‘It's scientific!’ Play, parody, and the para‐ethnographic in Southwest China

Play and games encourage persons to hold the world at a distance, while occasionally challenging its norms through parody, mimicry, and clowning, too. In this article, I offer new ethnography on drinking games among the Nuosu of Southwest China, who distribute penalty shots by injecting them directly into glasses with a syringe. While this revelry may evoke the recent Nuosu history of heroin (ab)use and HIV/AIDS, syringes are used in drinking games to parody the scientific writ large, which encompasses China's modern nation‐building approach, rationality, technological progress, biomedicine, hygiene, urban life, industry, precise standardized measurements, and even the human sciences, including anthropology, ethnology, and ethno‐history. Offering two case studies in which Nuosu ethno‐historians gesture to the scientific and the para‐ethnographic during drinking games, I show that – like ethnography – their play is meant to encourage everyone to stretch the bounds of the occasion by adopting a reflexive stance towards it.