Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 2018. xviii, 324 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos, diagrams.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-1964-6.
The Battle for Fortune is a well-written book based on author Charlene Makley’s long-term fieldwork in a Tibetan area not far from Xining, the capital city of Qinghai Province. Ethnographically grounded and theoretically sophisticated, the book’s discussion centres on 2008, an eventful year that witnessed China’s hosting of the Olympic Games, the horrific Sichuan earthquake, and a highly contested period of ethnic strife, especially between Han Chinese and Tibetans. Makley stayed in Rebgong, a well-known Tibetan town with deep religious roots and cultural influence in the region. She writes with an articulate style full of theoretical rumination and ethnographical nuance. Her ethnography is thus a valuable contribution to the study of contemporary Tibetan lives, especially in a region that is difficult for Western scholars to access.
It is clear to readers that Makley takes theoretical inspiration from Mikhail Bakhtin’s emphasis on discourse as dialogic and multivocal social processes in everyday life. She points out that “in Bakhtin’s understanding of linguistic practice, ‘voice’ is decidedly not the disembodied speech of a singular self. Instead, it is always manifested as a historically loaded figure or chronotope” (74). Makley sets out to write “a dialogic ethnography” that “is not about the ethnographer crafting narratives of harmonious ‘dialogues’ with ethnic others and thereby claiming an easy intimacy on equal grounds. Dialogic ethnography pushes one instead to grapple with the everyday realities of unequal access to communication and voice” (10). She has tried to accomplish this goal by conducting multi-site fieldwork, collaborating with local interlocutors, and situating her writing in multiple contexts.
As the title of book suggests, the livelihoods of local Tibetans in a broader historical situation are inevitably influenced by the Open the West campaign, a state-led development plan that has been in place since the beginning of the twenty-first century, and which thus overlapped with most of the author’s time in the field. Makley depicts a complex picture of local Tibetans’ reactions and resistances to this grand development initiative. She does an excellent job exposing the rich layers of local Tibetan everyday life in different aspects by not simplistically presenting the people as a homogenous and harmonious group.
Readers can see the power struggle between the medium of village deities, elders, and party secretaries at ground level, where religious and secular networks of power collide with each other (69–73). More interestingly, while the role of religious figures has historically been kept under a watchful eye by the Chinese state, Makley documents an unexpected twist, in which the village deity medium has recently been transformed into a master of “intangible culture heritage,” reflecting the changed discourse of religious-cultural practice in contemporary China (250). Tibetans are also divided in response to the government-sponsored resettlement plan that aims to move them down from villages in the high mountains. In the case of Langmo, a village of only twenty-eight households, eight of them choose to move down to a new settlement while the rest choose to stay. Why did the entire village not act collectively? According to the author, the first eight households consisted mainly of families with salaried employment, and the resultant difference of social position influenced their decision-making (166). In addition, Makley documents conflicts between different villages. According to the author, the struggle to access grasslands “led to a series of brutal fights” (179). Conflict also erupted between two neighbouring villages when one tried to build a road and a bridge to access more pasturelands and timber, and the other saw this action as an encroachment on its territorial rights (194). The three villages where Makley conducted fieldwork, indeed, each adopted different responses to the state:
In contrast to Jima village’s class and generational factionalism, and to Kharnak leaders’ neo-socialist communalism, Langmo elders ultimately prioritized Buddhist counterdevelopment efforts, grounded in particular claims to past and present lama-lay leader alliances. (162)
In depicting the full complexity of Tibetan village life, I think the author might need to take a closer look at her use of the term “elders.” In many instances, the term refers to villagers in powerful positions without making any further differentiation, yet in reality they are not a singular group, and are subject to challenges from others. In Makley’s depiction of three-day lay harvest festival called “Lural” in Jima village, for instance, the authority of elders was undermined when they were evicted by the medium of the village deity, even though the village party secretary was also a member of the elder group (69–72). In the case of village resettlement, decision-making by elders appears to have been a complex process with internal division and conflict. Elders is thus not a homogenous category.
In addition to Tibetan villages, the Chinese state is another subject of analysis throughout the book. In the spirit of “dialogic ethnography,” Makley claims:
We consider states not as uniquely unitary and rational administrative orders encompassing discrete local realms, but as, in practice, contested claims to particular forms of supreme authority or sovereignty that require constant embodiment and invocation by situated people. (71)
While the author has an admirably clear conceptualization of the state, the reality is much messier. As she acknowledges, when analyzing the Chinese state in the wake of ethnic unrest, she “can only claim a very partial knowledge of what was in many ways a highly opaque situation” (40). Given the difficulty of conducting ethnographic studies in the Tibetan area, several factors clearly have impeded Makley’s ability to fully achieve her goals. In terms of multivocality, the author is conscious that she needed to spend more time talking to women, and that the villager voices presented are thus mainly from Tibetan men. Her fieldwork site is a multi-ethnic area, with Muslims and Mongols present, yet their voices are rarely discussed or even mentioned, leaving a binary between Tibetan and Han Chinese populations. These considerations, if embraced, might produce an even more refined dialogic ethnography.
Zhou Yongming
The University of Wisconsin, Madison