In a deeply ethnographic appraisal, based on years of in situ research,The Battle for Fortunelooks at the rising stakes of Tibetans' encounters with Chinese state-led development projects in the ...early 2000s. The book builds upon anthropology's qualitative approach to personhood, power and space to rethink the premises and consequences of economic development campaigns in China's multiethnic northwestern province of Qinghai.
Charlene Makley considers Tibetans' encounters with development projects as first and foremost a historically situated interpretive politics, in which people negotiate the presence or absence of moral and authoritative persons and their associated jurisdictions and powers. Because most Tibetans believe the active presence of deities and other invisible beings has been the ground of power, causation, and fertile or fortunate landscapes, Makley also takes divine beings seriously, refusing to relegate them to a separate, less consequential, "religious" or "premodern" world.The Battle for Fortune, therefore challenges readers to grasp the unique reality of Tibetans' values and fears in the face of their marginalization in China. Makley uses this approach to encourage a more multidimensional and dynamic understanding of state-local relations than mainstream accounts of development and unrest that portray Tibet and China as a kind of yin-and-yang pair for models of statehood and development in a new global order.
Discipline and debate Lempert, Michael
2012., 20120331, 2012, c2012., 2012-04-30, 20120101
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The Dalai Lama has represented Buddhism as a religion of non-violence, compassion, and world peace, but this does not reflect how monks learn their vocation. This book shows how monasteries use harsh ...methods to make monks of men, and how this tradition is changing as modernist reformers—like the Dalai Lama—adopt liberal and democratic ideals, such as natural rights and individual autonomy. In the first in-depth account of disciplinary practices at a Tibetan monastery in India, Michael Lempert looks closely at everyday education rites—from debate to reprimand and corporal punishment. His analysis explores how the idioms of violence inscribed in these socialization rites help produce educated, moral persons but in ways that trouble Tibetans who aspire to modernity. Bringing the study of language and social interaction to our understanding of Buddhism for the first time, Lempert shows and why liberal ideals are being acted out by monks in India, offering a provocative alternative view of liberalism as a globalizing discourse.
At the beginning of the new millennium, the Chinese government
launched the Great Opening of the West, a development strategy
targeted at remote areas inhabited mainly by indigenous ethnic
groups. ...Intended to modernize infrastructure and halt environmental
degradation, its tactics in western China have resulted in the
displacement of pastoral Tibetans to urban residence and sedentary
livelihoods, causing massive social and economic shifts and
uncertainty and eventually leading to signs of discontent in
ethnically Tibetan regions.
Based on more than a decade of fieldwork, Exile from the
Grasslands documents the viewpoints of both the people
affected-Tibetan pastoralists in Qinghai Province-and the Chinese
officials charged with relocating and settling them in newly
constructed housing projects. As China's international influence
expands, the welfare of its ethnic minorities and its handling of
environmental issues are receiving close media scrutiny. Jarmila
Ptáčkova's study documents a politically and ecologically
significant process that is happening-unlike events in Lhasa or
Xinjiang-largely outside the view of the wider world.
Since the arrival of the first Tibetans in exile in 1959, a vast and continuous wave of international – especially Western – support has permitted these refugees to survive and even to flourish in ...their temporary places of residence. Today, these Tibetan refugees continue to attract assistance from Western governments, organizations and individuals, while other refugee populations are largely forgotten in the international agenda. This book shows and discusses how Tibetan refugees continue to attract resources, due, notably, to the dissemination of their political and religious agendas, as well as how a movement of Western supporters, born in very different conditions, guaranteed a unique relationship with these refugees.
Through an ethnography of the social and medical worlds of a community of Tibetan refugees in India, this book addresses two main questions: first, how has the prolonged displacement of Tibetan ...refugees affected concepts of health in the exile community? Second, how has exile changed traditional Tibetan medical practices? It explores how social changes linked to exile have influenced concepts of health and illness in the Tibetan refugee community of Dharamsala and by looking at recent changes in the theory and practice of traditional Tibetan medicine investigates the role of traditional Tibetan medicine in sustaining public health in the exile community.
How do Tibetans in India's Darjeeling Hills understand the life-span and various life-forces that influence longevity? This book analyses ethnographic and textual material demonstrating how Tibetans ...utilise temporal frameworks in medical, astrological, divinatory, and ritual contexts to locate and reckon life-forces influencing their life-spans.
In The Concrete Plateau , Andrew Grant examines the ways
that urbanization has extended into the Tibetan Plateau. Many
people still think of Tibetans as not being urban, or that if they
do live in ...cities, this means that they have lost something. Much
of this is relates to the expectation that urbanization can only
erode essential aspects of Tibetan culture. Grant pushes back
against this notion through his in-depth exploration of Tibetans'
experiences with urban life in the growing city of Xining, the
largest city on the Tibetan Plateau.
Grant shows how Tibetans' actions to sustain their community
challenge China's civilizing machine : a product of
state-led urbanization that seeks to marginalize ethnic and
indigenous groups. In their homes, neighborhoods, and businesses,
Tibetans' assertion of cultural identity and modification of the
built environment has prevented their assimilation into China's
national urban project. The Concrete Plateau presents
insights into the politics of urban development not only in Tibet
and China, but to contexts of urban diversity all around world. Its
findings are important for studies of urban development in the
Global South where in-migrating ethnic and indigenous groups are
negotiating top-down urban projects. Grant's book offers a profound
rethinking of urbanization, rurality, culture, and the politics of
place.
Spacious Minds argues that resilience is not a mere absence of suffering. Sara E. Lewis's research reveals how those who cope most gracefully may indeed experience deep pain and loss. Looking at the ...Tibetan diaspora, she challenges perspectives that liken resilience to the hardiness of physical materials, suggesting people should "bounce back" from adversity. More broadly, this ethnography calls into question the tendency to use trauma as an organizing principle for all studies of conflict where suffering is understood as an individual problem rooted in psychiatric illness. Beyond simply articulating the ways that Tibetan categories of distress are different from biomedical ones, Spacious Minds shows how Tibetan Buddhism frames new possibilities for understanding resilience. Here, the social and religious landscape encourages those exposed to violence to see past events as impermanent and illusory, where debriefing, working-through, or processing past events only solidifies suffering and may even cause illness. Resilience in Dharamsala is understood as sems pa chen po, a vast and spacious mind that does not fixate on individual problems, but rather uses suffering as an opportunity to generate compassion for others in the endless cycle of samsara. A big mind view helps to see suffering in life as ordinary. And yet, an intriguing paradox occurs. As Lewis deftly demonstrates, Tibetans in exile have learned that human rights campaigns are predicated on the creation and circulation of the trauma narrative; in this way, Tibetan activists utilize foreign trauma discourse, not for psychological healing, but as a political device and act of agency.
In Divination in Exile, Alexander K. Smith offers the first comprehensive scholarly introduction to the performance of divination in Tibetan speaking communities, both past and present.
In 'Tibetanness' Under Threat?, Adrian Zenz pioneers an analysis of remarkable recent developments in Qinghai's Tibetan education system. While marketisation processes threaten these positive ...developments, educational strategies of Tibetans in the Chinese system explore new ways of being 'Tibetan' in China.
