This article presents some images and conceptual structures surrounding notions of fortune and luck among Dechen Tibetans in southwest China and reflects on the strategies for negotiating the integrity of persons and other 'social containers'. First, it analyzes the problem in separating the multifarious manifestations of fortune connected to the well-being and vitality of persons and households. Secondly, it examines the ethnographic concepts arising from the interface between fortune and sovereignty by illustrating the cosmological imagination surrounding contemporary state rituals focused on the cult of Mt. Khawa Karpo. Finally, musing on the relation between vitality, containership, and alterity, the article highlights how tracing the flows of fortune problematizes the divide between interiority and exteriority, or the question of where the outside and the inside of a being or a society begin.
目次
Abstract 74 Counting Fortune 76 Three-Legged Subjects 82 The Lama Stranger: Fortune and Hospitality at the Foot of the Sacred Mountain 82 The Magnification of Life 84 The Cadres' Sheep 86 The Fortune of Fortune 88 Conclusion: Topologies of Containment 90 Acknowledgments 93 Notes 93 References 95
