When is a Hat a Mountain? The Material Religion of Gesar Bards’ Hats

Abstract

Based on interviews performed in Qinghai, this article examines the ritual for creating the “mountain hat” used by bards of Tibet’s Gesar epic in the Yushu and Golok provinces to argue for its importance in constructing local ideas of identity and authority. After introducing a typology of bardic hats, this paper relates the two-week ritual to make a “mountain hat” and analyses how it unites epic narrative, local ideas of place, and the authority of Buddhist institutions into a single, distinctive object used in the performance arena. Utilizing David Morgan’s work on embodiment and identity through the act of seeing, this article argues for the “mountain hat” as a microcosm of a religious imaginary that influences and shapes the viewer’s and the bard’s self-understanding. Additionally, this article considers the interpretation of the “mountain hat” and the religious imaginary it represents in the larger context of contemporary Tibet, where competing forms of economic and cultural authority challenge Tibetans’ experience. Ultimately, this article draws attention to the central role of ritual in constructing the “mountain hat” and imbuing it with the necessary symbolic complexes to become a potent visual object of identity.

Keywords:

• Tibetan religion
• Gesar epic
• David Morgan
• ritual
• mountain gods
• hats
• performance
• image

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the great help of Karma Lhamo and Tsebtrim Renqing in conducting the research for this paper.

Notes and References

Notes

1 While this particular use of hats is a fairly old phenomenon beginning with Euro-American interactions with Tibetans, for a modern example of this Tibetan “hat typology,” please see March 11, 2011 reference article in The Time of India, “Schools of Tibetan Buddhism: One Thought, Four Hats” (Times News Network 2011).

2 It should be noted that the versions of the Gesar epic found in Baltistan represent a notable exception to this Buddhist interpretation of the epic. There, the hero is Muslim defeating demons who threaten the Islamic community (Dryland and Hussain 2014).

3 Gesar bards are almost always men and, as a result, I will refer to bards with the male pronouns. This gendered aspect is not a solid rule, but rather a general trend.

4 For more information on these rituals and a complete listing, please see Forgues 2011.

5 Many thanks to Anna Sehnalova for providing this detail.

6 Based on my own fieldwork experience, in which bard Tsering performed the epic wearing only a white offering scarf, it could be argued that the importance of the hat in constructing the performance space is somewhat overstated. I would argue, however, that accounting for the surrounding context to the performance space itself is crucial—an impromptu performance in a café can be completed with a small scarf, but not a large, public performance at a festival. Indeed, it is noteworthy that some white covering is always necessary.

7 Solomon George FitzHerbert has ­hypothesized that many of these ­festivals may not originally have had much to do with the Gesar epic at all, but construct some sort of connection to the Gesar epic in order to capitalize on tourists’ interest (2007, 295–297).

8 Neither Tsering nor Gyurmé commented on the non-Han tourists coming from international destinations, possibly due to their still relatively small minority presence.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natasha L. Mikles

Natasha L. Mikles is a lecturer in the Religious Studies program at Texas State University after recently completing her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. Her research examines Buddhist hell literature, with a particular focus on portrayals of Buddhist hell in Tibetan and Chinese popular literature. She is currently working on a project examining the Gesar epic’s portrayal of hell and its relationship to the Nyingma Renaissance of the early twentieth century. [email protected]