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| Book Review: "The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China," by Charlene M. Makley | ||
| 作者 | Moran, Peter K. |
|---|---|
| 出處題名 | American Ethnologist |
| 卷期 | v.36 n.2 |
| 出版日期 | 2009.04 |
| 頁次 | 406 - 407 |
| 出版者 | American Ethnological Society (AES) |
| 出版者網址 | http://americanethnologist.org/archives/ |
| 出版地 | New York, NY, US [紐約, 紐約州, 美國] |
| 資料類型 | 期刊論文=Journal Article; 書評=Book Review |
| 使用語言 | 英文=English |
| 附註項 | The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China. By Charlene M. Makley. University of California Press, December 5, 2007. 400 pages. ISBN-10: 0520250605 ISBN-13: 978-0520250604 |
| 摘要 | The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post‐Mao China . Makley, Charlene M. . Berkeley : University of California Press , 2007 . 374 pp . This dense, detailed, and yet wide‐ranging study is based on fieldwork conducted during four visits, over a 15‐year span, to the famous monastery and town of Labrang in today's Qinghai province of China. It is one of the few book‐length ethnographic accounts of Amdo (as much of Qinghai was previously called by Tibetan speakers) Tibetans ever written, and the first in many decades; indeed, it is one of the few recent field‐based studies conducted among any Tibetan populations of China. As such, it offers fresh and complex perspectives on contemporary life in Labrang for its Tibetan inhabitants—who make up only a part of the population there. But this study also makes important reading for comparison with other parts of Tibetan China, including large swaths of Sichuan and the Tibetan Autonomous Region itself. Charlene Makley's nuanced work is useful in understanding the “Tibetan Buddhist revival” as it occurs not only in Amdo but also throughout the plateau. It is also a highly theorized look at gender in a particular Tibetan locality, accomplished through a primary concern with “participation frameworks,” following Goffman, as well as recent linguistic theory. Finally, this is a detailed exposition of the articulation between changing State policies and local concerns in the Labrang area over the last few decades. It is obvious to remark on the politics of opposition, and national–religious identity (re)construction, happening throughout Tibetan areas under Chinese governance. What makes this work powerful is its attention to the way that history is quite literally struggled with by local agents. For one example: Makley examines the Labrang Tibetan narratives she hears about Apa Gongjia, “Father State”—none other than the Chinese state anthropomorphized—in dialogue with the work of many other recent anthropologists of China who have drawn our attention to state–local articulations. Yet she also particularizes the genius of this local representation. “Father State” is a crucial figure in opposition to pre‐Maoist Labrang's gendered participant networks, which were also, although very differently, patrifilial. Of course the author elucidates the centrality of the monastery in the genesis and maintenance of Labrang's sociopolitical (not to mention religious) “mandala.” Yet she also describes the lay worlds organized by patrilineages and powerful men that existed in a subordinate complementarity with the monastic presence, a “mandala” now in tension with translocal, often “Chinese,” modernities. Makley makes plain the relative visibility, economic independence, and decision‐making power of Labrang's Tibetan women vis‐à‐vis Han or Hui women before (and sometimes well after) the Maoist years. But she also reminds readers that “relative” power is still relative and traces the ways in which Tibetan women's agency and access to currents of power was restricted in most areas by patriarchal structures and Buddhist monastic ideals. Her work's central thesis is that the changes at the heart of traditional Tibetan structures and epistemologies since the advent of the Chinese state have been changes in gender regimes. Much of this has been because of PRC policy—as during the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution years—that targeted citizen women as agents of “progress” and (re)production. Yet change has also come in the wake of important economic campaigns, the latest of which have opened Labrang to translocal forces including nomad settlers, Chinese businessmen, and of course foreign and Han tourists, too. Tibetan women's gendered performances—their recognition as “ Tibetan women”—proceed from radically different pressures and pulls: to the home and to tradition (Buddhist, Amdo Tibetan, local practices) and to the wider world (Chinese, contemporary, capitalist). |
| ISSN | 00940496 (P); 15481425 (E) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01142_3.x |
| 點閱次數 | 119 |
| 建檔日期 | 2017.05.19 |
| 更新日期 | 2020.02.11 |
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