Transnational environmentalism and entanglements of sovereignty: The tiger campaign across the Himalayas

In the spring of 2006, Tibetans in China set fire to more than a million dollars worth of otter, leopard and tiger pelts. The numerous bonfires were a response to the 14th Dalai Lama's statement, made at the Kalachakra Initiation Ceremony in India, that Tibetans should cease wearing such pelts. The Chinese state interpreted this as an act of loyalty to the Dalai Lama and this evidence of multiple overlapping sovereignties as a threat to its exclusive territorial sovereignty. An effort to clarify this space invited a sovereign invocation of the exception, as salaried employees were forced to wear endangered animal pelts, violating Chinese national law. A conjunctural analysis of the Dalai Lama's speech and the subsequent burnings demonstrates that contrary to prevailing narratives, transnational environmental advocacy played a key role. The conjuncture in which these events took place was shaped by multiple competing entanglements of Chinese, Indian, and Tibetan sovereignties with nature protection and transnational activism. Two distinct assemblages, shaped by power relations and the politics of sovereignty, formed around protecting the tiger across the Himalayas, with dramatically different effects. The case shows that far from post-sovereign environmental governance, nature and sovereignty remain inextricably entangled, and illustrates how multiple modes to construct and defend state sovereignty come into conflict with each other.     

藏族传统体育美学探微

藏民族自古生息繁衍在青藏高原地区。由于特殊的地理环境,藏族人民在长期的劳动中形成了具有鲜明的草原游牧民族文化特色的生产生活方式,创造了绚丽多彩的藏族传统体育文化,如在民间开展的赛马、射箭、“古朵”、赛牦牛等体育活动体现了浓郁的草原游牧民族的风格特征。本文从体育美学与藏族传统体育文化的角度,透视并分析了藏族传统体育的内涵、特征及研究发展思路。     

藏族苯教文化中的冈底斯神山解读

本文认为,在藏族的苯教文化中,冈底斯神山占有重要的地位。由于特殊的地理位置、俊美奇险的山形以及宗教、历史、神话和传说所赋予的神秘感,使冈底斯山具有了强烈的感召力、诱惑力,对它的崇拜和祭祀,已经成为千百年来藏族永恒不变的情结。     

作为“转轮王”和“文殊菩萨”的清帝——兼论乾隆帝与藏传佛教的关系

从历史背景来看,藏传佛教赋予中原统治者的"转轮王"和"文殊菩萨化身"称号只是一种尊称和象征性符号。不管是被动接受还是主动悦纳,它们对于清帝的核心意义在于确认其作为中原王朝统治者的身份。乾隆帝制作御容佛装像的基点在于以传统王朝的皇帝面对蒙藏族群,在此前提下融入个人的宗教趣味,形成了以"转轮王"兼"文殊菩萨化身"呈现的皇帝形象。如果说这种形式有什么更多的含义,那也不外乎是增加他对蒙藏高层的亲和力和他身为清帝的神圣性。新清史学者所主张的乾隆帝以藏传佛教的转轮王、菩萨身份治国的观点缺乏依据。     

Making and remaking Tibetan diasporic identities

The fifty-year long Chinese occupation of Tibet has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and has produced a refugee flow that continues today. Although the plight of Tibetans commands international attention, this diaspora remains understudied and undertheorized. To speak to this silence, we follow Patterson and Kelley (2000) and argue that the Tibetan diaspora can be analysed as both a condition and a process. Diaspora as condition emphasizes the structural features of an exile population, such as race, gender, class and religion. Diaspora as process draws attention to lived refugee experiences--the making and remaking of diasporic identities. In the Tibetan diaspora, His Holiness the Dalai Lama holds a central position. Through his global profile, and a transnational nationalist political structure, he creates images of Tibet, builds community and works toward Tibetan self-determination. Within this nationalist frame, Tibetan identities assume a singular, unified and homogeneous form. Further analysis that focuses on individual voices, however, shows how Tibetan diasporic identities are contested, complex and embedded in not one but multiple narratives of struggle.     

Following the caterpillar fungus: nature,commodity chains,and the place of Tibet in China's uneven geographies

Following caterpillar fungus as it travels from the Tibetan Plateau to wealthy Chinese consumers, this article makes several interventions into geographical studies of commodity chains. First, it argues for an expansion beyond the usual call to connect the political economy of production with cultures of consumption; the cultural politics of production and political economies of consumption must also be considered. Second, it argues for bringing together political economy and more-than-human analytical approaches to commodity chains, showing how nature and the nonhuman play a key role in an assemblage that has allowed Tibetans to navigate livelihoods in a rapidly changing economy. This challenges a tendency to assume a universal figure of ‘the human’ in more-than-human geographies. Third, by connecting the erasure of Tibetans from representations of various natures used to sell caterpillar fungus with the broader politics of Tibetans within the People's Republic of China, we show that commodity fetishism can conceal not just labor relations, but also political struggles not reducible to class. Finally, we show that following a small fungus can shed light on the unevenness of China's capitalist development obscured in monolithic narratives of China's rise, demonstrating the value of expanding commodity chain studies beyond those that end with Western consumers.     

Tibetan Traditional Strategies on Thunder and Lighting Prevention

The Frequent occurrence of thunder and lighting in Ti-bet inconveniences Tibetan people,even endangering their lives.However,Tibetans have accumulated rich experience to pre-vent injury from thunder and lighting.     

THE MODERN FACE of Tibetan Traditional Culture

<正>This series of papers is the phasic result of a research program entitled A Study on the Relationship of Tibetan Buddhism and Ethnic Tibetans, conducted by the"985"Research Center for Contemporary Key Ethnic and Religious Issues of the Central University for Nationalities.Professor Palpal Dorje and his graduate students have worked strenuously for up to 5 years in sociological studies to achieve remarkable results.All papers were published in The Journal of Northwest University Nationalities(Philosophy and Social Science,issue 3,2009).We herewith express our appreciation to Professor Palpal Dorje for his permission to include excerpts from a couple of the papers in this journal.     

NEW BOOKS

My Stories in Tibet Liao Dongfan,author and renowned scholar in Tibetan studies (being particularly well- versed in Tibetan folklore and popular culture) headed to Tibet and began his career there after graduating from the Chinese Literature Department of Peking University in 1961.In his 24 years of work on the plateau he devoted his time to studying the popular culture and folklore of Tibetans.     

Ruling the Land of the Yellow Lama: Religion,Muli, and geopolitics in the 17th century Sino-Tibetan borderland

Abstract

The author scrutinizes the history of Muli (木里) as a semiautonomous political entity in the 17th century southern Sino-Tibetan borderland. By tracing Muli’s improvization in the face of multiple powerful regimes such as the Naxi kingdom, the Geluk Tibetans, the Khoshut Mongols, and the Chinese dynasties, the author explores how an indigenous notion of power took shape in the wake of geopolitical turbulence. Before 1580, Muli was a colony of the Naxi kingdom and dominated by the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. After 1640, it became a stronghold of the Tibetan Buddhist Geluk school and was deeply involved in the power struggles between the Geluk and Kakyu schools as well as the Tibetans and Mongols. Despite of acknowledging multiple sovereigns, Muli rulers utilized various tactics to hold on to power and prioritize local interest. The nuanced, yet creative, strategies Muli people adopted showcases the significant role border regimes played and their agency in shaping the power dynamics in pre-modern Eastern Asian borderlands.     

A Storm of Changes Sweep over Tibetan Farmers and Herdsmen Led by the Qinghai-Tibetan Railway

From the opening traffic of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway,a major restriction on transportation to and from Tibet was finally removed. Such a change has had a massive impact on the economy of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) as a whole and,in particular,on the rural Tibetans.In other words,the railway became a leading force in the re- structure and advancement of the Tibetan economy.     

美国国会“涉藏立法”的历史考察

近二十年来,美国国会通过立法活动提出并通过了一系列干涉中国西藏事务的"涉藏议案"。其主要内容包括:要求美国政府将对华政策与"西藏问题"挂钩;以"西藏人权"为借口干涉西藏事务;为"藏独"势力提供援助,等等。作为美国对华人权外交的组成部分,这些"涉藏议案"对中美关系产生了不容忽视的负面影响,不仅使美国对中国所谓侵犯"西藏人权"问题的干涉长期存在,而且也在很大程度上助长了西藏分裂势力在国外的分裂活动。     

A colpi di cuore. Storie del sessantotto

This article attempts to tackle the problem of how a colonial culture that was elaborated through the written word may have impacted on an Italian society that was significantly more ‘backward’ than its western European counterparts. The Prima Guerra d'Africa (1885-96) has often been seen as a military campaign desired exclusively by an isolated Italian government in a society that was incapable of using the occasion to develop cultural themes that impacted on the desires and aspirations of the ‘real’ Italy. This supposed societal dysfunction meant that Italy failed to create a ‘culture of imperialism’ in the years of the Scramble for Africa in a way that has now come to be considered of such central importance for the histories of France, Britain or even Germany.

Through an analysis of the role played by primary schools in Italian culture in these years, this article attempts to reverse this view, arguing that even taking into consideration Italy's ‘backwardness’ there was not only a great awareness of what Italy was supposedly doing in Africa but also a serious attempt to load the events that occured there with a meaning that had a much more intimate relationship with Italy's population. Although defeat in Africa meant a major setback in this process, imperialism as a cultural phenomenon continued to be of fundamental importance to the progress of nation building and the development of nationalism in Italy and, Finaldi argues, it should therefore be assigned a place in Italian culture that is much more on a par to that which culture and imperialism are deemed to have held for other European nation-states.     

论“捏价”的法律意义

“捏价”,是藏族、撒拉族等高原少数民族商事交易中常用的一种议价方式。长期以来,人们对“捏价”的认识仅仅停留在一种民族习惯上,至今还没有学者从法学的角度作出评析。笔者通过对青海省玉树藏族自治州部分商事活动的调查与研究,重点分析了“捏价”及其涉及的相关法律问题。     

The politics of the Balfour Declaration: Nationalism,imperialism and the limits of Zionist-British cooperation

This article proposes a new perspective on the much debated question of why the British government published the Balfour Declaration? It argues that the Declaration was published as part of the struggle that took place in the course of the First World War between two rival factions in the British government on the question of the future of the Ottoman Empire: the “radical” faction that strove to partition the Ottoman Empire as a means to extend the British imperial hold on the Middle East, and the “reformist” faction that opposed this. By promising to turn Palestine into “a national home for the Jewish people” the Declaration advanced the radical agenda of dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and expansion of British imperialism in the Middle East.     

The Language of Imperialism in British Electoral Politics, 1880–1910

This article asks us to reconsider the impact of the issue of imperialism in electoral politics in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Using a corpus of around five million words of digitised campaign speeches from the years 1880–1910, it examines the language of the nine General Elections held in this period through computerised text-mining. This ‘big data’ analysis produces three conclusions, which in some cases nuance existing interpretations and in others directly challenge them. The first questions the prevailing consensus that elections in the high age of empire featured imperialism as a consistently central issue. The article argues that this interpretation relies too heavily on evidence from a minority of elections—especially the famous ‘khaki’ struggle of 1900—and that in the majority of campaigns in this period, imperialism was relatively unimportant as an election issue, including in the Unionist landslide of 1895. The second argument questions historians’ preoccupation with the ‘contested’ nature of discourses of imperialism and patriotism at elections, and contends that—insofar as the empire was an important campaign issue at all—the Conservatives were considerably more likely to champion it and connect it to politically charged and emotive appeals than were their Liberal opponents. Finally, the article maintains that the languages of imperialism and patriotism have often been unhelpfully conflated by historians, and argues that they could become politically synonymous only in the very specific circumstance of a ‘khaki’ election. In other contests, they could diverge, as is demonstrated by a case study of the campaign of 1906 when patriotism was reclaimed by the Liberals from a domestic, rather than imperial platform.     

‘Is imperialist nationalism an oxymoron?’*

According to Ernest Gellner's celebrated definition, nationalism is a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent. Based on this definition, Alexander Motyl has declared that ‘nationalism and imperialism are polar types’. Even so, dozens of books and articles have used the concept of ‘imperialist nationalism’ without any qualms. Is this just a matter of terminological confusion, or does it reflect a deeper disagreement on what the phenomenon of nationalism actually is? In the lecture, I discuss the concept of ‘imperialist nationalism’ as used in the standard literature and find that numerous historical actors take pride in being both nationalists and imperialists. I distinguish between overseas colonial empires and contiguous land‐based empires and demonstrate that in both cases, ‘imperialist nationalism’ can be found. In the latter case, nationalism can take the shape of either ‘nation‐building imperialism’, in which nationalists strive for cultural homogenisation throughout the state, or ‘ethnocratic imperialism’, in which the distinction between ‘the imperial nation’ and other national groups is retained. In overseas colonial empires, I find only ethnocratic imperialism. As a case study, I analyse how Russian nationalists have related to the fact that Russia has historically been an Empire.     

Ethnic Tibetans

Ethnic Tibetans speak and write by using their own language and characters. This language belongs to the Tibet-Burman phylum in the Sino-Tibetan language family. In over 1400 years of recorded history,ethnic Tibetans have been enriched by the profuse contents of their archaic books that make us gasp in admiration.     

The Historical Constitution of the Political Forms of Capitalism

Abstract: This article provides a general overview and critique of approaches to state theory, from the Marxist “state derivation“ debate of the 1970s, through to regulation and world‐systems perspectives, to theories which encompass imperialism. It proposes that a theory of the political forms of capitalism should have three elements: it should be based on analysis of the different historical processes by which capitalist states have been and are constituted; it should elucidate the specificities of the various political forms of capitalism; and it should explain the continuing existence of a plurality of states and imperialist relations.     

The great war and the french people

Thomas Hobbes's theory of action seems to give up on the idea that actions are ‘up to us’. Thomas Pink has argued that this counter-intuitive stance should be understood as the implication of his radical assault on the scholastic Aristotelian model of action. Hobbes rejects the existence of the immaterial soul. This means that he must also reject the existence of so-called elicited acts of the will, which form the primary locus of human agency. In this paper an alternative interpretation is presented. It is argued that Hobbes's fundamental disagreement with the scholastic tradition is not over the existence of elicited acts of the will but over scope and productiveness of mechanical explanation. Hobbes aims to give an account of human actions as in our control and as ‘up to us’ while at the same time applying and defending his mechanical mode of analysis. This paper contributes to the contextualisation of Hobbes's views and furthers our understanding of his theory of action.