Notes

1. See Rea (2015) for more on humor’s quotidian subversion of grand narrative.

2. For more on the politics of ethnic identification in Tibetan groups who are now considered Tibetan, see Kolås and Thowsen (2005, 39–41) and Upton (2000). Sometimes more political than scientific, many of those now classified as Tibetan speak what Roche and Suzuki (2018) call minority Tibetan languages, some of which are classified as non-Tibetic. Groups like the Prmi, meanwhile, are classified as Tibetan in Sichuan but are given their own ethnic classification status in Yunnan (Harrell 1996, 279).

3. For more on the Hui, see Gladney (1987a, 1987b, 1996, 2004, 120–75 and 282–311), Hillman (2004), and Cooke (2008a, 2008b).

4. For further reading on the Tu, see Limusishiden and Jugui (2010), Limusishiden and Stuart (1995, 2010), Limusishiden (2011), Stuart and Limusishiden (1994), Limusishiden and Roche (2017), Roche (2011, 2014), Roche and Wen (2013), Wang, Zhu, and Stuart (1995), Zhu and Stuart (1996), Slater (2003), Wen (2010), and Zhu, Qi, and Stuart (1997).

5. For some resources on the Salars, see Dwyer (2007), Ma and Stuart (1996), Ma, Ma, and Ma (1993), and Goodman (2008).

6. See, for example, Roche (2016), Khan (1996), Diemberger (2007), Bulag (2000, 2003), and Wallenböck (2016).

7. See also Pema Bhum’s 2001 memoir.

1. For more on the harvesting and sale of caterpillar fungus, see Sulek (2019).

2. My thanks to Tsering Samdrup, both for assistance with some of the earthier translations in this chapter and for pointing out how these names also can tell much about the characters and their social histories.

3. For more on Tibetan proverbs more generally, see Tournadre and Robin (2006), Sørenson and Erhard (2013a, 2013b), Lhamo Pemba (1996), and Pirie (2006, 2009, 2012, 2013). For a discussion of the social uses of proverbs, particularly in mediating conflict in Amdo, see Pirie (2009, 2013).

4. This includes wedding speeches and “praises of place,” as well as a variety of smaller speeches. For more on Tibetan oratory, see Thurston (2012, 2019), Thurston and Caixiangduojie (2016), Tshe dbang rdo rje, Anton-Luca, and Stuart (2009), and Blo brtan rdo rje and Stuart (2008).

5. For more or riddles and tongue twisters in Amdo, see Blo brtan rdo rje, Stuart, and Roche (2009).

6. These sung traditions have regionally specific tunes that differentiate the genres. There are also other conventions associated with these forms. For example, throughout most of Amdo, it is taboo to sing love songs in front of opposite-gender relatives, but in at least one area of Tsekhog County, Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, boys may sing them in the presence of their grandmothers. In one village in Rebgong, meanwhile, villagers cover their faces so as to perform them alongside villagers of the opposite sex during the Luroo harvest festival. For more, see Rossi (1992) and Anton-Luca (2002).

7. Also known as a padmaraga sapphire, these are pink stones.

8. I have slightly amended this from the original, to conform with spellings used in this book and those that I have seen used most frequently. This includes rendering the English name as Uncle Tonpa (instead of Uncle Dunba, which is closer to the Amdo dialect pronunciation), and ཨ་ཁུ་སྟོན་པ། instead of ཨ་ཁུ་བསྟན་པ།.

9. It is worth pointing out that Tibet was not quite as isolated as this may portray. Tuttle (2005) shows the important role Tibetan Buddhist leaders played in helping to shape modern China. This is indicative of the long-standing political and cultural exchange between Han and Tibetan communities that predates the establishment of the People’s Republic. Additionally, Tibetan culture owes much to Indian, Nepali, and Mongolian influences as well. Others have pointed out how some of the hallmarks of modernity, including an emphasis on scientific examination and rational human agency, also began to appear in Tibetan communities much earlier than the twentieth century (Gyatso 2011, 8–9).

10. McDougall notes that there are multiple published versions of the “Talks,” and that at least some contain edited or alternative versions. For this selected passage, McDougall’s translation omits the phrase “No, satire is always necessary” and includes a note that some versions add it (McDougall 1980, 81 n235).

1. This script uses some unorthodox spellings for Amdo dialect colloquialisms. I have kept the spellings in the written script that I have.

2. Shuji and mishu are both commonly translated as “secretary” but refer to two very different positions within China’s government. The former refers to the highest-ranking official—the party secretary—of a given area. The latter is more akin to the Western term in that it refers to the shuji’s personal secretary, who also is his protégé, which can be a significant inroad to advancement in the government (Li 2015).

3. This represents an indigenously Tibetan way of organizing cultural knowledge. The five greater cultures or sciences are “arts and crafts,” medicine, grammar, logic, and Buddhist doctrinal studies. The five lesser sciences are poetry, synonymy, rhetoric, drama, and astronomy.

4. This refers to traditional Tibetan woodblock-printed books, which are read horizontally on the long side.

5. All of the quotations in this section taken from the edition in Dondrup Jya’s collected works (see Don grub rgyal [1980] 1997).

6. Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, known primarily by their surnames, were an American comedic duo active between 1935 and 1957. Working across radio, television, and film, they were among the most famous such performers of the period. See Miller (2000, 5–28) for an introduction to the pair, with a particular emphasis on their horror-comedies.

7. See Don grub rgyal (1997) for the original text.

8. See Don grub rgyal ([1984] 1997) for the original text.

9. Virtanen (2008, 243; 2011, 51) very briefly discusses this performance but spends a much greater portion of her studies on his stories and poetry. This omission is not limited to the Western Tibetological field. Sprel nag pa rig ’dzin grags ldan’s (2009) edited volume of studies related to Dondrup Jya includes thirty essays dedicated to the author’s literature, but not one discusses “Studying Tibetan.” These examples comprise only a fraction of those on Dondrup Jya, but they should be enough to illustrate the tendency to overlook “Studying Tibetan” when examining his opus.

10. Link (2010, 58) argues that the term crosstalk, most commonly used to translate the Chinese xiangsheng (literally “face and voice”) (as in Thurston 2013 and Link 1984), is in fact a mistranslation, and that “the term might best be rendered as “comedians’ routines.” That said, “crosstalk,” as a descriptive of the major dynamic of the art, may be a more commonly used term in popular discourse. Chinese historians date the term xiangsheng to the Qing dynasty (Sun 2007, 2). For more on the history of xiangsheng in general, see Wang, Wang, and Teng (2011). For Western studies of xiangsheng since 1949, see Link (1984), Moser (1990), Kaikkonen (1990), and Link (2010).

11. Mao originally proposed this in the 1949 talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. For more, see Denton (2003, 463–69).

12. Importantly, this is not unique to Tibetan communities. You (2012), for example, notices how new gushi (stories) in the 1960s incorporated both traditional and novel storytelling strategies to meet the political and ideological needs of China’s socialist education.

13. As used in Western China more generally and among Tibetans specifically, “Inner China” (Jyanang in Tibetan) refers to China’s more developed coastal areas. It frequently applies also to landlocked provinces in central China like Shaanxi.

14. Hou Baolin (1917–93) was one of the most famous performers of xiangsheng. Link (1984, 88), for example, calls Hou “China’s premier xiangsheng performer,” and Tsau (1980, 47) and Moser (1990, 47) call him the genre’s star performer. Hou has also been prolific in documenting the art of crosstalk (see Hou and Xue 1981, Hou 1980, and Hou et al. 2011).

15. The year 1861 agrees with Moser (2018), who traces the genre’s origins to the mourning period after the death of the Xianfeng emperor. Many Chinese sources on the history of xiangsheng “crosstalks,” however, often credit the earlier Zhang Sanlu with the founding of the form during the reign of the Qing dynasty’s Daoguang emperor (1820–50) (see Wang, Wang, and Teng 1995, 70; and Kaikkonen 1990, 66). Tsau (1980, 33), meanwhile, traces the origins to much earlier Tang dynasty “adjutant plays” (Ch. canjun xi).

16. Goldstein (1998, 38), for example, points out that ’Bras spungs monastery in Lhasa had only 547 monks in 1995 despite reportedly boasting ten thousand in 1959. He also notes that the maximum number of monks allowed at the monastery as of that publication was six hundred.

17. A careful and diachronic study of education in Tibetan areas of China over the last few decades is beyond the scope of this study. There is, however, a sizable corpus of literature on Tibetan education in this period. For more, see Bass (1998, 2008), Clothey and McKinlay (2012), Postiglione (1992, 1999, 2006, 2008); Seeberg (2008), and Wang and Phillion (2009). For more on minority education in China more generally, see Hansen (1999).

18. Shakya also wrote, “One of the phrases that dominated Tibetan literature between 1980 and 1987 was mi rigs kyi la rgya” (2008, 77), written in this book as mirik gi larjya.

19. Dondrup Jya is not the first author to write in Tibetan vernacular; some famous religious leaders historically used limited amounts in their writings (see Mog chung phur kho 2010). But the vast majority of Tibetan writers often use a distinct literary register.

20. The Four Modernizations sought to focus national development efforts in the areas of agriculture, industry, defense, and science and technology.

21. For more research on the form and usage of such paroemias, see Sørenson and Erhard (2013a and 2013b). Collections of Tibetan proverbs are legion; see Tournadre and Robin (2006) for one such collection.

1. A full translation of this performance is available as part of an article I published in CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performance Literature (see Thurston 2013).

2. Tri Ralpachen was one of the three dharma kings of Tibet, and the penultimate king of the Tibetan Empire.

3. Zenz (2014, 129) cited the percentage of urban-based Tibetans as 8.6 percent according to the 2000 census, thus suggesting that 91.4 percent would be considered rural at that time.

4. Fischer (2009, 16) reported illiteracy rates over 40 percent in Qinghai and over 70 percent in the Tibet Autonomous Region into the 1990s, and numbers were higher for women than men.

5. Facing tremendous struggles with ensuring adequate healthcare in rural areas, “barefoot doctors” were a group of minimally trained medical practitioners who served their communities. For an introduction to this system and its history, see Zhang and Unschuld (2008).

6. The tenth Panchen Lama famously championed Tibetan education in the early years of the post-Mao period. Meanwhile, in Rarjya County, Golok Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, the lama Jigme Jyamtsen established a school that remains one of the best-known private educational institutions in Amdo.

7. For more on Tibetan tricksters, see Dkon mchog dge legs, Dpal ldan bkra shis, and Stuart (1999), Orofino (2011), Aris (1987), and Rwa se dkon mchog rgya mtsho (1996). For an important, albeit sanitized, collection of Uncle Tonpa tales collected and printed in China, see Sichuan Sheng Minjian Wenyi Yanjiu Hui (1980). For more on Uncle Tonpa’s more ribald exploits, see Rinjing Dorje (1997) and Aris (1987, 143–44).

8. This is not to say that Tibet lacked a scientific tradition prior to this period. In fact, rational, scientific critiques can be found in Tibet before the twentieth century (see, for example, Gyatso 2011 and Lobsang Yongdan 2011).

9. The focus on plot at the expense of character development is similar to a number of well-known and well-researched folklore genres, including legend (Briggs 1988; Dégh 2001), anecdote (Cashman 2008; Mullen 1978, 113–29), and others.

10. Han Chinese authors criticized arranged marriage as a cruel institution during the May Fourth Movement. Taking its cue from that, the Chinese Communist Party also made marriage a key to its modernizing program, portraying arranged marriages as backward, feudalist, or unmodern. Beyond China, meanwhile, scholars have also emphasized the importance of free-choice marriages and romantic love in early modernizing movements in Nigeria (Griswold 2000) and Nepal (Ahearn 2003, 2004). Though the practice of arranged marriage continues even into the twenty-first century (Thurston and Tsering Samdrup 2012, 55), it is central to the modernist Tibetan critique of tradition, and comedy is one important way these ideas were disseminated to the broader population.

11. For similar observations beyond Tibet include, see Noyes (2009, 240).

12. The term economies of fortune is an umbrella term for a variety of overlapping and mutually influencing fortune-related forces in the Tibetan worldview—including, but not limited to shtemdree (sometimes written as tendrel and translated variously as “omen” [Ekvall 1964b], “interdependence” [Kunsang 2003, 1080], “blessing, in the sense of material prosperity” [Clarke 1990], or “dependent origination”), géwa (virtue), sonam (merit), and lungta (luck). For more on the importance of fortune in Tibetan communities in Amdo, see Sa mtsho skyid and Roche (2011).

13. The Gesar epic is one important source of proverb-lore in China. The proverb featured here comes from the popular Hor gling g.yul ’gyed episode of the epic, in which the heroic king defeats neighboring Hor and its demonic king (see Gcod pa don grub and Chab ’gag rta mgrin 2000).

14. These hygienic language practices have proven to be an essential part of the modern project alongside social critiques, parallel other modernist interventions across Asia, including in Mongolia (Billé 2010), Japan (Heinrich 2012; Inoue 2006), and China. In each case, specific language practices become a conduit for promoting engagement with modernity. In China, meanwhile, many Qing-dynasty and May Fourth Movement intellectuals advanced vernacularization—promoting a more vernacular form of writing in place of Classical Chinese—to help create a discursive break between the premodern and the modern in a “new” China (Tong 2010; Lee 2005). After the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, the new government implemented further interventions in both writing and speaking the Chinese language as essential part of state-promoted modernization. New, “simplified” (Ch. jianti) characters replaced traditional (Ch. fanti) ones, with the aim of improving literacy communication (Chen 2004, 154–56), pinyin romanization was promoted to improve learning (DeFrancis 1984, 251), and the state created a “common speech” language around which the unified Chinese nation would progress. This is not a new situation, and is further explicated in Moser’s (2016) book, A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language.

1. Garchung’s development as a distinct performance style, with its own stars, parallels that of Han Chinese xiaopin skits popularized most famously by Zhao Benshan (Mu 2004; Gao and Pugsley 2008). Importantly, like garchung, xiaopin also address a different constellation of issues (Du 1998). However, unlike the Han Chinese media environment, in which crosstalk continues to be popular even after the advent of the more visual sketches, Tibetan garchung largely displaced khashag dialogues.

2. See Thurston (2018c) for a fuller discussion of the Tibetan language purism movement.

1. Historically, the term shuochang can refer to a number of traditional prosimetric genres in China that bridge the oral and literary divide. See Børdahl (2003, 4) for more on this interplay between written and oral, and “tell-sing literature” (shuochang wenxue).

2. In this way, we see similarities to how Hoklo rappers in Taiwan link rap to a traditional form of narrative singing (Schweig 2014).

3. The phrase in the Tibetan presents a traditional way of metonymically referring to the dynasty of Tubo kingdoms by the syllables that several of them shared in their names: seven whose names share khri, six whose names share legs, and eight whose names share sde.

4. For example, although fumigation offerings may be a part of a number of practices now listed on UNESCO’s list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, the practice itself and the prayers spoken on a daily basis to propitiate local deities do not receive such valuation.

1. Bai’s (2020) study of Mongolian fiddle stories demonstrates that this is not limited to the Tibetan context.

2. It is still possible to view some of these videos online. As of March 7, 2023, the Yongzin search engine, for example, kept archives of several videos, including the mask-wearing video described here (https://video.yongzin.com/v_show/playVideo.do?videoid=40288cc17aec7f23017ba5577eb836ad). The specific offices credited in the videos include the Propaganda Bureau; the Bureau of sports, Culture, Tourism, and Broadcasting; the television station, and the prefectural song and dance troupe.

3. Sun Wukong is a character from the famous Chinese tale Xi you ji (Journey to the west). This tale has been the subject of numerous movies and television series and has tended to reach Tibetan audiences primarily through these television series, sometimes translated into Tibetan. See Robin (2008) for further discussion of The Silent Holy Stones.