Flows and Frontiers: Landscape and Cultural Dynamics on the Northeast Tibetan Plateau

Roche, Gerald

doi:10.1080/14442213.2013.858765

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Several authors have shown how premodern Tibet developed its own Buddhist civilizing mission at the frontier of the state , Tuttle 2011, and that the Tibetan world is also characterized by internal diversity and the related dynamics of ethnicity (Kolås and Thowsend 2005, Shneiderman 2006, Klieger 2006. Some approach 'borders as liminal spaces' that are intrinsically ambivalent and unstable (Tenzin 2014, xiv), or focus on barely visible 'interstitial populations' (Roche 2014) in the context of porous and labile ethnic, linguistic, and territorial boundaries (see Gros 2014). Increasingly, and across the disciplinary divide of Sinology and Tibetology, our understanding of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands in their diversity and connections with larger dynamics, is being reshaped.…”

Section: Foreword and Acknowledgementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As is often the case with works that deal with Kham and Amdo (see for example Wellens 2010; Yeh and Coggins 2014), Aris focuses only on the Chinese side of the borderland, as if Amdo or Kham were not also a borderland with Central Tibet. This is true of another conventional expression: 'Sino-Tibetan Border(lands)' (see which furthermore renders invisible the other ethnicities of these borderlands (Roche 2014). By contrast, the eponymous volume edited by Klieger (2006) offers a much broader coverage of Tibetan Borderlands in which he encompasses Nepal, Ladakh, Sikkim, Baltistan, Gyelrong, and Amdo.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Frontier Tibet

2019

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This chronology provides a selection of major events of global and local significance: it foregrounds some key historical events to convey a sense of how eastern Tibet, and Kham in particular, has been shaped by various actors in conjunction with fluctuating political, economic, and cultural forces of different scales and intensity. 1 It focuses on the period from the mid-nineteenth century, during which Kham became a contentious zone, to the present. The first section of the chronology, however, starts in the seventeenth century because of the historical importance of this period and its relevance for later events. 1 This chronology aims to supplement existing chronologies with a focus on eastern Tibet and draws on Blondeau and Buffetrille (2002); Snellgrove and Richardson (1986); Tuttle and Schaeffer (2013); Travers (2009). For a general survey of Kham over history and the sources for such a history, Alexander Gardner's (2003) substantial commentary on the volume edited by Lawrence Epstein (2002) is a vital contribution. The realization of this chronology would not have been possible without Yudru Tsomu's collaboration and the many critical and constructive suggestions offered by David Atwill, Rémi Chaix, Carole McGranahan, and Scott Relyea. I alone am responsible for all remaining approximations, errors, and shortcomings.

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Section: Foreword and Acknowledgementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Frontier Tibet

2019

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“…More recent works explore the local histories of parts of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands and address the mutual interaction of diverse ethnicities in the context of changing economic, political, and environmental forces. They approach "borders as liminal spaces" that are intrinsically ambivalent and unstable (Tenzin 2014, xiv), or they focus on "interstitial populations" (Roche 2014) boundaries (see also Gros 2014a). Others scrutinize the roles local peoples have played in the sociopolitical and environmental transformation of these borderlands that generated "change in worlds" (Hayes 2014).…”

Section: From Space To Place: An Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…interethnicity in these borderlands, see Gros (2014a). It is, as Roche (2014) argues, a bias of Western scholarship to assume that ethnic referents are a given, which are often seen as immutable or displaying a historical continuity. Indeed, one of the claims-and results-of civilizational processes of expansion is to make "culture" spread across ethnic boundaries.…”

Section: Stéphane Gros Is An Anthropologist and Researcher At Thementioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction to “Frontier Tibet: Trade and Boundaries of Authority in Kham”

Gros¹

2016

Cross-Currents

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This special issue of Cross-Currents focuses on the region of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands that Tibetans call Kham: a historical frontier where several spheres of authority have competed, expanded or retracted, and sometimes overlapped. It has long constituted a buffer zone between the larger political entities of Central Tibet and China proper, and is an area that crosses cultural, ecological, and political boundaries.Kham is one of three traditional divisions of the geographical space that makes up what is often called "cultural Tibet" or "ethnographic Tibet," together with the central region of Ü-Tsang and the northeastern region of Amdo (see map 1). What makes the history of eastern Tibet special, as Wim van Spengen and Lama Jabb (2009, 7) have rightly argued, is its "relative location" vis-à-vis China and Central Tibet, an in-betweenness that make it a "contingent region" (Tsomu 2015, 1), both an interface and a place in its own right. Despite evidence of the relative autonomy-or even sometimes independence-of the disjointed polities that have made up Kham throughout history, its intermediate location and relationship with the neighboring centers of power have contributed to its evolving topology.The articles in this special issue of Cross-Currents stem from a collaborative project called "Territories, Communities, and Exchanges in the Kham Sino-Tibetan Borderlands." 1 Within the framework of this research project, the authors whose work appears here have avoided naturalizing any particular definition of Kham-although it is an inescapably endogenous category. Regions are the products of contested historical and socio-spatial processes. In Kham, influences from multiple centers have been exercised with varying intensity, and belongings and allegiances themselves have been multiple and variable. As Peter Perdue (2005, 41) contended, "the frontier zone was a liminal space where cultural identities merged and Gros 2 Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review E-Journal No. 19 (June 2016) • (http://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-19)shifted, as peoples of different ethnic and linguistic roots interacted for common economic purposes." These liminal areas can be seen as "microcosms," as Nicola Di Cosmo and Don J. Wyatt (2003) have proposed, where cultures and identities are constantly recomposed. In this issue, we adopt a multipolar approach to the adaptive and intrinsically mixed properties of border areas, which goes against unitary visions of China or Tibet. In doing so, we highlight the timespecific processes that took place in the history of this frontier, especially from the eighteenth century onward.Map 1. Geographical location of Kham. Source: Created by Rémi Chaix, based on data from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM).In order to decipher the processes that unfolded on the frontier, it is necessary to look closely at a wide range of issues, including migration, ethnic demographics, trade networks, indigenous notions of power or potency, political negotiations, political a...

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“…2 I hope to contribute chiefly the voices of Nung and Drung people to make for a richer and more complex microhistory that regards them as active participants in the social history of Yunnan's borderlands. 3 This attempt contributes to a larger body of scholarship-within both Sinology and Tibetology-that seeks to further our knowledge of local cultures and our understanding of the ethnohistory of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands through detailed ethnographic studies of localized communities and their mutual interactions (see, for example, Gros 1996Gros , 2012McKhann 1998;Wellens 2010;Mueggler 2011;Tenzin 2013;Hayes 2013;Roche 2014).…”

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confidence: 99%

Tricks of the Trade: Debt and Imposed Sovereignty in Southernmost Kham in the Nineteenth to Twentieth Centuries

Gros¹

2016

Cross-Currents

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Southernmost Kham, which borders Burma and Yunnan Province, remained at the juncture of several mutually competing political centers until the first half of the twentieth century. On the fringes of Tibetan, Naxi, and Chinese expansion and increasing political control, several Tibeto-Burman-speaking groups such as the Drung and Nung gradually became integrated into their neighbors' polities. Their political dependency often arose from trading with and accepting loans from commercial agents and from the intermediaries of local rulers, Naxi and Tibetans alike. This article addresses this practice of providing credit, which was developed at the expense of impoverished groups who were often obliged to accept the terms of the transaction. The author particularly emphasizes the connections between this system of debt dependency, the relationship between creditors and debtors that has to be considered in terms of exchange and reciprocity, and the question of political legitimacy. Within this broader context of regional interethnic relations, the article provides a detailed analysis of the concrete terms of the political relationship that existed between Drung communities and Tibetan chiefs of Tsawarong, which contributes to an understanding of the workings of this relationship and its economic, territorial, and even ritual components.

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Flows and Frontiers: Landscape and Cultural Dynamics on the Northeast Tibetan Plateau

Cited by 8 publications

References 35 publications

Frontier Tibet

Frontier Tibet

Introduction to “Frontier Tibet: Trade and Boundaries of Authority in Kham”

Tricks of the Trade: Debt and Imposed Sovereignty in Southernmost Kham in the Nineteenth to Twentieth Centuries

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