Description | The Melodious Sound of the Right-Turning Conch Historiography & Buddhist Counter-Development among Tibetans in China Wednesday, May 9, 2018 1:30 - 3:00 PM Allen Auditorium In this talk, we travel upriver from the famous Tibetan Buddhist town of Rebgong in southeastern Qinghai province, China to the small and marginalized Tibetan community of Langmo. Here we explore the stakes and consequences of village history-making as a dialogic process in the context of increasing state-led pressures on rural land use. I had met Langmo elders back in 2005 when I was first looking for highland communities to research. Langmo elders, it turned out, had their own goals for our collaboration. Their counter-development plans for the village meant “capturing” foreign donors and converting them to village patrons. Thus my naive offer in 2008 to help fund Langmo’s primary school roof repair drew me into deepening relationships with villagers I had never anticipated. And that meant taking a role as a key listener and medium for elders’ oppositional accounts of Langmo history. In the face of resettlement pressures, elders insisted that Langmo’s Buddhist history grounded the community’s sovereign right to their former lands. Charlene Makley is Professor of Anthropology at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Her work has explored the history and cultural politics of state-building, economic development and Buddhist revival among Tibetans in China’s restive frontier zone (SE Qinghai and SW Gansu provinces) since 1992. Her first book, The Violence of Liberation, was published in 2007. Her second book, The Battle for Fortune: State-Led Development, Personhood and Power among Tibetans in China (May 2018), is an ethnography of state-local relations in the historically Tibetan region of Rebgong (SE Qinghai province) in the wake of China’s Great Open the West campaign and during the 2008 military crackdown on Tibetan unrest. For more information about her work visit: academic.reed.edu… |
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