Introduction Doing Zurza

There’s no way to talk without joking.

There’s no way to eat without making offerings.

གཏམ་ཀུ་རེ་མེད་ན་བཤད་སྲོལ་མེད།

ཟས་མཆོད་ཁ་མེད་ན་ཟ་སྲོལ་མེད།

Tibetan proverb

In the winter of 2010, a friend invited me to celebrate Losar, the Tibetan New Year, with his family in the grasslands of Tsongon (the Tibetan name for the province known as Qinghai in Chinese). I jumped at the opportunity for a true homestay there, and about a month before the festival was set to begin, I found myself sitting alongside my friend on a bus, winding westward and upward out of Ziling, the capital city. As we rode through the lower-altitude farming area of Trika County, I marveled at the sharp contrast between the barren red cliffs overlooking the murky Yellow River and the verdant grasslands, snow-covered mountains, and pure rivers that the name “Tibet” conjured in my mind’s eye. From there we headed to the windswept town of Gomang in Mangra County, and then another thirty-minute drive in a private car on a bumpy dirt road took us southwest of town to my friend’s home. The wintry grassland was a dull brown and adjacent to a gradually encroaching desert. This was not the picturesque Tibet memorialized in coffee-table books and postcards.

Over the next few weeks, my perceptions of the region’s culture underwent a rapid transformation. I had come to the Tibetan Plateau to research the role of traditional tales about the well-known trickster, Uncle Tonpa (ཨ་ཁུ་སྟོན་པ།), in contemporary China’s ethnic minority mediascape. I had even rationalized my trip by telling myself that I would probably spend evenings listening to elders telling stories around a warm stove or hearing songs being sung on the grassland—what I naively considered “real” folklore. I was hoping to document this, especially the trickster tales I was researching (the more ribald the better), to compare them with the sanitized versions in children’s books, cartoons, and the work of an award-winning but controversial author. I thought that this might be the ideal opportunity to record some trickster tales in context. To my dismay, however, the telling of these and other folktales was far less common than the many printed collections had led me to believe.

Indeed, despite having read many accounts of evening storytelling, nocturnal visits to paramours in nearby villages, love-song soirees, and communal gatherings (all important parts of lived experience in the recent past), by the time I arrived in my friend’s village in the winter of 2010, such practices were largely absent from the everyday experience of pastoralists. While material traditions and foodways persisted, many oral traditions seemed limited to particular contexts, especially “time out of time” (Falassi 1987) festival events and weddings. Instead, average evenings were spent around a softly flickering television. For weeks, after the sun had set and the family’s livestock had been penned and fed, my hosts would gather around to watch the news and other programming on the Tibetan-language television station and, very occasionally, Chinese-language programming.

One night, instead of watching the regular Tibetan offerings, my hosts played a video compact disc (VCD) of sketch comedies. These portrayed contemporary Tibetan experience in ways simultaneously realistic and exaggerated, all featuring performances by a single comedian. It was like watching a “best of” compilation of Saturday Night Live. One particularly memorable sketch opens with a man, his back facing the audience, leaning against a structure that says po (men) on the door. Next, a woman walks on stage shouting at the man:

Aro! Aro! Did you hear me? This isn’t the grassland! Ignoring the toilet to relieve yourself!

ཨ་རོགས། ཨ་རོགས། ཨེ་གོ་ཐལ། སྤྱོད་ཁང་རྩིབ་ནས་བཞག་བཏང་ངེ་རྩིབ་བ་བཏང་ངེ་རྩྭ་ཐང་མ་རེད་མོ།

The characters are a study in contrast. The scene is some anonymous town. The audience recognizes that the woman wearing jyala (modern clothing, literally “Han clothing”) must work as an attendant collecting money at the public toilet, while the man wearing a traditional robe must be a herder in town on some business. In saying that this is not the grassland, she is creating a moral geography in which one can urinate wherever one pleases on the grassland but not in the civilized city. The man, showing himself to be the argumentative type, replies,

Oh, I didn’t know. With you just saying “aro,” how can one know who you’re talking to? My name isn’t “aro,” aro?

ཨོ་མ་ཤེས། རང་ང་ཨ་རོགས་ཟེར་ནས་ཨག་བཏབ་བཏང་ན་ངས་སུར་བཤད་གོ་གི་ཟེར་རེ། ངའི་མྱིང་ང་ཨ་རོགས་མི་ཟེར། ཨ་རོགས།

The audience laughs, and the man turns to go into the toilet but is stopped again, this time because he has not read the sign saying it costs ¥2 to use the public restroom (as was common in many urban areas at the time). The man is miffed. For the remainder of the sketch, the two square off, the woman insisting that the man pay the amount required, and the man resisting hilariously. The herder takes the attendant to task both culturally and linguistically. To the audience’s evident enjoyment—the video cuts to the audience at key moments, providing cues about how funny and clever particular turns of phrase are to other Tibetans—the man haggles over the correct terminology for the fee being assessed:

MAN: Nowadays one even has to pay a toilet tax!

WOMAN: It’s not a tax

M: Right. It’s not a tax. It’s a rate.

W: It’s not a rate either

M: Then it is a tax.

W (annoyed): Call it a tax or call it a fee, you have to pay the price. It’s two mao. That’s it.

M: Price! So nicely said! A price means giving something and then getting something back. So if it’s a price, then you still have to give me something.

འབྲོག་པ། དེང་སང་ད་ཅིག་བཏང་ན་ར་ཁྲལ་འཇལ་དགོས་ནི་ཨེ་རེད།

བུད་མེད། ཁྲལ་མ་རེད།

འབྲོག་པ། བདེན་གི ཁྲལ་མ་རེད། གླ་རེད་མོ།

བུད་མེད། གླ་ར་མ་རེད།

འབྲོག་པ། དེ་ན་ཡང་ཁྲལ་རེད་མོ།

བུད་མེད། ཨ་ཡ། ད་ཁྲལ་ཟེར་ན་ཆོག་གི གླ་ཟེར་ན་ཆོག་གི རིན་སྟེར་དགོས་ནི་རེད། ཞོ་དོ་རེད། ད་དེ་རེད།

འབྲོག་པ། རིན། ཡག་པ་ཡག་པ་ཞིག་བཤད་ལེ། རིན་ཟེར་ནོ་འདི་ཧར་ར་ཕྱིན་ན་ཕྱིར་ར་སྟེར་རྒྱུ་ཟིག་རེད་ེཟེར་ན་མིན་ནས། རིན་གཟིག་ཡིན་ན་ད་རུང་ངར་ཅིག་སྟེར་དགོས་གི

The herder concludes that if he has to pay to relieve himself, he’ll just go behind the building.

Then there’s a ¥10 fine!

ཆད་པ་བཅད་ ན་བཅུ་ཐམ་པ་རེད།

The fines escalate if he ignores the attendant, and the herder begins to feel that it is all simply too ridiculous to be believed. At one point, things get so heated that the attendant locks the door.

The man, meanwhile, tries to bring the conversation back onto a cultural footing he understands: he talks about being a chieftain’s son, about having urinated in some of Tibet’s most illustrious locations, and that having to pay to carry out this most basic human act feels ridiculous. In the end, however, after several other twists and turns, the man leaves, having failed to use the toilet. As he goes, the attendant sends an ominous warning:

Say, uncle, and go and tell the others: “If you don’t get used to paying the price, in the future you might not be able to pee freely on the grassland.”

ཨ་རོགས་ཨ་ཁུ་བཟེ་ཡ། སོང་ང་རྒད་པོ་ཆོ་ཤོད་ལ། རིན་སྟེར་རྒྱུར་ལོབ་གི་མ་བཞག་དུས གཞུག་ནས་རྩྭ་ཐང་ནས་ར་རང་ང་རང་ང་བཏང་ན་མི་ཆོག་ན་ཐང་བཟེ་གོ

The sketch ends with the herder saying that such a custom will never spread on the grasslands and trudges off.

Moments later, the next comedy begins. This time, it portrays two salesmen trying to bilk a hard-of-hearing pastoralist and his friend into selling his traditional robes to be repurposed as modern leather goods, only to find that they are not such easy marks as the salesmen imagined. Even though my hosts were already familiar with this performance and the other sketches on the VCD, evening activity came to a near standstill while the comedies played. Adults and children alike laughed freely at misunderstandings between characters, particularly well-worded comebacks, puns, and artfully crafted parallelisms. Looking away from the screen briefly, they smiled and repeated favorite lines to each other appreciatively.

In noticeable contrast to the conversations that frequently drowned out everyday television watching, these comedies brought ambient conversation to a halt. More than mere entertainment, it was also immediately clear to me that these comedies were conveying important messages about contemporary Tibetan life and shaping attitudes about language, culture, urbanization, and more. In the first sketch described above, the behavior of both characters is placed on display for audiences, who laugh not only at the pastoralist’s inability to navigate the urban environment but also at the bathroom attendant’s unstinting adherence to seemingly arbitrary rules. More ominously, they hear foreboding comments about the increasing privatization of space on the grassland. The performances may not be “real” or “true” stories, but they were “realistic,” and many Tibetans would know well—perhaps viscerally—the feelings and situations portrayed on stage and on screen. In short, these sketches appeared to be the new stories Tibetans were telling about their contemporary selves. I was hooked and determined to better understand what and how these comedies “mean” to performers and audiences alike.

Between 2011 and 2015, I collected over one hundred recordings and scripts of comedy performances and attended live performances whenever I had the opportunity. I met many of the most prominent comedians and chatted with dozens of self-described fans. From both my own reading of the performances and the testimonies of Tibetan interlocutors, I learned that these comedies engage in a wide-ranging social critique about issues facing Tibetan society. I also noticed that both comedians and their fans consistently stated that “good” comedic performances zurza ye (ཟུར་ཟ་བྱེད།), that is, they “do zurza.” When pressed about the term, my interlocutors often translated into Chinese as fengci or—less frequently—into English with “satire” or “sarcasm” (see, for example, Goldstein 2001), but these translations failed to account for the nuance with which people used the term. During follow-up field trips in 2016 and 2017, I also heard Tibetans use zurza in relation to obscure oral traditions, socially critical works of modern Tibetan literature, and the latest in Tibetan hip-hop. To hear the comedians and rappers tell it, zurza is part of what makes their work in new genres and emerging media uniquely Tibetan. This book presents the first study of this underappreciated expressive concept and its importance to post-Mao Tibetan cultural production.

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Zurza and the laughter that frequently accompanies it are hardly the first things most people think about when they hear the words China and Tibet in the same sentence. And why should they be? Many in the Euro-American “West” may hear the word Tibet and think of a traditionally Buddhist society, perhaps oppressed by a colonizing Chinese Communist Party. The same people may think of recent news reporting about Tibetans self-immolating, and Tibet’s Nobel Prize–winning exiled religious leader. For many who have grown up in China, meanwhile, images may range from a feudal society liberated by and incorporated into the People’s Republic in the 1950s, to news spots showing Tibetans dancing happily in displays of gratitude to the Communist Party for the “gift” of modernity (Yeh 2013b), to a pristine environment for young Han to conquer as they escape from China’s heavily polluted coastal metropolises. These descriptions, all carrying elements of truth, select some of the most contrasting images possible to make a rhetorical point. But the discourses of modernity and progress, and of traumatic experience and dramatic resistance, all emphasize grand narratives that leave little room for zurza.¹

Set against the background of these ongoing and well-publicized cultural and political tensions, a book about a topic as seemingly trivial as zurza and humor can come across as being in poor taste. And yet, laughter has served as the soundtrack to almost every one of my experiences of Tibet. This also manifests in everyday life. During dinners among friends, the seemingly endless toasting with liquor—almost always three cups at a time—often lowered inhibitions to the point at which teasing and reminiscing might devolve into uncontrolled hilarity. At traditional weddings, women from the host village may use humor and wit to demand some sort of payment or gift from the visiting representatives of the person marrying into the village (usually the maternal uncles of the bride). In the valley of Rebgong, interludes in the annual harvest festival featuring inebriated villagers—sometimes cross-dressing or wearing monks’ robes—may make fun of the behavior of certain members of the community, to the applause and laughter of all in attendance. Tibetan communities possess a diverse vocabulary for humorous activity that mirrors the diversity of ways that laughter appears in everyday life, including kure (joking), labjyagpa (boasting), tséwa (play), and zurza. This humor frequently accomplished important social work: to entertain, mask existential pain, serve hegemonic forces, speak the otherwise unspeakable, provide a “steam-valve” for social discontent, and/or to project and reflect worldviews (Rea and Volland 2008, x).

Among these arts of Tibetan humor, zurza, in particular, has emerged as an important principle guiding contemporary Tibetan cultural production in the modern era. Zurza—literally “eating sides”—refers to the arts of Tibetan satire and sarcasm. The New Dagyig Dictionary defines it in the following terms: “the name for words that criticize or expose the truth about another’s actions through relying on meanings other than what is actually said with examples or exaggeration” (Dag yig ’di’i rtsom sgrig tshan chung 1979, 693). The Great Tibetan-Chinese Dictionary further defines the term as “to abuse with indirect language or to speak something meaningful” (Zhang 1985, 2467).

These two definitions emphasize two major characteristics: first, the practice of critique, and second, the use of indirection and inversion. When used in a sentence, zurza takes the verb ye (to do, བྱེད།), which is classified in Tibetan grammar as a ta dadpa verb—what we might imperfectly translate into English as a transitive or agentive verb. The subject of these sentences is marked with an ergative marker, which emphasizes the agency of the satirist. In short, a speaker or author “does zurza” to a target when critiquing their appearance, attitudes, or behavior with indirection and inversion.

Primarily associated with the literary register of Tibetan, many illiterate or less educated Tibetans in Amdo may not immediately recognize the term. Nevertheless, they would be familiar with the activity, as many oral traditions use zurza to poke fun at the behavior and appearance of others through indirection and inversion. In this way, zurza operates more like a master trope, similar to African American “signifying” (Gates 1983; Abrahams 1962), and the people who “do zurza” act—as do comedians and satirists around the globe—as vernacular ethnographers (Brodie 2014) and “ipso facto moralists” (Levin 1987, 197). When famed trickster Uncle Tonpa tricks a landlord or merchant, or makes a king bark like a dog, he “does zurza.” When the seventeenth-century lama Shar Kalden Jyamtso (1607–1677) composed songs poking fun at the behavior of monks, he was also “doing zurza.” And when a contemporary comedian mocks people whose behavior seems out of touch in the contemporary moment, they too do zurza.

In the post-Mao period, zurza became a topic of explicit concern for a new generation of intellectuals and cultural producers, who use it as an expressive resource to simultaneously access state-run media and advocate for Tibetan causes. Working across media, genre, and moments, they weigh in on and shape popular attitudes toward the issues Tibetan communities face at various moments. Cultural producers, however, must get things exactly right as they create works that entertain and instruct Tibetan audiences on the one hand and meet government expectations for content on the other. Failure to do so can land a performer in jail, as happened with the famed comedian Menla Jyab (Donyol Dondrup and Makley 2018, 6).

That humorists living in authoritarian contexts potentially face reprisal for their jokes is not new (Oring 2004), but when they get the balance right, they can create memorable and meaningful texts that have potential to influence society. Seen from this perspective, zurza provides the tools for ensuring Tibetan presence contemporary media. This book explores the changing uses and meanings of zurza across different media and various moments of the post-Mao era. In doing so, it becomes possible to recognize how “cultural producers” (Abu-Lughod 1999, 113–14) from the ethnolinguistic region Tibetans call “Amdo” have used the concept to create work that is both entertaining and meaningful, reshaping Tibetan society in the process.

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Amdo is a geographical, linguistic, and cultural identity for Tibetans living in northeastern areas of the Tibetan Plateau, across parts of what are now Sichuan, Gansu, and Qinghai. Amdowas (people from Amdo) speak a variety of subdialects of Amhkel, or the Amdo dialect. The subdialects spoken in Amdo are nontonal and compensate for this with complex initial and final consonant clusters (Makley et al. 1999), leading some to postulate that Amdo’s spoken languages are more conservative or archaic than the Lhasa and Kham dialects. Estimates for the number of Amdo dialect speakers range from roughly one million (Huber 2002, xvi n5) to 1.8 million (Reynolds 2012, 19; see also Wang 2012).

Tibetans in Amdo further differentiate between ronghkel (farming dialects) and ndroghkel (nomad dialects), which constitute emically distinct sociolects (Reynolds 2012, 5). Linguists in China further recognize phonological and lexical differences between northern and southern versions of each, creating a four-part, etic distinction between northern and southern versions of farming dialects, and northern and southern versions of nomad dialects. Though the regional sociolects within Amdo are, to a large extent, mutually intelligible, each has its own expressive practices, as well as pronunciations that can confuse people from other parts of Amdo.

Along with the Eastern Tibetan region of Kham and the Central Tibetan region of Ü-Tsang, Amdo is one of the chol kha sum, the three regions traditionally recognized as being part of the Tibetan cultural world (Yang 2016). These are defined as follows:

It is known that when dividing the three regions, [the land] from Ngari and Gung thang to Soglakyawo is Ü-Tsang, the land of religion. And from there to the bend in the Yellow River is Dohtod [Kham], the land of men, and from there to China’s white stupa is Dohmad [Amdo] the land of horses. (Brag dgon pa dkon mchog bstan pa rab rgyas 1987)

This quote from the nineteenth-century The Political and Religious History of Amdo continues to influence Tibetan self-definitions and experiences to this day. It defines the regions according to altitude, with the highest in western and Central Tibet. Next come the higher-altitude valleys of Kham (Dohtod, literally “upper valleys”), then Amdo (Dohmad, literally “lower valleys”) as the lowest and easternmost of the three. Each region is then associated with a characteristic. Central Tibet, home to Lhasa and many of the most significant monasteries, is the land of religion. Renowned for its pugnacious inhabitants, Kham earns recognition as the land of people. Amdo is the land of horses, a nod to the region’s lush grasslands.

By the time I arrived in Amdo to begin my research, however, conditions on the Tibetan Plateau had changed, and some people had reworked the original chol kha sum formulation in recognition of this. One parody that I heard popularly during my fieldwork went as follows:

Ü-Tsang is the land of politics

Dohtod [Kham] is the land of wealth

Dohmad [Amdo] is the land of scholars

དབུས་གཙང་སྲིད་གྱི་ཆོལ་ཁ།

མདོ་སྟོད་ནོར་གྱི་ཆོལ་ཁ།

མདོ་སྨད་ཤེས་རིག་གི་ཆོལ་ཁ།

In reformulating the chol kha sum definition, we simultaneously recognize the incredible staying power of these emic definitions, and the changing ways in which each region is viewed in relation to the current socioeconomic climate. Ü-Tsang, home to the historic capital of Lhasa, is the most politically sensitive; Kham is a land of economic development; and Amdo is a hub of contemporary Tibetan intellectual activity.

In the process of modernizing a traditional wedding speech,” meanwhile, a Tibetan comedian parodied the original idea, describing various inhabited areas:

In Lhasa, there are many pilgrimage sites,

In Ngawa, there are many merchants,

In Ziling, there are many scholars,

And in Tibet in general, it should be said that there are many monks (Sman bla skyabs 1996f)

ལྷ་ས་ན་མཇལ་ས་མང་ནི་ཟེར་གི།

རྔ་བ་ན་ཚོང་བ་མང་ནི་ཟེར་གི།

ཟི་ལིང་ན་མཁས་བ་མང་ནི་ཟེར་གི།

སྤྱིར་བོད་ཡུལ་ན་གྲྭ་བ་མང་ནི་ཟེར་གི་ཟེར་རྒྱུས།

In mentioning Ziling, one of the major urban centers in Amdo, and long a place where Tibetan cultural producers from the region gathered and worked, this version of the three-provinces model speaks to an emerging realization of the intellectual ferment and scholarly activity developing in Amdo. In the recorded comedy performance, the statement elicits laughter from the studio audience of Ziling-based Tibetans, many of whom would themselves be intellectuals. They simultaneously recognize the intertextual relationship with the original chol kha sum idea and appreciate that it has been reworked into an image that they understand.

Further complicating this already complex description is the fact that Amdo, which was never a concrete political entity (Huber 2002, xiii), now exists across multiple administrative boundaries, including parts of China’s present-day Qinghai, Gansu, and Sichuan. Local provincial and prefectural administrations interpret policy directives differently, and implementation may also vary by county or even township. Nevertheless, Amdo remains a salient regional and linguistic identity for many Tibetans in the region.

In the 1950s, the new government of the People’s Republic of China further complicated regional identities when it undertook an ambitious nationwide “ethnic identification” (Ch. minzu shibie) project that sought to scientifically identify the ethnic composition of the people living in China (Mullaney 2010; Ramsey 1992) on the basis of four criteria: shared language, locality, economy, and psychological makeup (Gladney 2004, 151; Harrell 2001, 39–42). The project whittled an initial number of over four hundred applications (Davis 2005, 17; Litzinger 2000, 7) to the more manageable official recognition of fifty-five minority groups and one majority (Han) group who are all considered part of one Chinese nation-race, the Zhonghua minzu (Leibold 2007; Mullaney 2004).² On the basis of this work, the Chinese government officially recognized Tibetans, regardless of where they are from, with the umbrella term Zangzu, translated into Tibetan as Bod (བོད།) and pronounced in Amdo as wod or wol. This official recognition appears on national identification cards, and various prefectures and counties are classified as “Tibetan autonomous,” with guarantees of Tibetan representation in local government.

From some perspectives, this might seem natural. Tibetan oral tradition includes formulae like gonak wol (black-headed Tibetans, མགོ་ནག་བོད།) and dongmar wol (red-faced Tibetans, གདོང་དམར་བོད།), by which Tibetans referred to themselves. Religious writing often began with a Sanskrit phrase followed by a translation into wolhkel (the Tibetan language, བོད་སྐད།). Seen from another perspective, however, the state’s use of the term Bod—which also referred more specifically to Tibetans from the central regions, including Lhasa and Zhigatse—gave new political status to a reified and translocal identity (Makley 2007; see also Tuttle 2010) that arguably did not exist in this fashion before. These historical and contemporary complications make Amdo a difficult and awkward scale for contemporary academic study.

With its lower altitude and location at the peripheries of both Tibetan and Han cultural spaces, the region plays an important role as an interethnic “contact zone” (Sulek and Ptackova 2017, 11) about the size of modern-day France, which is also inhabited by a number of ethnic groups, including the Hui (China’s largest Muslim ethnic group),³ the Tu (also known by a number of autonyms, including Monguor, Mangghuer, Monghuor, and Mongghul),⁴ Salars,⁵ Kazakhs, Mongolians,⁶ and China’s majority ethnic group, the Han (Zenz 2014, 36–42; Roche 2011, 8). Historically, for example, Tuttle recognizes that Amdo Tibetans, as well as Mongolian and Monguor practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism in the Amdo region, acted as brokers in the development of the modern Chinese state, not least by serving as important mediators between Tibetan communities and the Chinese state (Tuttle 2005). The Amdo dialect of Tibetan, meanwhile, has traditionally been the “model language” of what is often called the Amdo sprachbund (Sandman and Simon 2016; Dwyer 2013; Janhunen 2004, 2005), which includes the languages spoken by the various groups living in the region. This continued into the 1950s, when the People’s Liberation Army formally—and sometimes violently (Li 2016; Weiner 2020)—incorporated Tibetan communities in Amdo within the nascent People’s Republic of China.

Under the auspices of the United Work Front, the Chinese Communist Party initially promoted a gradual implementation of socialist collectivization, and area religious and secular elites were recruited into local government leadership (Weiner 2012). Then, in 1958, disaster struck. A failed uprising saw the party scrap the gradual policies of the United Work Front and implement full collectivization in line with the rest of the nation. In the aftermath, the Tibetan religious and secular elite fled to India and established a government in exile, and many monasteries were forced to close their doors. In Qinghai, for example, which had once boasted a robust 722 monasteries and nearly sixty thousand monks and reincarnate lamas prior to 1958, only 11 monasteries remained open after this date; the number rose to 137 in 1962 after the Northwest Nationalities Work Conference (Pu 1990, 3–4). Statistics from neighboring Gansu tell a similar story: the 369 pre-1958 monasteries were reduced to only 8 after that date; again, the number rose to 107 in 1962 (Pu 1990 503–4). Similar stories apply to other Tibetan regions as well. Combined with Mao’s ill-fated “Great Leap Forward” and a widespread famine, Tibetans in Amdo today still speak of 1958 as having brought such sweeping and traumatic changes for communities across Tibet that it remains the year that they recognize as a “change in worlds” (Hayes 2014): the year the “old world” ended and the “new world” began.

Between 1966 and 1976, the entirety of the People’s Republic of China was gripped by the Cultural Revolution, and Tibetans in Amdo were no exception. This “ten years of turmoil,” during which “the four olds” (old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas) were targeted for destruction, lingers in the region’s cultural memory. The post-1958 closure of monasteries that had been so important to community life only intensified as village temples were demolished, monastery buildings repurposed (Makley 2007, 113–14), and religious writings destroyed (Willock 2011, 8). Pu Wencheng (1990) meanwhile notes that Qinghai and Gansu both closed all but one monastery, leaving open just Kumbum and Labrang Monasteries, respectively. In addition to targeting religion, Goodman (2004a, 388) points out that education was only to be conducted in Putonghua standard Chinese (Mandarin) rather than a bilingual education system that also taught Chinese.

Despite this commonly accepted narrative that cultural work and education came to a total standstill throughout the Maoist period, some did continue, and this is particularly true in Amdo, where a few dedicated teachers worked to, in the words of one former student, “save Tibetan” (Pema Bhum 2006, 2017).⁷ In many pastoral communities, schools met in tents rather than in fixed buildings, and the conditions were basic at best, but the work of education continued. One notable cultural producer, who would have been ten years old before the end of the Cultural Revolution, described his early education as follows:

After I was a little older than ten, after that I went to elementary school. Uh, at first, there wasn’t exactly a clear school in our village. They pitched a tent, a cloth tent, and I went to that [tent] school. Then, for one or two years, I went to the elementary school in the township, which is called the xiang. Then I went to the county middle school. Then I attended Tsolho Nationalities Normal School. And then at seventeen, I directly received a job, and came to Ziling and have been working at this post here since. (personal communication, March 11, 2013).

This type of anecdotal evidence appears time and again across Amdo. Under these difficult circumstances, Tibetan-language instruction often persisted due to the support of a single charismatic teacher, maybe a former monk. Those fortunate enough to attend these primary schools during the Cultural Revolution were well positioned to enter prefectural teacher training schools—like the famous Tsolho Nationalities Normal School mentioned above—and newly reopened universities when policies loosened again, beginning, for Tibetan regions, in the post-Mao period.

The above overview brings the narrative generally into the post-Mao moment, in which this book picks up the narrative: the period of Reform and Opening Up beginning in the 1980s. Against a background of intensifying social, economic, and cultural changes as the PRC shifted from a socialist to a market economy, Tibetans have been encouraged to resume Tibetan-language cultural production, including music (Morcom 2008; Adams 1996; Yangdon Dhondup 2008a), literature (Hartley 1999, 2003, 2007; Hartley and Schiaffini-Vedani 2008; Lama Jabb 2014; Yangdon Dhondup 2000, 2008b; Robin 2007, 2008), and art (Harris 1999), as well as the comedic and musical expressive forms detailed in this book. More recently, this has also spurred the development of a new film industry (Berry 2016; Frangville 2016; Lo 2016; Yau 2016; Grewal 2016).

The fortuitous confluence of educational opportunity, cultural policy, and the unprecedentedly bare cultural field in the wake of the Maoist period empowered a young generation of intellectuals to emerge as leaders of contemporary Tibetan experimentation with language, philosophy, and genre (Hartley and Schiaffini-Vedani 2008). Looking to both Tibetan traditions and more modern forms of cultural production, these intellectuals have played an immense role in shaping popular attitudes about the Tibetan present and expectations for a Tibetan future. Being seen and heard in media spaces, however, has often required working from within state-controlled institutions, including mass media. This book tells the story of how zurza provides cultural producers with a traditional resource to tell new Tibetan stories in post-Mao Amdo.

Amdo is a dynamic and diverse region undergoing rapid change, but studies have all too often examined contemporary Amdo Tibetan communities and their cultural practices synchronically and through festival moments. This approach produces “freeze frames” (Makley 2013b, 190) that obscure much of the region’s dynamism and diversity. Similarly, the chapters of this book show that zurza is too fluid a concept for such an approach. A diachronic one as flexible as zurza itself is necessary to understand it and the various ways cultural producers have deployed it. This book follows zurza—formulated differently at different moments and in different media—and its development in a generally chronological order, from oral traditions linked to stage performances in the early post-Mao period, and then into twenty-first-century televised sketch comedies and online hip-hop. At each moment, the ability to use zurza allowed access to state-controlled media and performance spaces, making it a valuable expressive resource for Tibetan cultural resilience at a moment when many producers felt the culture to be under threat.

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Sitting in a gleaming white Honda with a portly comedian and two of his trainees on the way to a performance, I was admiring the northern Sichuan countryside when the comedian Jamyang Lodree twisted back from his shotgun seat (one of his students was driving) and said, “If you want to be an artist, you have to be a bad person.” Something in his voice told me that he considered this an important idea. He used the word jyutselpa, which refers not just to painters or sculptors but to culture brokers who may engage in a variety of forms of production, including writing, acting, and singing. People like him. The word ngen pa, which I translate as “bad person,” was tinged with moral judgment.

Over the next few days, I watched as he seemed to put his words into embodied action. Over this time, he ate dinner with a local paramour (and tried to introduce me to her sister), consumed impossible amounts of liquor with a lama while the cleric’s Han devotees served them both, and got into arguments on the popular social media platform WeChat.

I should also note that he is a former monk who left religious life and became an emcee, singer, and comedian. His early exposure to both monastic life and the oral and material ways of pastoral life underpin his reputation as a master wordsmith and a veritable repository of Tibetan folk knowledge. His breadth of experience also makes him a keen observer of Tibetan life in a rapidly changing world.

These culminated in his performance at the event we attended, in which he and his students performed a sketch hilariously targeting gambling (primarily), through a portrayal of a man losing progressively larger amounts of money at cards while seeking to influence his fortune with ever-more vigorous prayers between hands.

Jamyang Lodree passed away suddenly in 2019, and with him went a vast repository of folk knowledge. I have since come to understand this statement about being a bad person as saying that a contemporary Tibetan “artist” must be a trickster, living betwixt and between, and eschewing the accepted definitions of a good life. Taking on the role of modern society’s trickster, the artist gains the experiences, critical eye, and expressive skill to create meaningful and entertaining stories. The foundation for all of this is the zurza as used in oral tradition. To begin the examination of zurza in post-Mao Amdo, then, requires first looking to still-present traditions of satirical humor in Tibet.