The Battle for Fortune: State-Led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans in China
The Battle for Fortune: State-Led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans in China
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Abstract
Based on long-term fieldwork in a rural Tibetan region in China’s northwest (2002-13), The Battle for Fortune is an ethnography of state-local relations among Tibetans marginalized underChina’s Great Develop the West campaign and during the 2008 military crackdown on Tibetan unrest. The study brings anthropological approaches to states and development into dialogue with recent interdisciplinary debates about the very nature of human subjectivity and relations with nonhuman others (including deities). The author does this by drawing on a linguistic anthropological approach to contested presence (as an ongoing “battle for fortune”). For most Tibetans, the active presence of deities and other invisible beings has been the ground of power, causation, and fertile or fortunate landscapes. The author thus takes divine beings seriously as interlocutors and parties to exchange in Rebgong, refusing to relegate them to a separate, less consequential, “religious” or “premodern” world. The book thus challenges readers to grasp the unpredictable, even violent, interpersonal dynamics at the heart of development projects in China and elsewhere. And it encourages a more multidimensional and dynamic understanding of state-local relations than mainstream accounts of development and unrest that portray Tibet and China as a kind of yin-and-yang pair for models of statehood and development in a new global order.
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Front Matter
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Introduction: Olympic Time and Dilemmas of Development in China’s Tibet
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1
The Dangers of the Gift Master
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2
The Mountain Deity and the State: Voice, Deity Mediumship, and Land Expropriation in Jima Village
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3
Othering Spaces, Cementing Treasure: Concrete, Money, and the Politics of Value in Kharnak Village School
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4
The Melodious Sound of the Right-Turning Conch: Historiography and Buddhist Counterdevelopment in Langmo Village
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5
Spectacular Compassion: “Natural” Disasters, National Mourning, and the Unquiet Dead
- Epilogue: The Kindly Solemn Face of the Female Buddha
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End Matter
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