The Remaking of Home, Community, and Self: Rangeland Fencing, Resettlement, and the Resilience of Tibetan Pastoralists

Abstract

This dissertation explores how differently positioned Tibetan pastoralists have responded to and coped with Chinese state-led rangeland fencing and resettlement policies in the past three decades. Based on long-term ethnographic research in two Tibetan nomadic communities, namely Kirti Ribo in Dzorge County, Sichuan Province, and Gongri in today’s Qinghai Province, it describes how a wide range of ordinary Tibetan pastoralists exercise their own slice of agency in the face of hegemonic narratives and policies. The existing scholarship on this topic has largely focused on the impact of the development policies and discourses on the political economy of Tibetan pastoralists, and as well as the spatial restructuring of Tibetan landscapes. However, this dissertation aims to demonstrate that the impact of large-scale policies such as rangeland fencing and resettlement has been taking place at a much deeper level, one that is not visible in the spatial restructuring of the landscape, yet is very consequential in Tibetan pastoralists’ social, cultural, and individual transformations today. In Chapter One, based on my ethnographic research in Kirti Ribo, I discuss Tibetan pastoralists’ narratives of their landscape and their own explanations for land degradation, which often draws on a hybrid and interlocking ontology of causes. In doing so, this chapter offers an ethnographic critique of the tendency to blame Tibetan pastoralists and their animals as the primary destroyers of their land in the name of overgrazing. Chapter Two delves further into the resilience of Tibetan pastoralists by exploring the coping mechanisms of two Tibetan pastoral communities in Kirti Ribo, after their communal land was divided to individual households and clusters of households. Chapter Three presents how a multitude of actors in Gongri community have come to view, respond, and cope with the nomadic settlement project by turning state development projects into business opportunities. Chapter Four is a different case, where a Buddhist monk, namely Akhu Kabuzng Gyatso relied on the state to localize the benefits of institutionalized schooling in Kirti Ribo community. The content of Chapter Three is less inspiring than the content of Chapter Four, but both are realities on the ground. Chapter Five continues the theme of resilience of Tibetan pastoralists by exploring two innovative land-based educational programs in eastern Tibet, which brought together Tibetan elders, youth, college students, and children with the aim of strengthening intergenerational collaborations to revitalize place-based relationships and responsibilities. Chapter Six revisits the creativity and resilience of Tibetan pastoralists by exploring how a group of Tibetan herders and a few college students in Kirti Ribo have relied on documentary films to present alternative narratives of their land, people, animals, and plants. Many of the community leaders that I consider in these two last chapters exemplify in their work the versatile possibilities of politically engaged work beyond text and beyond academia.