Taming Tibet

Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development

Emily Yeh

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780801469770
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

The violent protests in Lhasa in 2008 against Chinese rule were met by disbelief and anger on the part of Chinese citizens and state authorities, perplexed by Tibetans' apparent ingratitude for the generous provision of development. In Taming Tibet, Emily T. Yeh examines how Chinese development projects in Tibet served to consolidate state space and power. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2000 and 2009, Yeh traces how the transformation of the material landscape of Tibet between the 1950s and the first decade of the twenty-first century has often been enacted through the labor of Tibetans themselves. Focusing on Lhasa, Yeh shows how attempts to foster and improve Tibetan livelihoods through the expansion of markets and the subsidized building of new houses, the control over movement and space, and the education of Tibetan desires for development have worked together at different times and how they are experienced in everyday life.The master narrative of the PRC stresses generosity: the state and Han migrants selflessly provide development to the supposedly backward Tibetans, raising the living standards of the Han's "little brothers." Arguing that development is in this context a form of "indebtedness engineering," Yeh depicts development as a hegemonic project that simultaneously recruits Tibetans to participate in their own marginalization while entrapping them in gratitude to the Chinese state. The resulting transformations of the material landscape advance the project of state territorialization. Exploring the complexity of the Tibetan response to—and negotiations with—development, Taming Tibet focuses on three key aspects of China's modernization: agrarian change, Chinese migration, and urbanization. Yeh presents a wealth of ethnographic data and suggests fresh approaches that illuminate the Tibet Question.

1 State Space

Power, Fear, and the State of Exception

And of course it is the State which declares the state of siege and therewith ensures Leviathan’s special effects, the fetish-power of the State-idea where the arbitrariness of power butts the legitimation of authority, where reason and violence do their little duet. “The tradition of the oppressed,” [Walter Benjamin] wrote at the end of the 1930s, “teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” …our notions…of certainty…now appear as a state of sieged dream-images, hopelessly hopeful illusions of the intellect searching for peace in the world whose tensed mobility allows of no rest in the nervousness of the Nervous System’s system.

—Michael Taussig, The Nervous System, 1992

In late January 2001, I traveled to Shigatse, the second largest city in the TAR, for the local New Year (Tsang Losar), celebrated a month earlier than Tibetan New Year in Lhasa. My friend and I failed to awaken early enough to join the majority of pilgrims on their predawn trek to the summit of Drolma Ri, the main peak overlooking Shigatse, and back down to the lower part of the hill; perched on its summit are the ruins of a fort, which according to local legend looked like a distorted Potala Palace because its copied design had been carved on a radish that shrank on the journey home. By the time we started our climb, a long sinuous line of thousands of pilgrims was already working its way down a narrow path from the summit, where the pilgrims had burnt juniper incense, and made offerings of tsampa and tea leaves, also called chömar. They had also planted new prayer flags on the summit, to replace those from the year before.

We passed by a young man, baseball cap on backward and sporting sunglasses, blue jeans, and a long black trenchcoat, with a two-pouch tsampa and incense holder slung over his shoulder. Like the many other young men and women we saw, he was covered in the white tsampa that all were throwing at each other. We came upon several circles of men and women picnicking and enjoying thermoses of yak-butter tea and green plastic jugs of home-brewed chang, near the saddle of the lower hill. Right on the saddle were several cairns, incense burners, and prayer flags. From there we watched lines of five to ten Tibetans—often strangers, sometimes mixed groups of men and women, others all men or all women—form spontaneously by the cairns, facing the ruins of the fort. Everyone dipped into their tsampa pouches with their right hands, and soon, on some cue I could not detect, the line of propitiators raised their right arms in unison. Their arms swung upward as the celebrants shouted “kyi kyi so so!,” letting just a bit of tsampa fly up into the air at the top of the trajectory and the end of the phrase.1 Then they lowered their arms and raised them three more times while calling “ lha gyal lo! lha gyal lo! lha gyal lo!”—“Victory to the gods!” At the very last syllable, the entire line of propitiators simultaneously threw their tsampa into the air. The mood was festive and light, men exercising their vocal cords in the brisk air with jubiliant, cacaphonous shouts of “Gyi hee hee!” and all present throwing tsampa into the air, toward the gods and at each other.

Pilgrims on their way to and from the fort also stopped momentarily on the path to trade tsampa with strangers traveling in the opposite direction. One opens his tsampa bag in offering. The person who happens to be crossing in the other direction at this very moment takes a small pinch of tsampa from the other’s pouch, puts a pinch in her mouth, and then three times tosses the rest over her shoulder, or to the side in a circular motion, signifying the three Precious Jewels, the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. She then takes another pinch of the offerer’s tsampa and smears it on his right shoulder, a way of wishing that person good fortune. As I was heading down the mountain a few hours later, three young men, completely covered with tsampa, came running past me. One saw my pouch, stopped short, and asked me politely, “Miss, please give me a bit of chömar.” I opened my pouch, he took a handful and threw it at his friends. A few seconds later a young girl of perhaps ten or twelve approached me and very politely asked the same thing. Again, I opened the pouch, she took a handful, and then launched the flour mixture into my face. Everyone around us burst into good-natured laughter, leaving me feeling foolish but happy to participate in the day’s festivities.

The most prominent religious practices in which, until very recently, virtually all Tibetans have participated at some point in their lives, circumambulation and pilgrimage, connect persons and places by the physical as well as metaphysical relationship formed between participants and the landscape. As such, circumambulation and pilgrimage are also ubiquitous Tibetan forms of place making. Indeed the Tibetan term for pilgrimage, nèkor (Wylie: gnas skor), contains within it the term for “place” (gnas), understood as both a physical place and the residence of powerful deities in or of that place.

Michel de Certeau has argued that “footsteps weave places together”2—that place making is a deeply embodied process of bodies moving through space, as bodies are always emplaced rather than free-floating. The walking of many circumambulation routes is hard physical work, and the physical connection between person and place that is forged in pilgrimage is highlighted by the fact that the most meritorious way of performing circumambulation is to prostrate oneself the entire length of the route, so that one’s whole body touches every inch of the ground along the way. The relationship between the body and physical landscape is created not just by seeing and touching the landscape, but also by positioning the body in relation to the place, by vocalizing and listening, as the vignette above describes, and by collecting and sometimes consuming substances from a place.3

In addition to creating a relationship between bodies and the landscape, pilgrimage and circumambulation are also key sites for the reproduction of Tibetan sociality. The practices not only bring families, friends, and villagers closer together in a day of fun and entertainment, but also bring Tibetans into direct social contact with others who dwell far away, forming new social relations that stretch across wide geographical expanses and deepening bonds of loyalty in old ones. Dharma companions (chö trog), strangers from sometimes far-flung places, whom one may meet and befriend on an important and arduous pilgrimage, form lifelong bonds and become friends for life. Thus, pilgrimage and circumambulation create broader senses of home and place. Indeed, as a ubiquitous social-spatial practice, pilgrimage historically created a sense of a common Tibetan identity across the vast Tibetan plateau, in the absence of a strong centralized state.4

Today, circumambulation continues to be essential to the ongoing reproduction and cohesiveness of Tibetan communities at multiple sociospatial scales. Spaces of circumambulation are specifically Tibetan places: the circumambulation route from Pabongka to Dogde on the Dharma Wheel Festival is one of the rare public space-times in or near Lhasa in which basically only Tibetan is spoken. In addition to the merit gathered, such occasions are also opportunities for catching up on gossip and family news, and conducting trade and business.5 They are also, quite simply, lots of fun. Picnics follow circumambulation, with food, sweet and butter tea, chang, and conversation leisurely shared among friends, relatives, villagers, and strangers. Indeed the explicit religious, merit-making meanings of these practices often seem subordinated to their social roles, and Lhasa residents joke about the old grannies who faithfully circumambulate the Lingkor every morning before dawn, turning their prayer wheels with one hand, counting prayer beads in the other, and gossiping the entire time.

Up through the 1950s, Lhasa residents’ spatial practices were marked strongly by their bodily movements along the three nested circumambulation routes of the Nangkor, Barkor, and Lingkor, and by other embodied practices such as the viewing and visiting of the gargantuan thangka (Tibetan Buddhist scroll painting) at Ganden Monastery on the fifteenth day of the sixth Tibetan month, making offerings at the unveiling of the great thangkas at Drepung and Sera Monasteries during the summer Yoghurt Festival, or the traverse of mountain ridges between the Nyangre and Dogde valleys on the Dharma Wheel Festival. These and farther-flung pilgrimages to and circumambulations around the temples with which Buddhism tamed the Tibetan landscape by pinning down the supine demoness continue to be crucial spatial practices today. However, since the 1950s, they have been circumscribed as the state seizes space. During the Maoist period these practices were largely banned. The 1980s saw a revival of religious practice, including those of pilgrimage and circumambulation, but the movement of Tibetan bodies in particular patterns through space has been once more greatly curtailed at times since then, most notably after 2008 when the state’s control over space corresponded with the increasing normality of a state of exception in Tibet.

This chapter explores space as the “privileged instrument,” the open secret of the production of state power.6 Analyzing how state power has been produced through the control over space since the 1950s sets the stage for the discussion of territorialization through material transformations of the landscape in the rest of this book. As Henri Lefebvre has suggested, the production of state space is a production of territory. Territory enables state action, and state action produces territory. While the modern state attempts to “pulverize” space into an abstract grid, social forces attempt to defend, create, and reproduce spaces of everyday life and social reproduction, for example through practices of circumambulation and pilgrimage.7

THE STATE EFFECT AND MODES OF POWER

The state, sociologist Philip Abrams demonstrated decades ago, “is not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is.”8 As a social fact and a structural effect, however, the state is exceedingly powerful and a compelling object of analysis. Throughout this book, I use the term “the state” to refer to this effect and the way it is experienced. Here I explore ethnographically how it has come to be manufactured and imagined in post-1950s Lhasa as a translocal and almost transcendental entity through specific spatial practices and arrangements. I examine the production of state power through control over space: the everyday techniques, practices, and arrangements through which the state becomes reified, appearing coherent, unified, and autonomous from society.

Key to state reification is what Michel Foucault called disciplinary power or disciplines, microphysical methods of order that generate power out of “the meticulous organization of space, movement, sequence and position…complex hierarchies of command, spatial arrangement and surveillance.”9 The command of space, characterized by a Cartesian attitude, a view of space as an abstract grid, is central to the production of state power and the state effect. In Lhasa, the spatiality of the state is characterized by control over mobility, strict regulation of movement, and the arbitrary freezing and releasing of the circulation of citizens through the city. Michel de Certeau characterized actions that originate from such command over space as strategies, in opposition to tactics, which are arts of the weak that take advantage of opportunities. The analytical distinction between a strategy, a characteristic of state space, and a tactic does not mean that subalterns are incapable of “strategizing” in the sense of planning or thinking logically about courses of action, but rather that the terrain on which action occurs has been organized and set out in advance.10

Another key process in the production of the state effect is the employment of practices of visibility, or what de Certeau calls the “mastery of places through sight.” Disciplinary power, generated in part by surveillance and self-surveillance, is characterized by the principle of vision. Architecturally, its apotheosis is Bentham’s Panopticon, which induces a state of permanent visibility that makes power and surveillance permanent in their effects. Surveillance is internalized, so that the effect of surveillance remains even during moments when there is no actual external conduct of surveillance. As a result, the Panopticon becomes “a machine for creating and sustaining power relations independent of the person that exercises it…[so] that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they themselves are the bearers.”11

The disciplinary practices and arrangements of control over space and the principles of visibility traced here include elements that are common across China’s territory, and indeed to statist techniques of government more generally. However, they are employed to an exceptional degree and through exceptional means in the Tibet Autonomous Region. The mantra that Tibetan residents of the TAR repeat in reference to the political conditions that shape their lives is “Tibet is special.” Indeed, as I will demonstrate, the TAR, and increasingly also the Tibetan areas of Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Gansu provinces, are zones of exception, where laws apply through their suspension. This is the case not just when martial law has formally been declared, but also during times when state officials insist that all is normal.

In his prominent theorizations of sovereign power, philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that the once-extraordinary state of exception has become a paradigm for contemporary government, whether democratic or authoritarian. The state of exception is a condition in which law and violence, as well as biological and political life become indistinguishable. The state’s violent response to the 2008 protests across Tibet is testament to the everpresent possibility of being reduced to bare life, of being abandoned by the law and killed without it being considered a homicide or celebrated as a divine sacrifice. Agamben provides us with a way of thinking about this increasingly permanent state of emergency in which the sovereign assertion of the exception becomes the rule.12

However, Agamben’s project is an ontological rather than a geographical or historical one. His assertion that “we are all virtually homines sacri” now marks a lack of concern with the embodiment of difference and the specific geographies of exceptionalism that make certain groups reducible to bare life. As feminist and other critical human geographers have pointed out, this approach not only ignores biological constructions of difference and their connections to citizenship, but also elides the uneven production of space. Yet exceptions and states of emergency, even as they become the rule in the contemporary world, are always applied differentially, not uniformly. Exceptionality is embodied and emplaced, not free-floating and placeless.13 As a specifically marked subset of citizens of the PRC in a contested national space, Tibetans in the TAR are made exceptional in their relationship with the law, by the spatial practices, discourses, and techniques through which the state gains form.

In Lhasa, these practices include not only rules of spatial partitioning, segmentation, and registration, and controls on mobility but also the heightened visibility of the state’s capacity for violence, displayed through the more than dozen military and paramilitary garrisons sitting within the urbanized core of the city. Just across the Kyichu River, Pumburi Hill is a popular and frequent destination for Lhasa residents to burn incense and hang prayer flags on auspicious days; on the hike up, it is hard to avoid seeing the army compound directly to the west, with its lines of cannons pointing directly at the city. Military convoys of trucks carrying troops, fuel, and equipment are a common sight, as are nightly patrols by armored jeeps with flashing lights. These reminders of sovereign ...

Table of contents

• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Note on Transliterations and Place Names
• Abbreviations and Terms
• Introduction
• A Celebration
• 1. State Space
• Hearing and Forgetting
• Part I. Soil
• Part II. Plastic
• Part III. Concrete
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Notes
• References