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The rise and fall of the green Tibetan: Contingent collaborations and the vicissitudes of harmony
... This chapter offers a case study of a grass sowing practice led by an iconic Tibetan environmentalist in Dzögé county (mdzod dge, or Ruo er gai County), Sichuan Province, China. This grassland conservation practice largely resonates with other scholarly observations in China that local environmental practices are as much about conserving the eco-biological sphere as they are about legitimating the long marginalized cultural practices (Bum 2024;Hathaway 2012;Yeh 2014). The alliance between global environmentalism and indigenous activism has been prevailing since the 1980s (Conklin 2006). ...
... And "[m]ore specifically, Tibetan claims and representations about environmental stewardship and ecological wisdom resonate strongly with other indigenous formations" (ibid.). The global eco-indigeneity in China has also created a space for ethnic minority groups and their scholar-activists for their cultural expressions (Hathaway 2012;Yeh 2014). This case study argues that the alliance with modern environmentalism and science not only legitimizes Tibetan's cultural practices, which have already been observed by other scholars (Bum 2024;Yeh 2014) is embedded with modernity and internationality, creates new meaning to contemporary Tibetan pastoralism. ...
... The global eco-indigeneity in China has also created a space for ethnic minority groups and their scholar-activists for their cultural expressions (Hathaway 2012;Yeh 2014). This case study argues that the alliance with modern environmentalism and science not only legitimizes Tibetan's cultural practices, which have already been observed by other scholars (Bum 2024;Yeh 2014) is embedded with modernity and internationality, creates new meaning to contemporary Tibetan pastoralism. This case study also points to the importance and power of narrating environmental stories. ...
In present times, we are increasingly witnessing a loss of life, especially among animals and plants. Some species are becoming extinct, while others struggle to adjust to new habitats. Human beings are looking for strategies to overcome the effects of climate change and mass extinction. The contributors to this volume reflect on how the current problems affect the living world. Artists and scholars from around the world share their views on the changes and challenges produced by the effects of the ecological crises in a variety of regions. While some of their stories concern loss, others offer hope by suggesting new ideas for living together in sustainable harmony within a multispecies world.
... M. Li, 2007T. M. Li, , 2014Yeh, 2014b). ...
... Huber (1997) argues that the 'greening' of the Tibetan identity in the mid-1980s largely came from outside the Tibetan community in exile and the globally distributed Green Tibetan image can be tracked back to 1960s environmental movement in the European-American societies (T. Huber, 1997Huber, , 2001 Meanwhile, it is noted, at the turn of the twenty-first century, there was "a rapid mobilization of international and domestic environmentalists and transnational investors accompanied by intensive Chinese and foreign scholarship, media coverage, and an explosive growth in tourism" in northwest Yunnan (Coggins & Zeren, 2014, p. 211;Litzinger, 2004;Moseley & Mullen, 2014 (Yeh, 2014b). However, Yeh (2014b) notes also that both streams of the making of the Green Tibetan are heavily politically loaded. ...
... Huber, 1997Huber, , 2001 Meanwhile, it is noted, at the turn of the twenty-first century, there was "a rapid mobilization of international and domestic environmentalists and transnational investors accompanied by intensive Chinese and foreign scholarship, media coverage, and an explosive growth in tourism" in northwest Yunnan (Coggins & Zeren, 2014, p. 211;Litzinger, 2004;Moseley & Mullen, 2014 (Yeh, 2014b). However, Yeh (2014b) notes also that both streams of the making of the Green Tibetan are heavily politically loaded. Explicitly using Green Tibetan imagery as a part of a larger effort, the early stream aims to win support for Tibet by appealing to the environmentalist ideal as well as emphasizing the negative consequences of the Chinese government's exploitation of natural resources in Tibetan areas; while the Green Tibetan claims, starting from the 1990s, often adhere to the Chinese state's laws and policies (Yeh, 2014b, p.263). ...
Within the context of China’s environmental changes that closely related with its rapidly expanding economy what can we learn from looking at tourism there from a political ecology perspective? Political ecologists have contributed to the politicization of discussions around the complex network of relationship that exists between nature and society. At places where economic development and environmental deterioration confront one another, tourism regularly is advocated and often adopted as a possible resolution for alternative modes of development without further compromising ecological relationships. Examining tourism in the context of political ecology therefore becomes inevitable.
This study is geographically situated in Shangri-La in Southwest China. Located in the Sino-Tibetan borderland and within a natural World Heritage Site; The Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Area. Shangri-La is a habitat historically shared by various ethnicities and nonhuman speices. Since the late 1990s, tourism development has been vigorously promoted. My own long-term engagement with Shangri-La, in particular Pudacuo National Park, dates from 2007 and includes an eight-month period of ethnographic fieldwork in Pudacuo National Park and Niru Village in 2013 and I continue to regularly visit Shangri-La till today. Drawn from the experiences, conversations and observations I had in Shangri-La over years, I view tourism as a process of “worldmaking” (Hollinshead, 2016) rather than simply as an industry. In order to understand this process of tourism “worldmaking”, I examine not only the political economy background of (eco)tourism development in Shangri-La, but also the constant interactions and exchanges between different perceptions/regimes of ‘nature’ realized through tourism development. I argue that in tourism “worldmaking” we can no longer view ‘nature’ singularly, as ‘capitalist nature’, ‘organic nature’ or ‘techno-nature’. Instead we need to recognize ‘hybrid natures’ that result from hybridization of these other, different ideas of ‘nature’ which constitute an ‘environmental discourse’. Through a critique of ‘Green Tibetan’, I identify individuals who, as ‘environmental subjects’, have experienced changes of livelilhood, often working within or alongside tourism development. These environmental subjects simultaneously hold different regimes of nature; thus are constantly enacting ‘hybrid natures’ through their being and becoming. I argue that these individuals are always in a process of translating and appropriating of ‘environmental discourse’ into their own thinking and practicing, which in turn allows them to contribute back to the ‘environmental discourse’, through tourism “worldmaking”.
Through integrating political ecology and tourism studies, the contributions to knowledge emanating from my thesis therefore are four-fold: the fieldwork conducted in Shangri-La provides a place-based and historically situated analysis of environmental subjectivities in the context of tourism development. Second, the thesis helps to recognize the formation of environmental subjects within the environmental discourse and, recognizing the production of environmental subjects explains how individuals carry out the hybridization of different nature regimes, as well as contributing to each. Thirdly, this, in turn, helps us to better understand tourism “worldmaking”, with which we can use to examine ecotourism and perhaps other kinds of tourism more generally. Finally, the thesis deconstructs the long-held binaries/beliefs in tourism about the relationships between culture and nature and discusses how tourism should be recognized as contributing to political ecology studies by continuously unsettling predetermined concepts such as ‘nature’, ‘culture’, and ‘modernity’.
... It comes in the form of narratives about Tibetans living in harmony with their natural environment through indigenous and religious wisdom. Since that time, versions of this idea have been deployed in different ways, by a variety of interlinked actors (Yeh 2014a). Drawing upon interest in 'sacred sites' and indigenous knowledge as tools for conservation, interventions such as Conservation International's Sacred Lands Program have focused on the revival of Tibetan cultural values. ...
... Respondents indicated that improvements in forest during the last decade result from both religious resurgence since liberalisation and government forest protection policies, often presented as mutually reinforcing. This reflects progression in Green Tibetan discourse from opposition to the state to a strategic alignment with state policies (Yeh 2014a), which since 1999 have become more environmentally protective. Although state policies were largely presented through a religious lens, religious and scientific rationales (e.g., soil erosion) for protecting forest were also not always presented separately in discussions suggesting the pervasive nature of state discourse. ...
... There was some ambiguity regarding the direction of cause and effect of this improvementwith religious resurgence and therefore virtuous actions leading to a better environment, and virtuous actions also including protecting animals and trees, so that relationships between sonam and the environment were reinforcing. Critiques of Western environmentalism by Tibetan activists hold the ultimate cause of environmental destruction to be sonam, dependent on people's hearts, rather than proximate causes of logging and pollution (Yeh 2014a). There is also a historical and political foundation to this idea intertwined with religious identity. ...
Representations of Green Tibetans connected to Buddhism and indigenous wisdom have been deployed by a variety of actors and persist in popular consciousness. Through interviews, participatory mapping and observation, we explored how these ideas relate to people’s notions about the natural environment in a rural community on the Eastern Tibetan plateau, in Sichuan Province, China. We found people to be orienting themselves towards the environment by means of three interlinked religious notions: (1) local gods and spirits in the landscape, which have become the focus of conservation efforts in the form of ‘sacred natural sites;’ (2) sin and karma related to killing animals and plants; (3) Buddhist moral precepts especially non-violence. We highlight the gaps between externally generated representations and local understandings, but also the dynamic, contested and plural nature of local relationships with the environment, which have been influenced and reshaped by capitalist development and commodification of natural resources, state environmental policies, and Buddhist modernist ideas.
... Many Tibetans believe that things such as glacier retreat and disease among fruit trees are negative repercussions for mistreatment of the deities (Coggins and Hutchinson 2006;Coggins and Yeh 2014). These interactions are thus working to build upon past traditions regarding reverence and care for mountain deities in light of changing contexts to nurture more of what Yeh (2014), quoting Agrawal (2005), calls a new form of "environmentality" among some lay Buddhists such as Ani Dom and Li Weihong. As Yeh outlines, terms such as ecology and sustainability did not previously factor into the everyday thinking of Tibetan environmentalists who focused on local deity complexes, but after meeting and collaborating with Chinese environmentalists and Western conservation organisations the framing of their thinking changed. ...
... Khawa Karpo is a god and a deeply important landscape for both local and larger Tibetan Buddhist practice, and reaping economic benefit from the land at the god's expense through modern practices including chemically intensive viticulture and hunting is seen as not paying proper homage or respect to the local mythologies that have developed over generations. It is worth noting, however, that similar forms of environmentalism and care for locally sacred landscapes suggest that these localised "Tibetan" efforts are likely also in uenced by changing state policies towards environmental protection and communication with Western environmental organisations (Yeh 2014;Woodhouse et al. 2015). Prior to 2008, several transnational conservation organisations and domestic Chinese environmental NGOs actively worked in collaboration with local Tibetan communities to promote biodiversity conservation and the value of sacred landscapes. ...
In Dechen (Bde chen) County, Yunnan Province, a Tibetan county of the People’s Republic of China, prominent lay Buddhist practitioners work to resist and mitigate the impacts of agrochemical pollution and climate change on sacred landscapes. In this region of northwest Yunnan officially renamed and dubbed “Shangri-La” by the local and national state for tourism purposes, and in alignment of this name with the term Shambala, a place of divine serenity in Tibetan Buddhism, the protagonists in this paper insist that chemical futures and pollution are only adding to the creation of a “fake” Shangri-La, and that more than human- and nature-centric views are necessary in building a more ecologically sound future. This paper ethnographically analyses these activities and motivations in the context of ecocentric views surrounding indigenous Tibetan more-than-human spirit worlds. I ask what drives rural Tibetan grape-growers to pursue an ecologically friendly agenda. Motivations include observation of chemical degradation on land, Buddhist ethics, local land worship, and conceptions that being a local Tibetan should revolve around the preservation of sacred landscapes and mountain gods and spirits rather than purely economic profit and development. A critical variable, however, is that lay Buddhists holding these beliefs are exceptions, with most villages showing more concern for the economic benefits of new cash agricultures over sacred landscapes and spirits. I argue that while many villagers are willing to ignore the long-term vitality of the sacred landscape in favour of economic prosperity and view new economic activities as morally acceptable within Tibetan spirituality, some individuals insist that preserving the local landscape is paramount to a sustainable future both locally and across Greater China.
... 13 In addition, some pastoralists value the wetland restoration from a religious perspective, as they believe that the restoration programme will lead to more water on the ground that will support more living beings in the water. The small number of these herders who have taken part in restoration are a part of trend, in which, Tibetans have become environmentalists or those "for whom the environment constitutes a conceptual category that organizes thought and practice" (Yeh 2014a(Yeh : 205, 2014b. Within this process some Tibetans have increasingly become aware of, and deliberately protect, their environment. ...
... Similarly, many herders said that they did not know why wetlands need to be protected, particularly the wetlands with too much water on them. Tibetan herders' responses suggest that unlike the recently-emerged and educated Tibetan environmentalists (Yeh 2014a), ordinary Tibetan pastoralists do not adapt their practices to the deliberate protection of wetland and grassland. Rather they are motivated by other benefits, including the cash incentive of state environmental programmes, religious and moral values such as accumulation of merit, and their own herding practices-for instance, better grassland for their livestock. ...
Alpine wetlands occupy a considerable area of the Tibetan Plateau, a region that is characterised by diverse but fragile ecosystems, including alpine wetlands, which are reported to have shrunk by 29% over the last several decades. This article explores the contradictory practices of Tibetan pastoralists regarding these alpine wetlands and examines how Tibetan pastoralists conceptualise and understand wetlands as well as how state policies, market forces, and religious norms work together to produce Tibetan herders' practices vis-à-vis their livestock and the wetlands. The analysis will first challenge the common notion that Tibetan Buddhism plays a decisive and consistent role in conservation and environmental protection, an idea that has been proposed by academic scholars and promoted by many non-governmental organisation practitioners. As an alternative to the attempt to measure indigenous people and their culture against the criteria set out by western conservation, I argue through this case study that Tibetan pastoralists' relationship with wetlands informs their negotiation with competing forces including state policies, market logics, global environment movements, religious resurgence, and traditional nomadic practices.
... 18 Tibetan studies scholars Toni Huber and Emily Yeh have critiqued these claims as ahistorical and as examples of contemporary politicized reimaginings of the past to present a favorable image of Tibet to global audiences. 19 However, religious studies scholar Cathy Cantwell provides nuance to these arguments in her critical analysis of the Earth Ritual (Tibetan: sa mchog). In her 2001 article, Cantwell argues that while the Earth Ritual cannot be understood as an environmentally friendly ritual according to contemporary understandings, it can be seen as part of a broader form of specifically Tibetan Buddhist environmental ethics. ...
... In this paper, I examine the ecology and polity of two kinds of sacred space and the complex geopieties 3 and geopolities that animate them. One involves a distinctively Tibetan form of geo-animism, found in what I call "animate landscapes," which include "god mountains" (a placeholder for Tibetan gzhi bdag, yul-lha, and gnas ri, Chinese shenshan 神山) (Karmay 1994;Ma and Chen 2005;Coggins and Zeren 2014;Yeh 2014aYeh , 2014bSmyer Yü 2015). The god mountains exemplify what Mircea Eliade would call theophanies-manifestations of the sacred (hierophanies) involving the presence of an anthropomorphic spirit or deity (Eliade and Sullivan 1987). ...
The “spirit” in spiritual ecology is an active political force deserving sustained scholarly analysis and public recognition. This article reports on 15 years of field research on “animate landscapes,” associated with gods and spirits in Tibetan communities, and “vital landscapes” associated with fengshui in Han Villages. Despite a century of dramatic sociopolitical change across rural areas in the People’s Republic of China, many villages maintain significant geo-phenomenological connections between body, mind, and land, comprising a body politic maintained through ritual cycles and dwelling practices that uphold the sanctity and integrity of vital watersheds. Comparative analysis of Han and Tibetan spiritual ecologies reveals that cosmological landscapes comprise the armature of relational ontologies grounding and informing everyday life, livelihood, and power relations. As dynamic, emergent, and flexible systems of socio-ecological adaptation that both shape and are shaped by regional and transnational media, they play significant roles in policy initiatives associated with Ecological Civilization and hold potential for broadening the horizons of Anthropocene scholarship, socio-ecological activism, and meaningful settlement in a profoundly unsettled world.
... The ways in which nature is incorporated into cultural discourses and economic practices are necessarily diverse and contested, which not only shape the situated, contingent approaches and trajectories of development, but often epitomize the ambiguity of frontier development itself (Smith, 2010;Castree, 1995). More importantly, in an era when environmental discourses and stewardships are referenced at translocal, even global scales, economic frontiers are increasingly also key ecological frontiers or green frontiers in state and public discourses (Hathaway, 2013)as Tsing (2005Tsing ( , 2015 and Yeh (2009a) have observed, frontier regions have been viewed to be places where people have intrinsic connections to nature, and therefore essential to the knowledge and practices of environmental conservation and protection of authentic ecological systems and dynamisms. This paper elaborates these points by examining the entanglement of development and the knowledge, discourses and practices of nature in Yunnan Province, a frontier region in southwestern China. ...
In this paper we argue that research on development in frontier regions needs to incorporate an explicitly environmental and ecological dimension, because economic frontiers are increasingly regarded as ecological frontiers in state and public discourses alike. We elaborate this argument by examining how the state-capital coalition has intervened in the development of Yunnan, a southwestern frontier of China, and how this process has involved the construction of an ecological civilization. This paper conceptualises the campaign of ecological civilization as the performance of state power through the discourses and practices of nature, and in this process, development is a highly situated and contingent process entangled with the complex negotiations between the state's ambition of socio-political assimilation, the volatility of the market and the agency of local communities. In specific, we focus on economic and ecological practices of using land for the plantation of the commercial crop maca. In the past decade or so, maca production in Yunnan has undergone a drastic process of rapid expansion and subsequently an equally rapid decline. Local authorities colluded with large enterprises to domesticate maca and promote maca production for land-based capital accumulation and poverty alleviation. Meanwhile, local farmers underwent a transformation, albeit contested, incomplete and full of back and forth, from passive recipients of development to active agricultural entrepreneurs. This article advances debates on frontier development and the role of nature in such processes, through the specific lens of ecological civilization in contemporary China.
... To better understand and articulate this process, I will examine the narratives from my informants in relation to recent discussion of the notion of "the Green Tibetan." Originally emerging in the 1980s (Huber, 1997(Huber, , 2001, "the Green Tibetan" re-emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a "a rapid mobilization of international and domestic environmentalists and transnational investors is accompanied by intensive Chinese and foreign scholarship, media coverage, and explosive growth in tourism" in northwest Yunnan (Coggins & Zeren, 2014, p. 211;Litzinger, 2004;Moseley & Mullen, 2014;Yeh, 2014). In short, "the Green Tibetan" is a set of representations in which Tibetans are perceived as resourceful in their ecological knowledge and their harmonious ways of living with nature (Huber, 1997). ...
The increasingly popular notion of Anthropocene urges us to reflect and review the role of the human, the Anthropos, as part of the planet earth. In this context, tourism has been singled out as a global industry that is driven by neoliberal economic principles and is inevitably intertwined in the production of the Anthropocene. At the same time, tourism has been adopted also as part of environmental governance and management, aiming for a more sustainable economy. Based on the idea that ecotourism contributes to the discourse of “nature” (and Anthropocene) disruptively as well as productively in unsettling the normative ideas of “nature” and “culture”, in this article I attempt to understand more specifically how ecotourism may enable individuals' subject formation in relation to the broader environmental discourse. Drawn on fieldwork in Niru Village, Shangri-La, Southwest China, I employ a political ecology approach and examine the ways individuals relate themselves to “nature”, through a process of negotiation and exchange with others engaged in ecotourism activities. The tourism encounters in Niru Village, therefore are also embodied encounters of different environmental subjectivities.
... Western audiences did not need support groups that connect different minzu, with one exception being a Tibetan and Uyghur Solidarity group that mainly consists of a handful of expatriate Tibetans and Uyghurs in Europe. to be convinced that "sacred landscapes" existed for Tibetans, for they had long been regarded as a people with a deep spiritual connection to the land [51][52][53], what Emily Yeh calls the image of the "Green Tibetan" [54]. Westerners' great interest in and romance around Tibetan Buddhism is buttressed by a highly visible and charismatic spokesperson, the Dalai Lama. ...
This article explores how global environmental organizations unintentionally fostered the notion of indigenous people and rights in a country that officially opposed these concepts. In the 1990s, Beijing declared itself a supporter of indigenous rights elsewhere, but asserted that, unlike the Americas and Australia, China had no indigenous people. Instead, China described itself as a land of “ethnic minority” groups, not indigenous groups. In some sense, the state’s declaration appeared effective, as none of these ethnic minority groups launched significant grassroots efforts to align themselves with the international indigenous rights movement. At the same time, as international environmental groups increased in number and strength in 1990s China, their policies were undergoing significant transformations to more explicitly support indigenous people. This article examines how this challenging situation arose, and discusses the unintended consequences after a major environmental organization, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), carried out a project using the language of indigeneity in China.
This study interweaves strands of history, culture, and resiliency to examine the complex fabric of the Tibetan experience. The research delves into the intricacies of Tibetan existence, scrutinising the relationship of past trauma, forced relocation, and persistent obstacles encountered by the Tibetan people. The Tibetan story is characterised by a deep craving desire for cultural preservation, from the advent of Buddhism in the eighth century—ascribed to Padmasambhava—to the revolutionary events of the twentieth century, such as the Chinese occupation and subsequent succeeding exile.
An effort has been made to centres this research on the psychological environment of Tibetans, both in Tibet and in the worldwide diaspora. The collective historical trauma has permanently impacted political persecution, and the ongoing terror brought on by the Chinese occupation through their imposed culture (Goldstein, 1989) In addition, the study looks at how trauma is passed down through generations and impacted the life of Tibetans research also providing insight into the intricate dynamics influencing Tibetan youths' mental health outcomes.
The experience of the Tibetan is a woven with the interweaves of researches in resilience, culture, and is a history of a various multilayered fabrics. It helps to examine the association between the ancient trauma, forced displacement and continuous encounters faced by the people of Tibet. The research is an effort to understand the complexities of inhabitants with the sensitivity of its’ existence in Tibet. It is bizarrely perceptible as a strong desire to preserve the culture dated back to the histology of eight hundred years ago. It is attributed to the thoughtful engrossment to Padmasambhava with a strong motivational source of preserving and living with their culture. Moreover, the struggle extended to twentieth century as a revolution is a persistence desire despite Chinese occupation and exile.
According to (Goldstien, 1989), the psyche of Tibetans is a matter of global diaspora being followed by political persecution, ancient trauma and persistence of struggle with Chinese encroachment and occupational setups. The landscape of psychology is a experience of generational transformation of pain and other mental health issues related to present outcomes in upbringings of Tibetan kids. A great transaction of hope is with the Tibetans living abroad and their continuous struggle to sustain the act as they must perform between maintaining their culture and integrating into a new society with the prevenance of thoughts with same sensitivity of Tibetian Buddhism. The study of Kuang (2002) identity conflicts and the stress of acculturation, and the need of community support in fostering resilience are among the significant subjects.
This research attempts to add to a comprehensive knowledge of the difficulties experienced by the Tibetan community and to offer techniques for promoting resilience and well-being in the face of adversity by examining the many layers of the Tibetan experience. As Tibetans go into the future, the study emphasises the need of cultural resilience, mental health literacy, and strategies for decreasing barriers to mental health care.
In the context of China's “Constructing ecological civilization” initiative, Tibetan environmentalists are proactively incorporating ecological science into their wildlife conservation efforts. This ethnographic study explores the logics, rationales and motivations behind this approach among Tibetans in Qinghai province. The article contends that Tibetan environmentalists adopt ecological science to gain legibility in the eyes of both the state and the wider environmental conservation community, thereby enhancing their political legitimacy and social recognition. On one hand, this practice counters the stigmatizing narratives that depict Tibetan pastoralists as backward. By embracing scientific discourses and practices, they challenge such derogatory views and position themselves as forward-thinking conservationists. On the other hand, this strategy indirectly preserves the traditional knowledge of pastoralists. Through their involvement with ecological science, they merge traditional insights with scientific methodologies, ensuring the protection of their cultural heritage while adapting to the sociopolitical landscape of contemporary conservation dynamics in China.
In his 2009 novel, Empty Mountains, the famous Sino-Tibetan writer Alai engages with new themes that were almost totally absent from his award-winning 1998 novel, The Dust Settles (titled Red Poppies in English). In addition to the new focus on post-“liberation” Tibet, other major new themes include wild animals, the natural environment in general, and the relationship that the novel’s Tibetan protagonists have with both. This article explores the representation of animals and the human–animal relationship in Empty Mountains and argues that it is instrumental in creating and asserting a new Tibetan identity and history. I then suggest that this representation reflects a major trend in contemporary Tibet to promote concern for animal welfare and more compassionate treatment of animals as part of an ethno-religious effort to reconstruct Tibetan identity in the context of the Chinese domination in Tibet and the growing impact of Chinese modernity in the region. The article hopes to contribute to the growing body of literature on the place of animals and the human–animal relationship in Tibetan culture by demonstrating that the symbolic use of animals in this culture is not confined only to religious rituals. It also provides a powerful case study that illustrates how human perceptions, practices, and narratives that relate to animals both reflect and are used to construct ethnic identities.
This article probes a long-overlooked concept in modern China—ethnic indigeneity—to propose new ways of looking at the relationship between the Chinese nation and its multiethnic minority groups. The Western scholarly community has long held that because the Chinese state uses the Marxist-tainted term shaoshu minzu (ethnic minorities) as the official designation for the non-Han people, the concept of indigeneity is irrelevant to understanding China and its ethnic diversity. This article investigates how reform-era China has witnessed the emergence of an indigenous cultural consciousness exhibited by the non-Han people such as the Qiang people from southwest China. The article argues that minority groups like the Qiang are enthusiastic about “enterprising” their ethnic identities by writing minority histories into the foundational myths of a multiethnic, unified China and challenging the historical hierarchy of the “civilized” Han center and its “uncultured” non-Han peripheries. By analyzing locally produced scholarly and touristic discourses, ethnocultural writing, and filming efforts in southwest China, the article proposes that “indigeneity” entails the interactive processes for a minority group to carve out its cultural, economic, and political spaces of creative belonging within the state by conversing with national narratives and contending for the epistemological authority to represent itself in multiethnic China.
Global warming and environmental deterioration have had an enormous impact on the Three Rivers Region. The rise of the monastic organizations in Tibet had its social-politic factors such as the international impacts on "Green Tibetan" movement, China's foreign non-governmental organizations (FNGO) policies, and the revitalization of Tibetan Buddhism. The first Tibetan Monastic Organization (TMO) was officially registered in Golok Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (GTAP), People's Republic of China (PRC) in 2007. Since then an increasing number of TMOs in rural Tibetan areas started to take participate in conservation around the globally important Three Rivers Region, and these TMOs have begun to make an impact on environmental governance. In this paper, we chose Badma Rinto Wildlife Conservation (BWC) as the case study to obtain a better view of peoples' perceptions on the role of TMOs in conservation and development through questionnaire, semi-structured interviews and participatory observation. The study had illustrated that the conservation efforts from BWC is widely accepted from both local communities and government, and surprisingly with expectation from communities on BWC to bring greater influence in terms of future conservation and community development. Furthermore, the environmental work for conservation in Tibetan areas must be a collaborative effort among residents, Buddhist monasteries, monastic organizations, environmental NGOs, and the government.
Book details Tan, G.G. Pastures of Change: Contemporary Adaptations and Transformations among Nomadic Pastoralists of Eastern Tibet Cham: Springer; 2018. 200 pages 978-3-319-76552-5
In the Himalayas, water is seen by some as intricately linked to humans and produced through ethical actions. Its materiality, as a lack or excess of rain or snow, as healthy or receding ice, as destructive hail or flash flood, is a reflection of humans' moral attitude and an outcome of a process of reciprocity that links humans to nonhumans, the land, and divine beings. This perspective departs from the conception of water seen through development projects and from studies about climate change, which tend to objectify water through an epistemology that isolates nature from culture. Water as the materiality of ethics is examined by drawing on cases from Ladakh and Zanskar in the Himalayas and by reviewing studies from other parts of the Himalayas. In particular, water as the materiality of ethics is analyzed through three perspectives: how water is produced as people interact with a sacred geography, how snowy peaks are produced as objects of morality through affective attachment and encounters, and how water is produced as part of multispecies assemblages. A review of an ontology of water defined by reciprocity is important considering the significant changes currently taking place in the Himalayas and which are brought about by climate change and state production through large‐scale development projects. It can enrich our understanding of their implications for the cultural life of the often marginalized peoples of the Himalayas and contribute to narratives about the Anthropocene.
This article is categorized under:
• Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented
• Human Water > Rights to Water
This article examines how certain Tibetans and Han Chinese converts to Tibetan Buddhism in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture and Beijing are articulating various forms of environmental discourse, both in terms drawn from Tibetan ‘geopiety’, and/or from a Western model of environmental protection. In relation to these trends, I further explore how certain Tibetans are articulating their understanding of Tibetan Buddhism within an apparently localised context, while other Tibetans are more obviously appropriating from discourses originating in the West and/or wider Chinese society to become more ‘modern’, while at the same time retaining a conceptualisation of Tibetan Buddhism that is hybridised between traditional and modernist understandings. I also explore how some Han practitioners may seek to become more ‘Tibetan’ by endorsing localised forms of Tibetan Buddhism and/or ‘performing’ certain Tibetan modes of religiosity, while others, due in part to geographical distance from the Tibetan landscape and cultural context, endorse an understanding of Tibetan Buddhism which is more closely tied to discourses of environmental protection originating in the West. In both Tibetan and Han Chinese cases, informants reflect upon their own beliefs and identity by gazing at the Other (Tibetan, Han, or Westerner), and marking out differences and similarities between Self and Other.
As rampant modernization profoundly reshapes the economy, culture and ideologies of post-reform China, Han Chinese have encountered directly the malaises of modernity, and are gradually losing faith in modernity’s promises of reason and progress. Numerous small towns and cities, consequently, have become anchors of alternative identities and lifestyles. This article examines the group of ‘drifters in Lhasa’, namely Han Chinese who have migrated to and settled in Lhasa, Tibet, in pursuit of slow-paced lifestyles, communal belonging and assumedly more authentic social relations. Drawing literature on the critiques of modernity and modern subject’s invocation of othered places and peoples as a means of self-criticism, this article argues that the constructed Tibetanness offers the drifters critical cultural resources to counteract ordering endeavours of Chinese modernity. At the same time, however, the modern subject in search of otherness tends to reproduce the modern modality of cognition which results in the objectivation of the other. The article investigates the effects of objectivation from two perspectives, namely the rendering-silent of the others’ voices and interests; and re-inscription of boundaries of difference between the self and the other, against broader contexts of socio-economic transformations in Tibet.
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