A Note on Language, Methodology, and Ethics

The chapters of this book open us onto a complex Tibetan world featuring multiple ethnic groups, languages, dialects, and registers. In order to convey concepts, performances, and people “on their own terms,” I have favored many Chinese and Tibetan terms over imperfect English equivalents. In some instances, I have provided English translations followed by Tibetan and/or Chinese originals in parentheses. Some terms, like the names of administrative units (counties, prefectures, provinces, etc.) have both Chinese and Tibetan equivalents; others are specifically Tibetan. Some of the Tibetan terms are common across dialects and have accepted written forms; others are specific to the Amdo dialect and have no commonly accepted written form. This complicated situation means that I have spent far too much time considering how best to portray these terms in a way that is accessible to readers but also does justice to the communities and the individuals. There are no easy answers, and surely someone will be disappointed. If someone is to be disappointed, though, I would rather it be the readers than the people who kindly shared with me their time, food, tea, liquor, experiences, knowledge, and dreams. These speakers deserve to be read and heard in their words, their language, and their culture.

Chinese terms are relatively straightforward; they are also in the minority. I use the pinyin romanization system for all such terms and mark these terms with “Ch.” For example, when describing the 1950s ethnic identification projects, I write: “ethnic identification” (Ch. minzu shibie). Where Tibetan terms are involved, however, this commitment to the words of my interlocutors presents at least two immediate difficulties. First, there is no commonly accepted system for rendering Amdo Tibetan speech with the Latin alphabet. The most common romanization systems render Tibetan based on either normative pronunciations of the Lhasa dialect or the Tibetan writing system. Neither of these really makes sense. A book about Amdo—a region of northeastern Tibet now split between modern-day Qinghai, Sichuan, and Gansu, possessing a range of dialects largely unintelligible to Tibetans from other regions—can hardly employ a romanization based on the Lhasa dialect, like the Tibetan and Himalayan Library’s Online Tibetan Phonetics Converter. The Extended Wylie Transliteration System (see Anton-Luca 2006), while dialect neutral, portrays words and concepts as they are written in Tibetan. This would solve the problem of dialect but yields unwieldy consonant clusters that some English-speaking readers may find off-putting.

If neither of these, then what? The best solution I have found is to render Tibetan names and terms in the body of the text in something resembling the Amdo Tibetan pronunciation based on how I, as an American from Ohio, hear them. Because the comedians, rappers, and tradition bearers with whom I spoke are primarily from pastoral communities, I especially privilege pronunciations from their subdialects. In cases where I am trying to make a specific linguistic point, I have also included Tibetan script in parentheses immediately following the romanized term. For longer quotations of Tibetan texts, I have placed English translations and Tibetan script together. After all, any book about modern Tibetan cultural production and language’s important role in this can hardly proceed by erasing Tibetan language.

I have made two major exceptions to this practice. For proper nouns sufficiently well known to my expected English-speaking audience to have other popularly accepted romanizations, I have used the more common ones, even where they differ from the Amdo Tibetan pronunciation. For example, I have written the name of the Central Tibetan region “Ü-Tsang” instead of the Wylie Dbus (or dBus) gtsang or the Amdo pronunciation of Wetsang. Additionally, if a living person has expressed a particular preference for how to write their name in English, I have followed that. Comedian-poet-actor-director Shidé Nyima, for example, uses this spelling when writing his name with the Latin alphabet, though I might render it differently if trying to faithfully replicate some Amdo dialects. Failing specific requests, I have rendered names phonetically as I heard them. The Tibetan script for personal names and specific terms can be found in the glossary.

Rendering Tibetan script throughout the text should not be off-putting. For a book about Tibet, it is little different than including Greek script in a text about Greece, except that a Western reader’s eyes are less accustomed to it. The same applies to Chinese characters. Meanwhile, in a moment in which we seek to recognize and be transparent about the construction of knowledge, there is a strong decolonizing argument that my interlocutors be heard as well as possible and on their own terms. This will help to ensure that speakers’ words can be examined and that my own interventions and decisions are more available to readers.

Having made this decision, my second immediate difficulty is that, despite a few attempts at writing in Tibetan “vernacular” (some of which are mentioned in this book), there remain few commonly accepted ways of writing colloquial Tibetan. The conventions in this book follow those I have seen employed in textbooks, scripts, and vernacular literature. Where Tibetan performances quoted derive from poetry, comic scripts, and other written documents, I have replicated the spelling in the originals. For transcriptions of oral performances for which I have no scripts, the Tibetan provided represents my best efforts to render specific features of the Amdo dialect’s grammar, often in collaboration with Tibetans from the region. A nonexhaustive list of some conventions would include verb aspect markers like ki/gi (ཀི or གི) for the present tense, tha (ཐལ) for completed actions, and ni re (ནི་རེད།) for the simple past aspect. The following phrase from “Gesar’s Horse Herder” (the performance discussed in chapter 4) illustrates this approach:

In my opinion there’s a lot that you don’t know.

ངས་བལྟས་ན་ཁྱོས་ཤེས་གི་མེད་ནོ་མང་གི

This one sentence illustrates many of the concerns and interventions unique to the Amdo dialect. Here, the syllable no (ནོ) is used as a nominalizer (Dpal ldan bkra shis 2016, 540) to construct the relative clause “what I’m talking about.” The syllable ཁྱོས། is the second-person pronoun (locally pronounced cho) with the agentive particle affixed, rendering the new pronunciation chee, creating the subject of the verb “to know.” The final two syllables of the phrase, mang gi (མང་གི), join a single syllable adjective mang ‘many’ with gi, which in Dpal ldan bkra shis’s (2016, 48) terminology is the “reportive mood,” used by a speaker to report what the speaker thinks to be the case. Most of these features are specific to the Amdo dialect. At the same time, the verb “to speak” has a commonly accepted spelling, and I preserve this even though it differs from the pronunciation.

Toponyms and names for administrative units and government media companies present further problems. With both Tibetan and Chinese names, I have chosen to use Tibetan pronunciations for cities, towns, counties, and prefectures, Chinese pinyin in parentheses at the first usage, and characters in the glossary.

Due to the very real potential for political fallout associated with any study of China’s ethnic minority populations, I have done my utmost to protect the identities of my consultants. Most interviews were conducted in Tibetan, and only rarely in English or Chinese at the interviewee’s preference. If done in English or Chinese, I have marked the quotes as such at the end of the quotation. Under the terms of IRB protocol 2012B0466, and due to the potentially sensitive nature of the project, I transcribed all interviews myself, without the aid of a research assistant. All interviews were conducted in spaces chosen by the interviewee, often teahouses or cafés. As such, there were certain segments of conversations that were difficult to understand. These indistinct portions are marked with question marks. Any mistakes in the transcription and translation are entirely my own.

It should also be noted that, due to the scope of this thesis and the regional nature of its analysis, I have sometimes generalized based on the informed opinions of my interlocutors. I am fully aware of the dangers of overgeneralization, but, over the course of countless conversations throughout the region, I have come to believe that the views contained in their responses are representative of those held by many (especially lay) Tibetans in Amdo.

The selection of interlocutors was limited to my own networks and my own ability to meet people. They are overwhelmingly male, first-generation-urban Tibetans who, when asked about their home areas, are more likely to say the name of a county in the Tibetan countryside than the provincial capital of Ziling, in which most of the interviewees live. I also conducted interviews with people from a variety of areas in the countryside.

Most of my interviewees are bilingual in Amdo Tibetan and some form of Chinese; some are trilingual. Their opinions, and my subsequent deductions, certainly do not reflect the experience or opinions of every person on the plateau. To wit, there is a small—but growing—population of one-and-a-half- and second-generation urbanites who are unable or unwilling to speak Tibetan, and not as concerned with the issues being articulated here. I conducted no formal interviews with such people, as they admitted no interest in these performances, due to their inability to understand both the language and the content.