Tropes of Indolence and the Cultural Politics of Development in Lhasa, Tibet

Abstract

Tibetans in Lhasa negotiate development, as a hegemonic project, through idioms animated by situated practices and historically sedimented memories. Two related idioms through which development is experienced are a pervasive trope of Tibetan indolence and one that describes Tibetans as being spoiled. A Gramscian analysis of contradictory consciousness is critical to understanding the trope of indolence, which is both a performative speech act and a reference to patterns of labor and time allocation. The trope is informed by contemporary state development discourse and national value-codings of “quality” under economic reform, as well as culturally, historically, and religiously constituted notions of proper work. These idioms tie together ambivalence about multiple aspects of life as transformed by development, including underemployment, urbanization, and chemically intensive agriculture. Though culturally specific, these idioms of development are not “merely cultural.” Instead, they are shaped by specific policies for economic development and political control in the Tibet Autonomous Region. These idioms, in turn, also shape possibilities for maneuver within the larger trajectory of reform and development. This analysis builds on the work of geographers, anthropologists, and others who have recently argued that conceptualizations of development as a monolithic and globally uniform discourse elide the cultural effects of development as well as the grounded practices through which it is enacted and contested.

Key Words:

• China
• cultural politics
• development
• ethnography
• Tibet

Acknowledgments

The research on which this article is based was made possible by support from the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Environmental Protection Agency STAR Graduate Fellowship, and a grant for Research and Writing from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. I would also like to thank Audrey Kobayashi and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions on an earlier draft, and most especially the people of Lhasa who very generously and patiently shared their time and insights with me.

Notes

1. For the purpose of readability only, I use “Tibet” interchangeably with “Tibet Autonomous Region” (TAR) in this article. The TAR, corresponding roughly to the area under direct political control of the Tibetan government in Lhasa in the early twentieth century, is the administrative unit officially recognized as “Tibet” by the PRC government. However, it is home to less than half of the total population of Tibetans in the PRC, and covers about half of the area where Tibetans live. Other parts of what some scholars call “ethnographic Tibet” have been administratively divided into the provinces of Yunnan, Sichuan, Gansu, and Qinghai.

2. According to the PRC's minzu (nationality, or ethnicity) classification scheme, the Han make up about 92 percent of China's population, with fifty-five minority minzu, including Tibetans, constituting the rest of the population. See Yeh (2007) for an extended analysis of how the state tries to attach “Chinese” (as a marker of nation-state belonging) to “Tibetan” and the troubled discursive relationship (for Tibetans) between “Han” and “Chinese.”

3. To protect the identities of the people with whom I worked, all names used in this article are pseudonyms and other identifying information is deliberately omitted.

4. Xibu dakaifa (re)defined “the west” as consisting of Xinjiang, Tibet, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, and Guangxi Autonomous Regions; Chongqing municipality; and Qinghai, Gansu, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou provinces. See Goodman (2004).

5. The exchange rate for one U.S. dollar was roughly 8.1 yuan (Renminbi).

6. According to Fischer (2005, 118), urban poverty rates in the TAR were the third highest in China in 1998 if measured against average per capita incomes.

7. 28 November 1994. Tibet People's Broadcasting Station, Lhasa, in Chinese. Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB FE/2170/G), 5 December, 1994.

8. In this article, italicized Tibetan indicates the use of the Wylie transliteration system; a few proper names and common words are rendered with a more pronounceable spelling.

9. The argument for the interpretations of Gramsci developed by the Birmingham school of cultural studies is further developed in Yeh (2003). In brief, these avoid the mapping of resistance/domination onto off-stage/on-stage, mind/body dualities that are implicit in the work on hegemony by Scott (1990), as discussed by Mitchell (1990) and Moore (1998).

10. There are two issues here: one theoretical, about how speech should be analytically considered, is discussed in the text; the second, methodological, is sometimes framed as, “how do you know that ‘lazy’ isn't just a convenient way to dismiss the researcher?” The discourse of indolence is a whole complex of statements not limited to formal interviews or even, according to many informants, the presence of an outside researcher. A more reflexive consideration of the research is provided in Yeh (2006).

11. In the Sigalovada sutra in the Digha Nikaya, for example, the Buddha teaches: “Sleeping by day/Wandering all around untimely. … These things destroy a person … / … The wise endowed with virtue … /Shine forth like a burning fire/Gathering wealth as bees do honey/And heaping it up like an ant hill/Once wealth is accumulated/Family and household life may follow. … / … Energetic, not lazy … Such a person attains glory” (http://accesstoinsight.org/canon/sutta/digha/dn-31-ksy0.html; last accessed 24 May 2006). Benavides (2005, 79) notes that in a Buddhist story about beginnings, it is the laziness of primordial beings that begets work, and work that causes scarcity; “work, then, is both cure and blessing, for without the disturbance brought about by work, it would not have been necessary to have kings and priests; while in order to support them, it is necessary to work even more—the support of the priests being indeed a meritorious act.” Furthermore, “work as production … appears as degrading, as something from which one must distance oneself; and if one cannot distance oneself from it in reality, one must at least cleanse oneself from it as much as one can” (2005, 87); but the act of giving brings merit, and donating to the monastic community requires accumulation and hence productive work.

12. Though farmland is being expropriated at an ever more rapid pace across Lhasa today, at the time of my research most of the farmers on whose interviews this article is based still had use rights to their farmlands (and hence the ability to rent out their land to migrant farmers). Tropes of indolence and spoiling are invoked broadly—by new urban elites, urban poor, periurban farmers who still have use rights to land, as well as those such as in Lhalu who have recently lost it to urbanization.