Life Histories of Forgotten Heroes

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Life Histories of Forgotten Heroes? Transgression of

Boundaries and the Reconstruction of Tibet in the

post-Mao Era

HILDEGARD DIEMBERGER

University of Cambridge, UK

[email protected]

ABSTRACT

Oral-history projects in the Tibetan areas of China face the challenge of dealing

with a highly contested history and a sensitive political context that raises

numerous ethical questions. At the same time, this particular situation makes

them compelling. This paper looks at some examples of local cadres, heads of

monasteries and village elders who were a driving force in the reconstruction of

the Tibetan social and cultural fabric in the 1980s and 1990s. These are peoplewho had experienced Tibet before its radical reshaping through the Democratic

Reforms of 1959, survived the Cultural Revolution and, after 1978, led their

communities in their endeavours of reviving Tibetan traditions and promoting

local welfare. This generation of political and religious leaders has now largely

disappeared from the active scene. Their personal involvement, often above and

beyond their official roles, has been crucial in the shaping of contemporary Tibet.

However, Chinese official narratives and those of Tibetan exile - for opposite

reasons - tend to neglect or misrepresent their contribution. This paper shows

how the collecting of life histories and personal accounts makes it possible to

reconstruct a 'history from below', otherwise consigned to oblivion. At the same

time it provides some telling examples of how leaders negotiated the shifting

boundary between the religious and the secular while trying to reconcile the

moral authority of the past with a modernist vision of society. An engagement

with oral history may thus provide some insights into the current tensions within

the emerging Tibetan civil society that straddles a difficult pathway between thetenets of Chinese socialism and deeply engrained Buddhist morality.

Keywords: Tibet, oral history, policy and memory

Oral-history research in the Tibetan areas of China faces the challenge of havingto deal with a highly contested history and a restrictive political context. Scholars

Inner Asia 12 (2010): 113-25

2010 Global Oriental


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114 HILDEGARD DIEMBERGER

are confronted with numerous ethical questions when studying crucial events

which are perceived to be still sensitive. At the same time, such dilemmas make

this kind of research compelling. The recent publication of On the Cultural

Revolution in Tibet: The Nyemo Incident by Melvyn Goldstein, Ben Jiao andTanzen Lhundrup represents a step in this direction. One of the first studies to

explore events from the Cultural Revolution in Tibet using fieldwork and oral-

history data together with contemporary Chinese documents, it provides a

detailed account of the 'Nyemo incident'. In this incident, Tibetan villagers,

inspired by a possessed nun (Trinley Chdrn), but guided by the Gyenlog revo-

lutionary faction, attacked the local PLA garrison troops, and then marched on to

the local government seats in Nyemo County in June 1969, only to be thoroughly

squashed a few days later, costing many lives. This event captured the imagina-

tion both of Tibetan activists, who saw it as a fight for independent Tibet, and of

Chinese officials, who described it as a splittist uprising. But simplistic nation-

alist readings from opposite points of view obliterated important aspects of the

events, argue Goldstein et al. In their view, reality on the ground reflected the

entanglement of local and general issues, with internal conflicts in the commu-

nity and factional fights within the party. Despite the merits of this work, some

commentators expressed concerns about what could be expressed by informants.

One review is particularly pertinent:

It should be no surprise that in Tibet not one person taking an active part in an

armed uprising wanted to mention independence, as participating in any inde-

pendent activities is punished with long prison sentences in Tibet today. Even if

the uprising was a long time ago, Tibetans know very well what can be said

and what is better not told. It seems incredible to me that such an insight is

missing from the book, because making an interview in Cleveland or in Nyemo is

just not the same thing. The real views of the people and what they say in an inter-

view recorded by an employee of the Chinese govemment are obviously two

different stories. (, accessed20 December 2009)

The lingering sensitivity and controversy surrounding this four-decade-old event

shows that what Portelli calls 'the public struggle for meaning and memory' is

still open. This study is caught in a tension between the stated aim of recon-

structing what had happened and a more subtle exploration of perceptions which

have been part of the history of this event in their own right. As Portelli shows in

his study of the 1944 Fosse Ardeatine Massacre in Rome:

When an incorrect reconstruction of history becomes popular belief, we are not

called on onlyto rectify the factsbut also to interrogateourselveson how and why

this commonsensetook shape and on its meaning and uses. This is where the spe-

cific reliability of oral sources arises: even when they do not tell the events as they

occurred, the discrepancies and the errors are themselves events, clues for the

work of desire and pain over time, for the painful search for meaning. (portelli

2003: 16)
http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Revolution-Tibet-Nyemo-Incident/http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Revolution-Tibet-Nyemo-Incident/http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Revolution-Tibet-Nyemo-Incident/http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Revolution-Tibet-Nyemo-Incident/


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LIFE HISTORIES OF FORGOTTEN HEROES? 115

Over the past twenty years I have been involved in anthropological fieldwork in

Central and Eastern Tibet and I was often made acutely aware of the importance

of different perceptions of the past. Although not involved in any oral-history

research project nor with the study of major historical events, I have collectedmany materials that show how oral-history research can promote a better under-

standing of contemporary Tibetan society and highlight the link between politics

and memory. China as a state based on secularist ideology betrays a remarkable

uneasiness in its dealings with a deeply religious society such as the Tibetan,

despite the fact that freedom of religious belief is guaranteed in China's

Constitution. My research shows the importance of Tibetan Buddhist roots not

only for the Tibetan population but also for Tibetan cadres, and highlights the

anxiety on the part of the local authorities in dealing with anything that cuts

across the boundary between what is religious and what is secular. It also shows

the impact of recent policies on the mechanisms through which memory of

people and deeds is preserved or forgotten.

In this article I look at some examples oflocal cadres, heads of monasteries

and village elders who were a driving force in the reconstruction of the Tibetan

social and cultural fabric in the 1980s and 1990s. These are people who had

experienced Tibetan society before its integration into the PRC (and its radical

reshaping through the Democratic Reforms of 1959), survived the Cultural

Revolution and, after 1978, led their communities in efforts to revive Tibetan

traditions and promote local welfare. Their personal involvement, often above

and beyond their official roles, has been crucial in the shaping of contemporary

Tibet and provided remarkable examples of what Stephan Feuchtwang and

Wang Mingming (2001) would call 'grass-roots charisma'. Celebrated in narra-

tives of reconstruction that had almost an epic character, they recalled the greatBuddhist figures that had brought to the fore the shrines, texts and festivals that

they were recovering. They were a sort of local modem hero in the Buddhist

revival of the post-Mao era, which is sometimes called the 'further spread ofthe

Buddhist doctrine' (yang dar) in continuity with the 'first spread of the

Buddhist doctrine' (snga dar) during the Tibetan imperial period (sixth-ninth

centuries) and the later spread of the Buddhist doctrine (phyi dar) after the tenth

century. This generation of political and religious leaders has now largely disap-peared from the active scene as a result of more restrictive policies on religion

and culture and the passing of time, as most of them have retired or died.

Chinese official narratives and those of Tibetan exile, for opposite reasons, tend

to neglect or misrepresent their contribution. We could say that they were too

involved with the Chinese administration to be admired and recruited by

Tibetan activists and too devoted to local religious interest to be relied upon

and promoted by the Chinese authorities. They now seem to have disappeared

from the public narrative space that would make them part of a collective

process of connecting the past to the present and the future. With their demise,

the memory of a generation that experienced and contributed to crucial histor-

ical changes in Tibetan society risks remaining untold and unrecorded. Their


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fate excludes them from what Passerini described as the inter-subjective process

of remembering:

What is required is indeednot a simple and spontaneousmemory,not the one that

stems from a need for vengeance, for instance, but a memory of a memory, a

memory that is possible because it evokes another memory. We can remember

onlythanks to the fact that somebodyhas rememberedbefore us, that otherpeople

in the past have challenged death and terror on the basis of their memory.

Remembering has to be conceived as a highly inter-subjective relationship.

(passerini 1992:2)

THE DEVOUT CADRE AND THE HOLY SHRINE

In Tibetan landscapes, special places are often linked to the lives of important

people so that narratives of place and narratives of life become tightly inter-

twined. Located in Kyirong County in southwestern Tibet, the monastery of

Trakar Taso, built where the famous twelfth-century mystic Milarepa is said to

have meditated for nine years, is one of these places. It shared the destiny of

many other religious sites that faced destruction by intention or neglect duringthe Cultural Revolution, when erasing the past seemed indispensable to estab-

lishing the new Tibet. In the post-Mao era it saw the involvement of a number of

people trying to reconstruct this shrine. These included Lhasa officials, an ex-

monk who had returned to religious life, a growing community of nuns, a local

administrator, and so on. I remember the stories of these people being told along

with those of the great spiritual masters from the past, as if they had become part

of the local mythology. They had been able to achieve those feats in the 1980s

and early 1990s, an era when China's religious policy in Tibet was at its most lib-

eral. After 1994, new policies showed an increasing uneasiness towards anything

that blurred the boundary between religion and politics, sacred and secular and,

more generally, what is defmed as 'old society' (spyi tshags rnyingpa) and 'new

society' (spyi tshags gsar pa). When religious policy became tighter, and the sep-

aration between religion and politics more stringent, their remembrance started

to pose a particular challenge.

By the end of the Cultural Revolution, Trakar Taso, with its monastic build-

ings and ancient printing house perched on a steep slope on a gorge south of

Dzongkha town,2 was in ruins. It was found in this condition by a group of

Tibetan scholars who were carrying out surveys into what had survived the

Cultural Revolution. One of them said in November 2009:

I first went to Trakar Taso in 1989 with two colleagues. They were senior

researchers,much older than me; I was very young then and mainly followedtheir

lead. At that time we were deeply aware that a lot had been destroyed during the

Cultural Revolution and we felt that we had to care for what had survived. I had

also a strong influence from my mother who had exposedme to Tibetan texts and

relics. We saw many places and eventually found the ruins of Trakar Taso.There


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we saw ancient printing blocks exposed to the rain, ritual items and objects that we

felt to be very precious scattered all over the place. My two colleagues highlighted

how famous Trakar Taso was in Tibetan history. This contrasted with the desolate

place in front of our eyes, now completely ernpty, abandoned. We felt great pity,we felt very sad ... especially sad, at that view. We felt that we should at least take

care of the ancient printing blocks.

These feelings prompted the scholars to ask the local authorities about the aban-

doned shrine:

We went back to the county seat and asked the local governor for advice, men-

tioning that all this should be looked after. We asked whether there were some

monks from the monastery left. The county governor said that we should speak to

Pho L.3 He introduced him to us - he was great! From Pho L. we leamed that there

was one Trakar Taso monk that had survived, called Shedra T.,4 and we went to

meet him. He lived in a small house of mud bricks and as we arrived there I saw a

middle-aged man carrying a baby. I rernernber this very clearly. He said that he

was sad about Trakar Taso's current condition and from time to time he would

visit the ruins. We said we would like to see the monastery restored and asked

whether he could look after that. He was hesitant at first and pointed out that he

had had to disrobe and marry and thus he might not be in the most suitable posi-

tion to lead a new monastic community. Eventually he said that if there was some

support he would do so.

The scholars discovered that the destiny ofTrakar Taso had already been a con-

cern to many in the community and in this way the restoration project started,

relying on very modest private funding:

At first we did not get big money, we collected some private funding among our-

selves and asked people for more private support. There were also some donations

of wood. Among the local people Pho L. really understood the situation and he

supported the operation. The county leader said that he would not support us but

he would not obstruct the operation, either. Pho L. gathered support among local

people in a private capacity.

At that time, I was told, although there was hardly any government support, the

fact that no permits were required made such spontaneous reconstruction

endeavours relatively simple. That experience deeply impressed the young

scholar, who decided to pursue his interest in Tibetan culture with a pragmatic

approach and joined an organisation established by the Panchen Lama and

Ngabo Ngawang Jigme to promote welfare projects and the restoration of Tibet's

cultural heritage:

In 1991 I moved from my academic institution to an organisation that was looking

after Tibetan cultural heritage and promoted international fund raising to this

effect. At that time Trakar Taso was adopted as a project and we managed to

channel international funding towards it. This was possible only for a limited


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period oftime, in 1994there was a big policy change ... After Shedra T. and Pho

L. died, I remained in touch with the nuns who managed to run the place, retrieve

books and manuscripts that had been hidden and get them catalogued.

The local township governor (xiangzhang) Pho L. (who had promoted and sup-

ported the endeavour inspired by the scholars' visit to Trakar Taso) was an

imposing man, highly charismatic and popular in his community. I first met him

in June 1993, during one of my research trips to that area. This administrator of a

modernist, secularist state seemed to behave like a traditional community elder,

but I was not too surprised as I had already come across party secretaries blessing

community fields, and other religiously engaged governors. He immediately

started to tell about his homeland, his own story and what he did to revive the

sanctuary of one of Tibet's most famous mystics:

This used to be the ancientkingdom of Gungthang and in ancienttimes this was a

main trade route and dhanna route. We can still se the ruins of the royal palace.

The kings had the name of Thride (Khri Ide)5because they were descendants of

the ancient Tibetan emperors.6That snow mountain is the protector of the kings.

They built the fortressand many monasteriesandtemples.Insidethe fortressthere

is Dzonkha Chode monastery and the Droma temple, which is very ancient and

built in Nepalese style. Down in the souththere is the famous PhagpaWatitemple

which used to house a very holy statue. On the way there is Trakar Taso,

Milarepa's meditationplace.

He mentioned the ancient Tibetan emperors and the Buddhist kings of

Gungthang who saw the support of Buddhist deeds as part of their rule; they were

apparently an important reference for him. He blended themes from Buddhisthistories and biographies with his own story and that ofthe people with whom he

shared his vision. 'I was once a monk in Dzonkha Chde, the main monastery

here', he said, and then 'I spent three years injail during the Cultural Revolution.

That was very hard but after Deng's policy change I was rehabilitated and even-

tually recruited by the administration. Now I am here and I can do things for the

community and for the holy places of this area.' His was a narrative of both sur-

vival and celebration, rooted in the past and looking towards the future and thenew opportunities. In fact he had not only enthusiastically supported cultural

revival but had opened a successful mechanical workshop and was looking after

the welfare of the community with commitment.

I met Pho L. again one year later, at the end of July 1994. He was leading the

summer festival in an encampment of white tents amidst the barley fields and

was surrounded by men and women wearing their best traditional costumes. In

the middle of the dancing crowd was a central pole with Mao's portrait attached

to it. It was the meeting of two worlds, communist modernity and Tibetan tradi-

tion. In this second encounter Pho L. mentioned events surrounding the

restoration of Trakar Taso. In between, however, he voiced a sense of anxiety

and disbelief: according to new administrative procedures, he was going to be


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reappointed to an administrative position but only as deputy xiangzhang. The

notion of' deputy' contrasted with Pho L.'s apparent seniority? and popularity. At

that time I could not make much sense of his statement. I met him once more in

1997. By then he had retired and was rather depressed. By my next visit to thearea, a few years later, I heard that he had died. On a visit in 2009 to the same

area, I looked for memories of what used to be this great community leader. I

realised that newly appointed cadres were completely unaware of what he had

been, and after having encountered some awkwardness among local people, I

was given an account of what had happened to him. This account casts his experi-

ence in the broader framework of 1994 administrative reforms promoting radical

policy changes and centralisation. I was told by a local official that:

Pho L. was one of those people who had originally been selected as community

representatives. At that time this was to a large extent based on volunteering and

the compensation was very limited and was raised by the community itself In

1992 Pho L. was officially recognised as a cadre (las byed pa) and he received a

proper government salary in his capacity of township govemor (xiangzhang).

People trusted him very much on all kinds of issues. He was even consulted to

assess whether a pair of earrings to be presented to a relative were made of gold orto give advice on business. Pho L. engaged in private fundraising for Trakar Taso.

Some people from the lower valleys offered wood, others work, others money.

People were very pleased with Pho L.'s engagement in the restoration of Trakar

Taso.

The change in Pho L.'s position was explained and commented as follows:

Later the government sent specific people to become xiangzhang, this is why he

was moved to the position of deputy. The new cadre was appointed to the position

of senior xiangzhang. This happened around 1994. This senior xiangzhang how-

ever did not have much funding to support something like the restoration of

Trakar Taso. He was different from Pho L. who was well connected in the com-

munity and also behaved like a trader. He was not linked up with the community

in the same way. He was also bound by new policies that demanded more control

of religious institutions and members of the monastic community.

Commenting on the current situation, there was a sense of appreciation for some

of the most recent developments despite tighter centralised control:

Later the government promoted the appointment of dedicated personnel to look

after sites like Trakar Taso and funding was made available for the preservation of

cultural heritage but all has been more tightly controlled. What then happens on

the ground depends very much on the motivation and ability of the officials and

how they can engage with the system; some are more able than others. Here rightnow we are doing fairly well ...

Pho L.'s deeds have survived him and have now become an important part of

local cultural heritage - Trakar Taso was even recently celebrated in a tourist


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advertisement. However, memory of his personal deeds is fading. The role he

played to make possible the revival ofTrakar Taso occurred at a time when cadres

could be relatively open about their deep feelings for their traditions and even

their religious motivations. They were locals and, according to a rather decen-tralised administrative setting promoted in the 1980s and early 1990s, they were

deeply rooted in the local community. This setting changed with administrative

and policy changes. The memory ofPho L. reflects an arrangement between reli-

gion and politics that had eventually become awkward and his memory is now a

private matter, consigned to those people who had a direct experience of him.

Shedra T., the monk who, with Pho L., had started the reconstruction project, is

now remembered through a brass reliquary in the shape of a stupa. This is located

just above the main reconstructed buildings and the ruins of the monastery, not

far from those of Trakar Taso's ancient spiritual masters, but at some distance

from the main pathway. For some of the visitors and pilgrims who have had a

long-standing relation to the monastery, he has become part of a 'place of

memory' with its narratives of spiritual deeds. For most, however, the golden reli-

quary is barely worthy of notice.

Pho L. and Shedra T. represent in different ways the generation that lived

across the divide between 'old society' and 'new society'. Since the cadre was

not supposed to have had religious feelings and the monk had had a civil life

before becoming the leader of the monastic community, their memory also stands

for the entanglement between the sacred and the secular and defies engrained

political and religious ideals. They seem to stand for awkward continuities in a

setting that has been predicated upon the celebration of discontinuities.

In a comer of southern Central Tibet I came across another example of pecu-

liar arrangements between the political and the religious that shows that activitiesofPho L. and Shedra T were not exceptional but reflected a widespread pattern in

Tibet.

THE WORLDLY NUN AND THE PARTY SECRETARY

In November 2009 I was looking for Ani T., the senior nun of a nunnery of theBodongpa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Nearing the relevant village not very

far from the city of Gyantse in southern Tibet, I asked a woman about her where-

abouts. 'Ah yes, the worldly nun', said she with a somewhat enigmatic

expression. 'She died last year'. I was both saddened by the news and slightly

puzzled by the expression she had used to define her. I had met this remarkable

nun several times before, during my research into the tradition to which she

belonged. The first time it was almost by chance in 1997 during a festival at

Samding, the main monastery of her tradition. Eight years later I visited her in

her nunnery perched on a red spur above the village. On that occasion she told me

the story of her nunnery and linked her own story to that of sacred women of the

past:


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121LIFE HISTORIES OF FORGOTTEN HEROES?

My nunnery was originally established in a land tenure of a local ruler from

Bonpo Tengchen. He had a daughter, a princess who wished to become a nun ... I

became a nun when I was seventeen. I was bom in a family of farmers and as one

nun had left the nunnery, I became a nun in her stead. At that time, we used to par-ticipate in family life and go to the nunnery for ceremonies. When I was

twenty-eight-twenty-nine [around 1960], the nunnery was closed down and was

eventually destroyed. At that time I did not have two avenues to choose from. I

had only one. So I married. I then had seven children. When I was about fifty

[around 1982], a small group of friends came together and decided to rebuild the

nunnery. We started to collect funds as begging nuns, wandering all over the

region. Part of that original group was a nun who had stayed at Chagsam Chubori,

the residence of Thangtong Gyalpo. She died some seven years ago. At first we

asked the local authorities for permission to rebuild a small place, the size of two

pillars, for the practice of ritual fasting (nyungne). It was very difficult. We applied

to one official, who then referred us to another official, and so on. We were

allowed to practise, for the local authorities were good to us, but it was difficult to

get a formal permit to establish the nunnery. Eventually we managed to receive it.

It was 1993. I then became the formal head of the nunnery and some nuns joined

in. For the construction we received some donations from Samding, including

some wood. The local people provided labour and we kept collecting funds as

begging nuns. Recently because of my health I moved away, but I still go back

when there are ceremonies.

What she did not tell me at that time was that her husband had been the party

secretary of the township (xiang). Her narrative was fully focused on her indi-

vidual life as a nun and was apparently informed by Tibetan traditional ideals -

the begging nun is a popular trope in the biography of religious women. A party

secretary as a husband was, it seemed, extraneous to the story. When I met her

two years later, I visited her in her house. She was there with her husband and her

elder daughter. It was there that her family context emerged. Although he said

that he did not actively help her in her efforts to get permits, his support was

nonetheless significant, especially in the earlier phase of her effort.

In 2009 I returned to the nunnery in the hope of getting a more detailed

account. She had died, but her husband told their story as follows:

We met in 1960. I was a local party cadre and she was an ex-nun. At that time nuns

could not practise and it was decided that we should marry. Our first child was

bom in 1962. I had become a party cadre because I was once a servant. I had the

right kind of background for that. However, in fact, I was bom as the son of the

steward of a noble family. When my father died I was only six and I was adopted

by a family of herders under the same noble family. I thus became their personal

servant and later looked after transportation with yaks. Because of my class back-

ground, as a former servant, in the early '60s I was summoned to help mediate

conflicts among the people and explain democratic refonns. In 1966 I became

Party Secretary. I was originally illiterate but I started to look at newspapers and I


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learnt how to read and write from them. My wife already knew how to read and

write from having been a nun. At that time [i.e. the beginning of the Cultural

Revolution] we were requested to take a stand andjoin either the Gyenlog or the

Nyamdrel. I said that we would rather not join either of them. However,since wewere told that we had to choose we decided to opt for Gyenlog. Since the whole

village followed the same choice there was no major infighting as had happened

elsewhere.

His account would support the hypothesis that the Cultural Revolution was par-

ticularly destructive where party factional fights intersected with tensions inside

the local community for economic and religious reasons, and that he played his

role strategically. After the major policy change of 1978, his wife expressed thewish to restore her former nunnery. Asked whether he helped her in getting per-

mits, he denied that this was the case and added that she had all her dealing with

the Buddhist Association in Gyantse. However, he supported her personally. 'I

did not make any obstacles and looked after the family so that she could pursue

her efforts, raise funds as a begging nun and go to the relevant offices to get

permits.'

Seated next to the images of Buddhist deities, great lamas and Communistleaders in the house that he had constructed for his family, this local party secre-

tary was recalling the story of the woman with whom he had shared his life and

whom he was still deeply missing. He showed not only love but great respect for

her spiritual aims which she pursued with great commitment and with much skill.

What she had achieved was remarkable indeed. 1 came across other nuns who

had tried to re-establish their nunneries but had never been able to get formal per-

mission. It was precisely the ability of this woman to navigate both the worldly

and the religious that made her success possible. Yet among the nuns she is con-

sidered 'the worldly nun', and her position is deeply ambiguous. Like Shedra T.,

she had had a civil life and this had put her in an awkward position in relation to

religious ideals and prototypes.

MEMORY AND POLICY

Religious revival in a socialist state would seem at first sight a paradox. But it has

been happening all over China, and Tibet in particular, over the last three

decades. This phenomenon has sometimes been interpreted as an innovation and

linked to an assumed fading away of the socialist nature of the Chinese state.

However, this view underplays the fact that the CCP had in the 1950s a pragmatic

attitude towards religion expressed by Mao himself. Goldstein and Kapstein

(1998: 2), writing about the religious policy in the 1950s, observed that' despite

the CCP adherence to a Marxist, atheist ideology, it initially adopted a flexible

policy regarding religion in the new state'. A similar flexible and pragmatic

arrangement was re-instated with the policy shift launched by Deng Xiaoping in

1978 after the Cultural Revolution, during which anything religious had been


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attacked as a symbol of the old society. However, the implementation of the

'freedom of religious belief' which was enshrined in the Chinese constitution has

over time reflected different ways of understanding how religion had to be cir-

cumscribed with respect to politics. Its implementation in a society in whichreligion and politics had traditionally not been separated was thus confronted

with the challenge of defining a boundary between the acceptable and the non-

acceptable, and as this shifted with policy changes it often allowed for

contradictions and paradoxes as well as huge differences in implementation

between one place and another. Only by looking at individual cases and at the

narratives of people involved in these processes is it possible to gain an insight

into this complexity and variation.

The nun T. managed to obtain the permit for her nunnery in 1993. This

remains up to now the only nunnery of her tradition to have achieved this. One

year later everything would have been much more difficult, perhaps impossible. I

was told of another nunnery of the same tradition that had been informally estab-

lished in the same period and was dissolved because it had failed to obtain official

permits. I also heard of other nuns who had tried to restore their nunnery but were

discouraged by the difficulties and continued their practice privately. Perhaps T.'s

family situation had an impact on her success.

In 1994 new policies linked to a radical change of direction announced with

the Third Work Forum on Tibet were introduced. Religious containment became

a priority and local arrangements such as the ones described above became

impossible. For example, in the main document, called The Golden Bridge

Leading to a New Era, it is stated:

There are too many places where monasteries have been opened without pennis-

sion from the authorities,and having too much religious activity ... the waste of

materials, manpower and money has been tremendous ... sometimes leading to

interference in administration, law, education, marriages, birth control, produc-

tivity and daily life. (The Golden Bridge Leading to a New Era, p. 37, quoted in

Barnett 1996:25)

This shift in religious policy reflected a more general shift in the attitude of the

Chinese govermnent towards Tibet. The idea that Tibet had special characteris-tics that needed to be taken into account had been earlier voiced in documents

and newspapers. For example, in an article published in Tibet Daily it was stated:

'The special characteristics of the Tibetan region must be recognised and there

must be special measures and flexible methods' (Zhang Shurin and Guo Wutian

in Tibet Daily, 7 January 1991, cited in Barnett 1996: 24). This attitude was now

strongly criticised: 'Is Tibet willing to accept the label of "being special" and

stand at the rear of reform and opening up? ... ' (People 5 0 Daily, 16 May 1994,

cited in Barnett 1996: 24).

The tendency towards standardisation and centralisation was reflected in new

appointment policies such as the one experienced by Pho L. The 1994 policy

shift, analysed in detail by Robert Barnett (1996), had an impact not only on


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Tibet's administration and development but also on memory. Since then refer-

ence to any arrangement that cuts across the divide between religion and politics

and is rooted in the local community and its traditions has become awkward.

Narratives have thus become organised according to separate spheres, with reli-gion clearly separate from and subordinate to politics. Yet it was the people who

navigated both that were able to reconstruct Tibet after the upheavals of the

Cultural Revolution, and this heritage remains the one enjoyed by local inhabi-

tants and visitors; and is sometimes promoted by the Party as the showcase of

Tibetan culture.

CONCLUSION

In this paper I have shown how the collection of life histories and personal

accounts makes it possible to reconstruct a 'history from below', otherwise con-

signed to oblivion. The stories ofPho L. and Shedra T., of Ani T. and her husband

are not exceptional and have many similarities with many others across Tibet.

They are interesting because they reflect the history and the memory of a genera-

tion that lived across important historical divides: the one between 'old society'

and 'new society' and the one between Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaoping's

new policies. They illustrate the entanglement of the religious and the political in

a process that made the reconstruction of Tibetan social and cultural fabric in the

post-Mao era possible. The collection oftheir individual histories brought to the

fore behaviour and local political handling of situations that often contrasted with

popular expectations and official master-narratives, but which have been crucial

in the shaping of modem Tibetan society. Although a discrepancy between ruleand practice is to be expected in most societies, the fact that Tibet underwent rad-

ical transformations in a short period of time created an extreme complexity that

can best be understood through the analysis oflife narratives, especially those of

the generation that lived across crucial historical divides.

Looking at specific life histories it is also possible to see how biographical

tropes have had an impact on subjectivity formation and personal narratives,

reflecting a 'morality of exemplars' (Humphrey 1996: 25--48) widespread inBuddhist societies across Inner Asia. The re-enactment of historical exemplars

has often bridged the divide across 'old society' and 'new society', inspiring

action in a completely new setting. This process has had a significant impact on

the modes in which leaders engaged with local traditions, navigating the shifting

boundary between the religious and the secular and reconciling the 'moral

authority of the past' (Humphrey 1992: 375-89) with a modernist vision of

society. Looking at the impact of policy and policy shifts on memory I wonder

whether silencing and forgetting did not come at a price of increased political ten-

sions, revealing an unspoken but still open struggle for meaning and memory. It

has been observed that 'in totalitarian regimes power is maintained in part

through the control of memory' (Perks &Thomson 1998: 449) and some of the


13/13


effects of restrictive policies enacted in Tibet are reminiscent of this. However,

the fact that research projects such as the one carried out by Goldstein, Jiao and

Lhundrup have become possible is a sign that other tendencies are also present

and point towards a more open engagement with the past. Oral-history researchmay eventually provide important insights into the emerging Tibetan civil society

that straddles a difficult pathway between the tenets of Chinese socialism and a

deeply engrained Buddhist morality.

NOTES

1 This was one of two opposing factions, called the Gyenlog and the Nyamdrel, that dom-inated the Cultural Revolution in Tibet: see Shakya 1999.

2 The seat ofKyirong County in Shigatse Prefecture, TibetAutonomous Region.

3 In Tibetan rural areas traditional kinship tenns tenns likepho or mes, meaning 'grandfa-

ther, ancestor' , are often used as titles in front of the name oflocal officials.

4 The term shedra is a title that indicates that he had been part of a religious college.

5 Khri means 'throne' and was often part of the ancient Tibetan emperors' name; iDe was

the name of the imperial lineage.

6 The history of the Gungthang kings is known not only through the oral tradition but isalso recorded in historical sources such as 'The Royal Genealogy of Gungthang' (Gung

thang rgyal rabs), published as part of a modem book in 1995.

7 His role as community elder was not only apparent from his performance, it was also

made evident by the title pho, a tenn meaning 'grandfather, ancestor'.

REFERENCES

Barnett, R. 1996. Cutting off the Serpent's Head: Tightening Control in Tibet, 1994-

1995. New York: Tibet Information Network and Human Rights Watch.

Feuchtwang, S. &Wang Ming Ming. 2001. Grass-roots Charisma: Four Leaders in

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Goldstein, M. &M. Kapstein. 1998. Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet:Religious

Revival and Cultural Idenity. Berkeley (CA): University of California Press.

Goldstein, M., B. Jiao &T. Lhunclrup. 2009. On the Cultural Revolution in Tibet: The

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