4 Garchung Televised Sketches and a Cultural Turn in the 2000s

Sounds of bleating sheep piped through the sound system turn the stage into a pastoral community. With a little imagination, you can almost see the grasslands unfolding ahead, dotted with white sheep and black yaks. An elderly-looking man wanders onto the stage wearing a nomad’s felt raincoat. He takes off the coat and places it on the ground, briefly surveys the scene, and then strolls back off stage left. As soon as he exits, a tall Caucasian man and an Asian woman enter from the opposite end, speaking English. The foreigner says he is looking for black-necked cranes that only live on the Tibetan Plateau, and the guide thinks that “Uncle Horse Herder,” a local herdsman, might know where to find them. At this, the herder walks onto the stage, shouting:

Aro! This is my pasture. There’s no passage! So, head off that way!

ཨ་རོགས། འདི་ས་ངའི་རྩྭ་ས་ཡིན།འགྲོ་ས་མེད། གན་སར་སོང་།

The audience laughs and claps at the obstinate herder, who they recognize being played by the star comedian Menla Jyab. This, the woman says, is Uncle Horse Herder, and she thinks that he might know more about the birds.

The woman, Hongmei, who turns out to be a Tibetan and a teacher at the local school, tries to speak with the herder and introduces the foreigner, Jersey, who gives a Tibetan greeting and bows awkwardly. The stunned herder responds, saying:

Look how human speech comes from his mouth.

ཁྱོས་ལྟོས། འདིའི་ཁ་ནང་ནས་མྱི་སྐད་གྲགས་ནོ་ཨེ་རིག་གི།

More laughter.

The teacher tries to explain why she has brought the foreigner onto the horse herder’s land. But she immediately runs into trouble, because the pastoralist seems largely incapable of understanding the young teacher, who mixes Chinese and Tibetan so often that her speech is almost unintelligible. For example, she says that the foreigner will bring dollars, which the herder mishears as doleb (stone slabs); she also says meigor, a combination of the standard Chinese Meiguo (America) and gormo, the Amdo Tibetan word for money. He not only fails to understand this term but mistakenly believes she is talking about a “beggar’s money” because the first syllables of mépo (beggar) and Meiguo sound similar to his old ears. This makes no sense whatsoever to the herder. After all, what can “beggar’s money” be? And regardless, none of this explains why the teacher has brought the man onto his land. When the teacher tells him the foreigner is looking for birds, he is even more confused.

All of them know that the black-necked cranes live on this land, but the horse herder seems disinclined to allow the pair onto it. He lies, saying that the birds have left and that the foreigner should do the same. Frustrated, the teacher pulls him aside and, running around like a terrier to face the nomad, who is trying to turn his back to her, she argues:

This is an excellent opportunity! The god of wealth has arrived at our door. You might need help with money in the future.

ཇི་ཧུཨེ་(机会)་དགའ་གཟིག་རེད་མོ། ཙའི་ཤེན་ཡེ(财神爷)་བཟོ་སྒོ་ཁར་ཐོན་བཏང་ནི་རེད། གཞུག་ནས་སྒོར་མོ་བཟོ་དགོས་ན་ཐང་།

Far from impressed with the young woman’s reasoning, Uncle Horse Herder responds, saying:

Dear Teacher, you seem like the reincarnation of one who’s died a pauper.

དགེ་རྒན་ལོ་ལོ། ཁྱོད་འདི་སྒོར་མོ་མེད་ལ་ཤི་སོང་ནི་ཟིག་གི་རྣམ་ཤེས་ཡིན་ས་རེད།

There’s raucous laughter this time.

Then the foreigner begins to speak. In Tibetan! “What if I look from far away?” he asks. The herder is stunned, and the camera cuts to a member of the studio audience, who leans on his neighbor, mouth agape; the herder is clearly not alone. “It’s like he’s speaking Tibetan,” the herder says. The foreigner insists that he won’t cause a problem, and he and the teacher try to convince the herder. With the foreigner speaking Tibetan, the horse herder is willing to listen and to share a bit of his knowledge, but he still denies the presence of the cranes.

When confronted with his deception, he reveals that his opposition is cultural:

Small Treasure Lake is not some meaningless puddle. It is Gesar’s [wife] Drukmo’s mirror. The slender-winged white crane [on the shore of the lake] is the Tibetans’ spirit bird. It is Drukmo’s soul bird.

མཚོ་ཆུང་ནོར་བུ་ཟེར་ནོ་གན་རང་ང་ནང་དོན་མེད་ནིས་ཆུ་འཁྱིལ་ཟིག་མ་རེད། གན་གླིང་སེང་ལྕམ་འབྲུ་མོའི་ངོ་བལྟ་རེད། དེ་ཁ་གི་ཁྲུང་ཁྲུང་དཀར་མོ་གཤོག་ཡག་མ། བོད་ཁ་བ་ཅན་གི་ལྷ་བྱ་རེད། གླིང་སེང་ལྕམ་འབྲུག་མོའི་བླ་བྱ་རེད། འོ་ཡ།

Later, he takes the teacher aside to let her know that the birds, the lake, and the village’s fortune are inextricably linked:

Small Treasure Lake is our village’s bucket of fortune. The birds on the shore are like the butter on its rim. It is said that during the years when the birds are many, the elders live longer and livestock prosper; when there are no birds there, then everything is doomed.

མཚོ་ཆུང་ནོར་བུ་ཟེར་གོ་ནོ་གན་འུ་ཆའོ་སྡེ་བ་གི་གཡང་གི་ཟོ་ཞབས་ཡིན་ནི་རེད། མཚོ་ཁ་བྱ་ཆའོ་ཟོ་ཁ་གི་མར་འདྲ་འདྲ་བོ་རེད། བྱ་མང་གི་ལོ་དེར་ལོ་ལོན་གི་ཚེ་ཐག་རིང་ང་ཕྱུགས་ཟོག་གི་འཕེལ་ཁ་དར་ར། བྱ་མེད་དུས་ད་བྱ་ཚང་གོ་ནི་ཡིན་བསོད་ནམས་ཟད་གོ་ནི་ཡིན་ཟེར་ནི་རེད།

With these exchanges, the herder thereby forces the conversation to remain firmly within Tibetan ways of understanding their world, with concerns of individual and village fortune paramount. He also compares the cranes to butter on the rim of a bucket, referencing a practice reserved for auspicious occasions, like weddings and New Year festivities. Linking local geographies to the Tibetan epic of King Gesar, meanwhile, is a common way communities place themselves on the Tibetan cultural map. By focusing on cultural rather than economic arguments, the horse herder justifies his decision to deny access to the lake. And with good reason: Although many birds live at the lake at the moment, things were not always thus. Previously an outsider had looked in the lake, and it coincided with a string of disasters for the village. The horse herder is unwilling to take any chances, what with the community’s fortune on the line.

But what if the foreigner was a Buddhist? After all, Hongmei reasons, there are Buddhists all over the world these days. So, she asks the foreigner about his religion. Jersey says he is atheist. Knowing that this answer is no good, she lies and tells the horse herder that Jersey believes in Tibetan Buddhism. The foreigner, however, seals his own fate by contradicting the teacher, saying that it is better to tell the truth and that he doesn’t believe in religion (literally saying he “has no faith”). The teacher is visibly frustrated at this, and the horse herder incredulously asks:

Where on earth are there people who don’t have a religion?

འཇིག་རྟེན་ན་དད་པ་མེད་ནིའི་མྱི་ར་ཡོད་ནི་ཨེ་རེད།

This situation appears to be one that he simply cannot fathom. Can the foreigner come back from this?

Next, things turn downright dangerous when the herder learns that the foreigner is from England, reminding the herder of the Younghusband expedition of 1904 in which a detachment of British soldiers defeated the Tibetan army (a staple of Maoist-era propaganda). The young “Brit” says, “It wasn’t me! That’s history!” But the herder mistakes “history” (ལོ་རྒྱུས།, locally pronounced lorjee) for the similar-sounding personal name Dorje (རྡོ་རྗེ།). In the Amdo dialect, everything but the initial consonant of these two words sounds similar, and the horse herder thinks the foreigner is trying to shift the blame. Even after clarifying the mistake, the herder remains unconvinced:

Well, that’s just what your chances of seeing the cranes are: history!

ངའི་མཚོ་ཆུང་ནོར་བུའི་ཁ་གི་ཁྲུང་ཁྲུང་ཚོ་ར་ལྟ་རྒྱུའི་གོ་སྐབ་འགྱའ་སོང་ནི་རེད། ལོ་རྒྱུས་རེད།

In a last-ditch attempt to help the foreigner achieve his goal (and possibly secure donations for the school in the process), the teacher and the foreign researcher try further arguments to convince the herder. Focusing on ecological conservation and the scientific study of the black-necked cranes, they argue for the benefits of allowing further research. But the herder is again confused when the teacher uses the standard Chinese term shengtai baohu for ecological conservation, Only after the foreigner clarifies with the correct Tibetan term (yes, you read that correctly!) does the meaning become clear. Again, however, the herder is unimpressed. By limiting access to his land, he believes that he has been engaged in ecological conservation for years already. The teacher offers to take a picture on the foreigner’s behalf and to boost the potential tourism money that could come from spreading news about the cranes. None of this sways the herder’s opinion. In the end, he trudges off alone in the direction from which he had come, leaving the teacher and the foreigner shrugging helplessly.

“Gesar’s Horse Herder” (Gesar htardzi) is the performance that initially inspired my interest in Tibetan comedy. From the first time I saw it, I felt that it spoke to important concerns facing Tibetan communities in the twenty-first century about the present and future of the language, culture, and environments. Conversations with performers and fans further solidified this impression when they regularly cited it as a favorite in relation to contemporary debates over language practice. More importantly, the comedy demonstrates just how significantly the satirical critique of Tibetan comedy—and the broader twenty-first-century intellectual project in Amdo—had begun to change. It begins with the more visual medium itself, which hints at the very real technological and infrastructural changes to Tibetan communities in this period.

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Sitting in the tiny back room of a small music shop selling mandolins and VCDs (video compact discs, which served as the primary medium through which people enjoyed audiovisual material during my fieldwork), I am chatting with a well-known actor and singer, who also happens to be the proprietor of the shop. With his hair cut short and wearing baggy jeans, a long-sleeve T-shirt, and a string of large prayer beads around his neck, he does not look like the long-haired, robe-wearing, and usually poor pastoralists he normally portrays on stage and film. Before I can even ask a question or set up my recorder, he immediately launches into a long disclaimer about his lack of education, his background as a singer, and his inability to speak authoritatively about comedy.

When I finally do manage to get a question in, I ask about his experience performing khashag. After all, I have heard fans use khashag to refer to both comedic dialogues and the sketches for which he is best known. It quickly becomes clear to me that I have put my foot in my mouth. The comedian vigorously corrects me and says that he does not do khashag. He primarily performs garchung (sketches, གར་ཆུང་།). “What’s called garchung,” he says, “is played with [physical] performance, they say it’s like that. This thing called a khashag, the two of us stand up and I speak to you, and you speak to me. That’s called khashag” (pers. comm., August 23, 2013).

It is one of those fortuitous fieldwork faux pas in which an errant word provides valuable new perspectives. Over time, I heard other comedians make a similar distinction between khashag and either garchung or zhadgar (comedic plays). One comedian, for example, agreed with the premise and expanded on it, saying:

Well, in general, in the 1980s and 1990s I mostly did dialogues, and, uh, in terms of the artistic forms, if you divide it into dialogues and sketches, comedic dialogues were mostly written during the 1980s and 1990s. At that time, there really wasn’t much to prepare. At that time, it wasn’t visual. They didn’t record images, and it was primarily recording sound. When they recorded, after I’d finished writing the script, I’d hold the script, and uh, the microphone, and I could hold it and it was all right to say it like this.

Sketches weren’t like this. Most comedic dialogues were like this. And when the later garchung arrived, uh, [we had to] memorize the script, and then find the cast, and they had to memorize, and then the directing process—it’s called daoyan, right? This process was involved, and then we finally [performed] it. It was like that.

Not limited to the names of the genres, the verbs used in conjunction with performance further reflect the difference between the two forms: a sketch, for example, is htsé wa (played, རྩེད་པ།) or trabhtun ye wa (performed, འཁྲབ་སྟོན་བྱེད་པ), while a khashag dialogue is shed pa (spoken, བཤད་པ།).

To Amdo’s comedians, this distinction between khashag comedic dialogues and garchung sketches recognizes that the newer, more visual, garchung required different artistic, material, and technological capacities. These terminological distinctions also hint at the different technological, artistic, and thematic properties of the form. While 1990s comic dialogues were primarily disseminated on radio broadcasts and audio cassettes, new garchung reached audiences through state television station and, later, on VCDs and the internet.

These sketches are also stylistically and thematically different from the comic dialogues of the 1990s, in that they satirize a host of new issues, a testament to how rapidly conditions have changed in the Amdo’s intellectual sphere. For example, whereas comedic dialogues and other cultural production in the 1990s satirized “social issues” associated with modernization, the comedies and other cultural production in the twenty-first century engage in what I call a “cultural turn.” Similar to what Ptackova (2019, 420) has termed “traditionalization,” defined as the (re)invention of tradition to distinguish Tibetan identity from the Han, this cultural turn focuses on issues like language, tradition, ritual, and environment, in support of a growing Tibetan nationalism. After all, vernacular and traditional practices are often “valorized when the nation is project” (Ortiz 1996, 37).¹

With the switch to a more visual medium and performance genre, some new stars emerged, finding that the style better suited their talents for physical comedy. Shidé Nyima and Soktruk Sherab, for example, both gained popularity and fame thanks primarily to their skills, especially with physical comedy. Many of these performers have gone on to feature in television shows and film, like the 2009 hit miniseries The Pig’s Head Soothsayer (Mohtun phamgo), featuring Shidé Nyima, and the 2008 series Yesterday’s Story (Khasang gi tamjyul), in which Soktruk Sherab took a star turn. Other established comedians, like Pakmo Drashe, who voiced the “Careful Village” series alongside Menla Jyab, gradually faded from the comedic scene. Some of Amdo’s comedic stars also seamlessly transitioned to this new style. For example, Menla Jyab’s fame and popularity grew with the transition to this more visual comedy.

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At the close of the 1990s, as comedians and other intellectuals promoted a Tibetan May Fourth Movement, Qinghai—including the Amdo heartland—had the worst economy in the entire country. Other regions of China’s ethnically diverse western regions lagged similarly behind the metropolises in the well-developed coastal regions. Then, in 2000, the Chinese government initiated the “Great Open the West Campaign.” This far-reaching project dominated state policy in the first decades of the twenty-first century, with massive investments in infrastructure, afforestation programs, transportation, a natural gas pipeline (Goodman 2004a), and particularly education (Clothey and McKinlay 2012). It also included encouraging the migration of non-Tibetan populations into traditionally Tibetan regions (see, for example, Yeh 2013b) and an extensive “ecological migration” program, in which Tibetan pastoralists were moved off the grassland in the name of protecting it, also subsidized by the state in the name of environmental conservation (Ptackova 2013).

While the Great Open the West Campaign transformed the economic, social, and infrastructural landscape of the Tibetan Plateau, the Chinese government also ratified the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2004 and began to undertake a broad campaign to identify and protect intangible traditions throughout the country. Leaders and culture brokers specifically targeted minority practices for heritage recognition, and by 2009 (the second year of official listing), Tibetan traditions comprised three of China’s twenty-nine successful applications to the UNESCO list, a representation far outstripping the region’s proportion of the total populace of the country. This official and broad-ranging support for traditional practices and knowledge, also seen as a way to boost local economies, suddenly authorized new discourses on state media and rendered new narratives about the values of tradition “tellable”—the qualities in a narrative and in a context that make it worth telling (Sacks 1992)—for a Tibetan audience in ways that they had not been in previous decades.

Contemporaneous to these many government-led initiatives, a host of international NGOs supported cultural preservation projects alongside those relating to running water and solar cooker distribution. Infrastructure investments also brought an influx of government money to the region, while the brisk and lucrative interregional trade in caterpillar fungus further supported local economies in this period and enriched some of the region’s rural inhabitants. Unprecedented amounts of disposable income, increased settlement in urban or periurban environments, infrastructural improvements (including lined electricity), and the new availability of electronic devices and other media technologies all helped to encourage the Tibetan Plateau’s increasing integration with China’s market economy.

Expanded television ownership also made new, more visual forms of cultural production possible. But getting seen on television was no easier than getting heard on radio broadcasts, and the state’s gatekeepers continued to strictly monitor the messages shared through these media. Many of the most famous performances ended up initially airing on the annual New Year’s Eve variety gala, the Losar Gongtsog. This spectacle aired on local television stations and featured emcees (broadcasters from the various television stations around the plateau) introducing songs, dances, greetings from other areas, and, of course, comedies. Still to this day, the show’s producers scrutinize each word of these events to ensure that they strike the correct political tone. In many cases politics weigh more heavily than entertainment value. With these strict controls on performance, Amdo’s comedians’ ability to use language artfully, humorously, and meaningfully—in short, their ability to mobilize zurza as a “cultural resource” to “solve problems”—remains a key discursive tool for comedians to turn humor into meaningful and tellable performance. Again Menla Jyab’s satirical critique derives its power primarily through the juxtaposition and comparison of various characters, like the foreigner Jersey, the teacher Hongmei, and the obstinate pastoralist, Uncle Horse Herder.

In this regard, one reason for the incredible popularity of “Gesar’s Horse Herder” is the stunning presence of the Tibetan-speaking foreigner. For some audience members, this might have been the first time they saw a Caucasian person speaking their language. Interestingly, however, “Gesar’s Horse Herder” is not the only performance to use foreign characters, though it is perhaps the most famous. In one part of the “Careful Village” series, a villager wants to marry a foreign woman who, coincidentally, has also come to the Tibetan Plateau to research birds. Foreign characters provide a valuable break in everyday life and allow comedians to openly discuss behaviors and social issues that might otherwise be taken for granted. The unique combination of (assumed) wealth and high prestige on the one hand and cultural and linguistic semicompetence on the other provides fertile ground for both humorous misunderstandings and biting satirical critique. In “Gesar’s Horse Herder,” for example, the presence and actions of the “Englishman” Jersey allows the audience to compare and contrast his actions and ideas with those of the two Tibetan characters. In particular, his words and activities point the satirical spotlight directly at Hongmei.

For all the modern social capital we can assume from her position—a high level of schooling leading to a job as a teacher, knowledge of multiple languages, access to the latest fashions, and more—Teacher Hongmei is not to be emulated. Instead, her name, clothing, attitudes, and behavior all index distance from Tibetan culture. One comedian even derisively asserted that the teacher, “has become Han,” (རྒྱ་ལ་ལོག་སོང་གཟིག) in a tone that made quite that this was not intended as a compliment. In particular, the teacher falls short in three areas that emerge as central components of the twenty-first century cultural turn and of the of satirist-comedian’s new critique: knowledge of traditional culture, knowledge of traditional environments, and linguistic (in)competence.

Most obvious of these are the instances in which Hongmei mixes Chinese words into her Tibetan speech. In fact, she borrows Chinese words several times, including the following:

1) The god of wealth has arrived at our door. 财神爷བཟོ་སྒོ་ཁར་ཐོན་བཏང་ནི་རེད།

2) He says that I need to translate ངས་翻译 ་བྱེད་དགོས་ནི་རེད་བཟེས།

3) There’s no relation 关系 ་བདག་གོ་ཅང་ར་མེད་གི

4) That’s about it. ད་大概་དེ་མོ་གཟིག་རེད།

Each time she borrows Chinese terms, Hongmei’s inability to communicate with the horse herder becomes more evident. By the end, the foreign visitor even corrects her Tibetan on two separate occasions. In the first, he corrects her use of the Chinese term dagai (roughly or approximately), while in the second and more pronounced instance, the foreigner teaches the teacher how to say the Tibetan term for ecological conservation:

HONGMEI: Shengtai baohu is everyone’s responsibility.

UNCLE HORSE HERDER: I didn’t understand a word you said.

Hongmei: (in English to Jersey) I’m sorry, what is “ecology” in Tibetan?

JERSEY: Hjyekham.

HONGMEI: (to herself) Hjyekham, hjyekham. (then to Uncle Horse Herder) Ecological conservation is everyone’s responsibility.

HONGMEI: 生态保护དེ་ཡོང་རྫོགས་གི་ལས་འགན་རེད་ཟེར་གི་ཟེ།

UNCLE HORSE HERDER: ད་ཁྱོའི་དེ་ར་ཅང་མ་གོ་ཐལ།

HONGMEI: I’m sorry, what is “ecology” in Tibetan?

JERSEY: སྐྱེ་ཁམས།

HONGMEI: སྐྱེ་ཁམས། སྐྱེ་ཁམས། སྐྱེ་ཁམས་སྲུང་སྐྱོབ་ཚང་མས་བྱེད་དགོས་ནི་རེད་ བཟེས་ཡ།

In this exchange, Hongmei’s baffling inability to produce pure Tibetan creates a sentence that is so incomprehensible to the horse herder that it alienates her from her interlocutors, suggests her cultural distance from Tibetan traditions, and weakens her own negotiating stance. This impression is furthered when the horse herder says that he hadn’t understood her at all. With this, the situation has become so egregious and untenable that Hongmei is practically incapable of interacting with the tradition-associated horse herder.

If Hongmei’s linguistic practices impede clear communication, her cultural attitudes further alienate the very nomad she is trying to persuade. At a key moment, the teacher argues that even she knows of the existence of cranes on the elderly nomad’s land and that gaining recognition for them could bring economic benefits to the community. Menla Jyab’s character, however, immediately retorts:

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

ངས་བལྟས་ན་ཁྱོས་ཤེས་གི་མེད་ནི་མང་གི

Hongmei is right, but so is the horse herder. The elusive, black-necked cranes do live on his land, and the community probably could benefit from allowing tourists to see them. But in solely emphasizing economic concerns, the teacher betrays her disregard of traditional cultural practice. By contrast, the herder’s decision not to allow the foreigner on his land shows that he cares about more than money. He bases his decision on a more complex historical and cultural logic, insisting that Tibetan ways of knowing their world should have a place in his conversations.

Tibetan audiences also realize that the horse herder has good reasons for refusing to allow the foreigner—and particularly an admitted atheist—onto his land. In calling his own character “Gesar’s horse herder” and discussing how the lake in question is “Drukmo’s mirror” (referring to Gesar’s wife), Menla Jyab creates a metonymic link (Foley 1995, 5–11) to a much larger cultural tradition of associating individual locations with Gesar’s exploits, and the even broader tradition of associating remarkable handprints and footprints on rocks with the presence of great religious figures.

Tibetans traditionally also view themselves as living alongside a variety of more-than-human beings, including both animals and a variety of autochthonous numina the interactions of which have the power to affect people’s lives for good or for ill. Grasslands and water sources are potentially dangerous, liminal spaces. A nap on the grassland can lead to encounters with deities (as in the case of inspired performers of the Gesar epic), and a poorly placed bowel movement can cause illness. Lakes and rivers are often home to lu, a class of autochthonous numina that live in lakes, control wealth, and can cause human illness. The plateau’s human inhabitants must navigate these spaces with care to avoid upsetting the delicate balance that has allowed human life to flourish.

In the sketch, the tradition-oriented horse herder explains that the lake and its cranes are the source of the village’s fortune, and as such, they must be protected and managed—and the horse herder intends to do exactly this. In doing so, he is clearly unwilling to risk another change to the region’s precarious fortune. This is more than mere lip service, as the herder underlines in speaking about how another outsider had previously upset this delicate balance by looking in the lake. In the teacher’s opinion, cultural concerns should have no bearing on the overwhelming economic issues facing Tibetan communities in the present. But in doing so, she comes off distinctly second best, and only emphasizes the significant cultural disconnect between the modern teacher and the traditional herder.

In addition to providing a defense of Tibet’s traditional cultural knowledge, the herder also uses his discussion on fortune to link Tibetan ideas of the environment to an area of contemporary political concern. Gaeerang (2017, 15) shows how the contemporaneous emergence of environmental policy and a conservation-linked Buddhist revival have led Tibetans in the twenty-first century to embrace environmental conservation. Menla Jyab’s herder avoids explicit Buddhist reference but provides traditional perspectives of the environment as a space filled with both human and nonhuman agents that shape individual and communal fortune. In his eyes, he has been protecting the environment through limiting human access to his land. The foreigner and the teacher, meanwhile, speak from a position in which environmental knowledge is based in modern, “scientific” ideas of space and environment. In refusing the outsiders’ perspective, Menla Jyab simultaneously promotes environmental conservation as a Tibetan value, and provides a rebuke of narratives that that overlook indigenous environmental knowledge and instead center Western scientific practices.

From language practices to traditional knowledge systems to ideas about the natural environment, the interactions between different characters in “Gesar’s Horse Herder” develop a satirical critique that privileges the tradition-oriented characters and gives them the upper hand over the more modern ones. The critiques about Tibetan language and culture resonate so strongly not least because they provide an uncomfortable mirror through which many Tibetans see their own attitudes (and those of their family and friends) satirically distorted back at them. The teacher Hongmei’s mixing of Chinese and Tibetan, for example, mirrors the everyday speech of many Tibetans across Amdo. In particular, they regularly use standard Chinese terms like dianshi for “television” and dianhua for “telephone.” Beyond emergent technologies, they may also use Chinese numbers when sharing a phone number, or use Chinese names of policies and official positions. Beginning in the early 2000s, however, popular attitudes toward this sort of mixing began to change, with sketch comedies and other cultural production discouraging the use of these Chinese terms. Instead, comedians and intellectuals promoted “pure” Tibetan, characterized by the absence of terminology borrowed from Chinese languages.

In many ways, this response has precedent in Tibetan history. Tibetan culture has historically placed tremendous emphasis on the work of translation, dating back at least to the creation of the writing system and the introduction of Buddhism to the region. To accommodate Buddhism, and to translate the Buddhist canon into Tibetan, generations of translators received royal patronage. Beyond religious translation efforts, political encounters with Uyghurs, Mongols, and other cultures have all left their mark on the Tibetan language, which has changed over time as a result of these many influences. In some cases, Tibetans have borrowed words directly from other languages, but it has often involved a preference for nativizing and translating outside terms. Similarly, in the post-Mao period, Tibetan discouraged borrowing in favor of calques (Shakya 1994; Makley 2013b) and neologisms (Tournadre 2003). For example, lokled (གློག་ཀླད།), the accepted Tibetan word for “computer” (literally “electric brain”) is a calque formed by translating the separate components of the Chinese term diannao 电脑. In other cases, Tibetan neologisms like khapar (ཁ་པར།) for “telephone” or lungtrin (རླུང་འཕྲིན།) for “radio” (literally “wind message”) are promoted. In each situation, these practices link to a growing purist language movement.

Interestingly, some speakers, and this includes comedians, show less resistance to borrowing from English, suggesting that the purist movement is, strictly speaking, a Sinophobic one (Billé 2015) instead of a more generally xenophobic one (Thomas 1991), and purists remain interested primarily in resisting the encroachment of borrowed terms from state-supported Putonghua, the language of power to Amdo Tibetan’s language of solidarity (Hill and Hill 1980).² This decentralized, grassroots (Roche and Lugyal Bum 2018) movement also benefits from the support of both secular and religious intellectuals, who further promoted it through social media and in essays, poems, memes, and songs (Roche 2020), as well as by word of mouth.

Not limited to issues of language, the teacher Hongmei’s lack of cultural competence also speaks to growing intergenerational and geographical rupture in the transmission of traditional cultural knowledge. With new sedentarization and urbanization policies moving pastoralists into fixed dwellings—often in the name of the environmental protection and better grassland management—traditional ways of living in and moving through the natural world changed almost overnight. The public education system, too, contributed to this rupture, with many students spending weeks and months away from their homes in boarding schools, either in the nearest townships or sometimes in coastal metropolises. How can young people, meanwhile, be expected to learn Tibetan language, values, and expressive traditions when they are so removed from the elders and the geographies that long served as the primary sites for cultural transmission?

With increasingly obvious gaps emerging in young people’s linguistic and cultural knowledge, many cultural producers quickly embraced Tibetan traditions that had previously appeared as sources of shame. In the People’s Republic’s participation in international projects of safeguarding intangible cultural heritage, meanwhile, Amdo Tibetan intellectuals found the space to express concerns about the perceived precarity of traditional cultural knowledge in the early years of the twenty-first century. In a keynote at the 2014 Himalayan Studies Conference, Tibetologist Françoise Robin (2014b) noticed the beginnings of this cultural turn in literature and poetry of the early 2000s. Like comedy, the poetry and films Robin examined in that talk began to reclaim once-denigrated pastoral imagery as a sign of national Tibetan identity. As a poet himself, Menla Jyab will certainly have been aware of these developments, and his comedies reflect and contribute to this growing discourse in Amdo’s intellectual community. “Gesar’s Horse Herder” is just one example.

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For many years after it initially aired, Tibetans most frequently watched “Gesar’s Horse Herder” as part of a VCD album entitled My Golden Homeland (Sermdok gi phasa) (Sman bla skyabs 2006b). This was also how I first experienced the sketch as well. Available in media shops around Amdo, it featured ten of Menla Jyab’s most famous sketches from this period. Together they help to better understand this cultural turn. Indeed, while “Gesar’s Horse Herder” seems to break with the social critique comedies from the 1990s, some of the sketches on the album continued the trend of satirizing the behavior of herders, as with “At Ease Hotel” (Semde dronkang) in which a student and a pastoralist share a hotel room. The student toys with the older man, who is anything but “at ease” in the urban environment. He has in fact arranged to meet the student (though they had never met) but instead views everyone as a potential threat. Everything works out in the end, but the older man’s discomfort in the urban setting makes him the clear target of the performance’s satire.

In another performance from the album, some nomads look out of touch in modern situations, but the reasons for their incompetence has changed. In “Sending a Message” (Hked tongwa), for example, a rural couple visits a Tibetan radio station to send a message home but appears similarly incapable in the urban world. They ask the station to provide a mowa (divination specialist) to help guide their decisions, but more tellingly, they also struggle to say their own address without resorting to Chinese terms for their county and work team.

Sometimes both herder and urbanite look bad, as in “Twenty Cents” (Zurnyi)—described in the introduction—in which a pastoralist is confused about why he should have to pay to use a public restroom (as is common in China) when he could just urinate on the side of the building. The attendant, however, insists that he pay the paltry ¥.2 fee to use the restroom or face a ¥100 fine for public urination. The herder appears comically out of touch, and the attendant comes across as shamefully attached to silly rules. Finally, in “Door-to-Door Sales” (Gotsong) a pair of Tibetan-speaking salesmen from Ziling trying to bilk a nomadic simpleton into selling his high-quality robe in exchange for a cheap knockoff leather jacket. From the very first interaction, however, the salesmen have difficulty with the herder. The salesmen speak Tibetan poorly and seem afraid that he might become violent with them. Later, an additional herder comes in to help, and after a series of hilarious mishaps and miscommunications, the pastoralists finally get the better of the urban city slickers.

Not all comedies pit urban and rural characters against each other. In “Cordless Phone” (Hkumé khapar) two old rivals—one formerly wealthy man whose family fell on hard times during the Maoist period and one former servant whose family is now relatively well off—meet at a teacher’s home to await telephone calls from their children in the city. (Before the advent of mobile phones, many rural communities had only a few landline telephones, where people would gather to wait for prearranged calls.) With the teacher’s daughter—played by Menla Jyab’s own daughter—writing her homework and minding the fort, the two old men trade barbs and try to get the upper hand by correcting their opponent’s use of Chinese terms. In particular, each tries to correct the other’s habit of referring to a telephone with the Chinese dianhua instead of the Tibetan khapar and other small linguistic errors when referring to modern institutions and devices. As the rivals’ grown children each call home, it becomes clear that they have fallen in love with each other and intend to marry, much to their fathers’ consternation and the audience’s enjoyment.

If 1990s comedies about Menla Jyab’s trips to Careful Village seemed to discursively create a set of binaries to produce a Tibetan social modernity rooted in urban, rational, and secular thought, the satirical critique in “Gesar’s Horse Herder” suggests the emergence of a new set of binaries for which the previous moral geography is less important. Instead, these are based in attitudes toward tradition and language practice. They appear to invert the 1990s critique through portraying the rural characters more positively than the modern urbanites without fully displacing it. The other performances from the album support this, and show that, rather than replacing the social critiques of the 1990s, “Gesar’s Horse Herder” layers a new, cultural critique atop them, rooted in a language of Tibetanness rather than the moral geography of social modernity.

While all the issues are treated separately here, it is worth noting that, for Tibetans, they are often interlinked, with their threats generally coming from the same developments. In conversation again with Menla Jyab, I remarked on the fact that he frequently plays the part of an old man or a pastoralist in his garchung and never the urbanites.

“So why is it that I usually perform old man after old man? I’m talking about traditional culture.… The old man stands in for an ethnicity’s traditional culture, and yet in his heart, he feels that all these new things have arrived like the flowing of water. Now culture—like Tibetan speech and writing—faces the greatest danger, and if conditions keep going like this, there will be great danger.”

Language, culture, and environment are generally inseparable in Menla Jyab’s eyes. The danger that these three things face is taken as a threat to the continued existence of the Tibetan ethnic group.

In reclaiming Tibet’s previously maligned language and culture, comedians from Amdo support the increasingly important intellectual project of Tibetan cultural nationalism through reappropriating new, politically acceptable discourses. Like Han Chinese cultural nationalism, which “takes advantage of the official discourse and seeks to impose its will on the Party-state by contesting the meaning of the same signifiers” (Guo 2004, 1), ethnic-minority communities use emerging national and transnational discourses promoting the safeguarding of cultural heritage, as well as constitutional guarantees for minority languages, to advocate for their own cultural nationalisms. Though not essential to Tibetan cultural nationalism, zurza provided a valuable tool for comedians and other cultural producers to reappropriate state discourse and access state media to articulate their own nationalist critique of Tibetan society.

While others have recognized Tibetan nationalism as focusing primarily on religious terms (Kolås 1996), however, Menla Jyab and other comedians carefully avoid positive portrayals of institutional Buddhism. Instead, the tradition-oriented protagonist in “Gesar’s Horse Herder” models a secular and cultural nationalism based primarily in topics of language and culture. The pastoralist also, meanwhile, creates a (limited) space for indigenous cosmologies and environmental knowledge in this cultural nationalism through his understandings of the natural environment, but he continues to keep religion at arm’s length by avoiding any explicit mention of folk religious practices related to the autochthonous creatures inhabiting the Tibetan world.

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Getting stiffly off the bus in a dusty county town, I search the crowd of onlookers. The friend I am supposed to be meeting hasn’t arrived, but the town is a small one, so I shoulder my large backpack and walk along the main road. As I pass the gate of a hospital of Tibetan medicine, one man turns to his friend and says, “It looks like Mr. Stuff’s back is full of stuff!” It is not the first time someone has looked at my large hiking backpack and referenced the line from “Gesar’s Horse Herder,” in which the herder plays on the homophony between the English name Jersey and the Tibetan word jyurdzee (རྒྱུ་རྫས།, translated here as “stuff”). It won’t be the last. “Gesar’s Horse Herder” is so influential that it shapes and constrains popular attitudes, behaviors, and even speech practices by providing (humorous) scripts for Tibetans to address the changing conditions of life in contemporary China.

The influence extends well beyond jokes about the foreigners in their midst. Sitting on a cloudy grassland one late summer in Malho County, one young man, a recent university graduate, opined on the changes he had noticed in Tibetan attitudes toward language and the role that comedians have played in shaping them:

As in the past, if I tell you what it was like, when you went to school and came back or worked in an office, a person like this, no matter what, if they spoke a few words of Chinese, this was excellent. And, among nomads, if you could speak Chinese, it was evaluated as being really, uh, sort of great. And so, in the past, if you could speak some Chinese [with your] Tibetan, they had the idea that “oh, he’s really an impressive person.”

However, these days, this perception is changing. This change has been influenced by comedies. If you ask what they do, these days, for example, if you go to school, when you come back, if you don’t know how to speak pure Tibetan when speaking Tibetan, and if you’re speaking Chinese, that’s not good. They say that in [these] comedies, right? So, they say it’s not good if you add Chinese to your Tibetan. That’s not what a good person does. Khashag [in the colloquial sense of both comic dialogues and sketches] say this quite clearly. Herders know this. Moreover, [they say], “Oh, when speaking Tibetan, you speak pure Tibetan, and when speaking Chinese, you speak pure Chinese.” They also say it should be like this, right? So Menla Jyab and Jamyang Lodree have spoken about this [habit of] speaking of Chinese in their Tibetan. (pers. comm., August 31, 2013)

This perspective, framing pure Tibetan language as the linguistic habit of a “good” person, speaks to the extent and significance of this cultural turn in twenty-first century Amdo, while the reference to Menla Jyab and the late Jamyang Lodree—standing in for their comedic performances more generally—addresses the importance of satirical comedy in modeling particular linguistic and cultural attitudes and shaping the attitudes and behaviors of Tibetan audiences.

Performed in 2007, “Gesar’s Horse Herder” carefully curates the encounter between the teacher Hongmei, the foreigner Jersey, and the sketch’s title character to help articulate this important change from a social critique of Tibetan backwardness to a cultural one. Like the comic dialogues of the 1990s, performances such as this are instant classics. Unlike “Careful Village’s Grassland Dispute” and other comedies of the 1990s, however, it is the modern teacher who features as the target of satirical critique, coming off distinctly worse in the encounter with the incorrigible Uncle Horse Herder. This radical shift from a social critique to a cultural one stands out as one of the most significant developments in early twenty-first century cultural production from Amdo. The cultural nationalism that emerges during this decade does not dissipate in the years to come. Instead, it moves online, intensifies, and becomes more frustrated. With this change, new forms of satirical cultural production emerge to articulate this critique digitally.