming (; ), also known as Yunnan-Fu, is the capital and largest city of Yunnan province, China. It is the political, economic, communications and cultural centre of the province as well as the seat of the provincial government. The headquar ...

Yunnan Yunnan , () is a landlocked province in the southwest of the People's Republic of China. The province spans approximately and has a population of 48.3 million (as of 2018). The capital of the province is Kunming. The province borders the ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

. He is also a

writer A writer is a person who uses written words in different writing styles and techniques to communicate ideas. Writers produce different forms of literary art and creative writing such as novels, short stories, books, poetry, travelogues, ...

, and a three-time winner of China's Minority People Literature Award. His studies have focused on his own ethnic group, the

Mosuo The Mosuo (; also spelled Moso, Mosso or Musuo), often called the Naxi among themselves, are a small ethnic group living in China's Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, close to the border with Tibet. Consisting of a population of approximately 40,000, ...

, and especially their

folk song Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has ...

traditions. In the early 1990s, carrying a large, old

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...

ese tape recorder, he went into the Mosuo mountain villages to collect folksongs and published the only book about Mosuo folk songs in China. In 1997 he finished the translation of a

shaman Shamanism is a religious practice that involves a practitioner (shaman) interacting with what they believe to be a spirit world through altered states of consciousness, such as trance. The goal of this is usually to direct spirits or spir ...

's recitation of the entire oral history of the Mosuo people, which it took him two months to record. In 1999, he published a book called "Mosuo Daba Culture," in which he collected and translated important oral literature of Mosuo indigenous religion Daba Religion. In recent years, Lamu's works have shifted towards critiquing the tourism and modernization of Mosuo culture. He has published the article "Mosuo People Do Not Live in the Western Exotic Fascination" and nine other articles in academic journals. Lamu has also collaborated with TV programs or ethnographic documentaries on Mosuo culture: "The Story of the Kingdom of Women", "Stories of Shangerila", "The Path to Heaven" and "Sun Rises, and Sun Sets." He is a member of the Chinese Writers’ Union and the Chinese Minority Nationalities Writer’s Union; and is a co-founder of th
Lugu Lake Mosuo Cultural Development Association
a non-profit organization dedicated to both preserving and increasing awareness of the Mosuo culture.

References

Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Educators from Yunnan People's Republic of China writers Writers from Yunnan Chinese non-fiction writers {{China-writer-stub