Methods, Meanings, and Representations in the Study of Past Tibetan Societies

This paper outlines a methodology that makes possible a nuanced understanding of past Tibetan societies by exploring the tensions between structure and agency. Ethnographic data from a recent project on the historical demography of Skyid grong District is used to demonstrate how one can move beyond normative descriptions of a past society by using interviewees as both informants (who impart normative views) and respondents (who reflect on their own individual circumstances). In this way one can gain a perspective on the widely accepted rules of a society, while also using case studies to illustrate how individuals negotiated these rules in practice. This paper details the process by which one particular anthropologist came to know what he claims to know, and as such is a commentary on the reliability and validity of ethnographic data. Anybody who has asked Tibetans to expound upon dimensions of their culture will no doubt recognize common prefaces to responses such as “We Tibetans believe...” or “We Tibetans are Buddhist, so therefore...” Ask a general question, and you are likely to receive a reply that is phrased in terms that reflect cultural ideals rooted in Buddhist ethics. Such expressions pay verbal homage to widely recognized and commonly accepted norms of thought and behavior. Unfortunately, they tend to be inappropriately used to represent Tibetans as a people who act in 1 Research in Nubri was made possible by grants from Fulbright-Hays and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Research on Skyid grong historical demography was made possible by an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Anthropological Demography at the Australian National University. I am indebted to Tashi Tsering (Amnye Machen Institute, Dharamsala) for informing me about the existence of the document upon which the Skyid grong research is based, Lobsang Shastri (Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, Dharamsala) for his generous support in locating and facilitating access to the document, and Jamyang Tenzin (Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, Dharamsala) for his painstaking efforts in generating a typeset copy. An anonymous reviewer for JIATS made valuable suggestions that led to significant improvements in this paper. Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 1 (October 2005): 1-11. www.thdl.org?id=T1217. 1550-6363/2005/1/T1217. © 2005 by Geoff Childs, Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library, and International Association of Tibetan Studies. Distributed under the THDL Digital Text License. strict accordance with religious principles, a caricature that has not held up well to critical scrutiny.2 To put it bluntly, we should never assume that statements reflecting acceptable standards of behavior are an infallible guide to how people think and act under concrete circumstances. A vignette from my fieldwork in the ethnically Tibetan enclave of Nubri, Nepal, can help illustrate this point.3 We all know that Buddhist philosophers espouse a rather dim outlook on the taking of life. To circumvent the ethical prohibition on killing, Tibetans rely on a special class of butchers who accrue the sins resulting from slaughtering sentient beings so that other members of the community can consume meat free from consequences. But what happens in Buddhist societies such as Nubri where there are no butchers? Whenever I encountered men coming from a nearby pasture carrying bamboo baskets laden with chunks of a freshly dismantled bovine carcass, they would invariably point to the precipice below the grazing grounds and say, “My yak fell off the cliff and died.” Then one day a neighbor began to inquire about my host’s food supply. When he heard that we were down to roasted barley flour (rtsam pa) and cured lard (tshi lu), his eyes lit up and he divulged, “One of my yaks is going to fall off a cliff tomorrow. Are you guys in for a quarter?” We leapt at the opportunity to replenish our larder with something other than carrion and promptly drew lots. The next day we were given the right fore-quarter of a yak that, at the time of the lottery, had been walking about blissfully unaware that it was slated to take a tumble. This digression illustrates how Tibetans in Nubri use a semantic device to sidestep the issues of human agency and premeditated intent. My neighbor made the explicit claim that the animal died as a result of its own ambulatory incompetence, rather than admitting that he had dispatched it with a skillfully guided knife. He invoked the claim, “my yak fell off a cliff,” in an effort to dissociate his own actions from karmic repercussions, and perhaps also to deflect moral rebukes from clerics and fellow villagers. Killing is certainly considered reprehensible in this devoutly Buddhist community, but starvation is not a very attractive option either. The moral of the story is that cultural ideals often conflict with the realities of everyday existence. Culture guides but does not predetermine an individual’s thoughts and actions. The purpose of this paper is to engage in a methodological discussion centering on the interplay between cultural ideals and individual actions. Much of what I write is not new to anthropologists for whom the issues of structure and agency have been prominent in theoretical circles for decades. Nevertheless, while working in an interdisciplinary chasm flanked by a highly reflexive qualitative discipline 2 Toni Huber, “Green Tibetans: A Brief Social History,” in Tibetan Culture in the Diaspora, ed. Frank J. Korom (Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1997), 103-19; Donald S. Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Thierry Dodin and Heinz Räther, eds., Imagining Tibet: Perceptions, Projections, and Fantasies (Boston: Wisdom, 2001). 3 This vignette originally appeared in Geoff Childs, Tibetan Diary: From Birth to Death and Beyond in a Himalayan Valley of Nepal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 126-28. 2 Childs: Methods, Meanings, and Representations in the Study of Past Tibetan Societies