A Battle on CultureOn the Margins of Tibet: Cultural Survival on the Sino‐Tibetan Frontier. By Ashild Kolas and Monika Thowsen. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2005.

Abstract

The Tibet Question has gone well beyond academic debate. At the heart of the dispute is whether the Tibetan culture has been protected and developed under Chinese rule (as claimed by the Chinese government) or whether it has been denied and extinguished by the Chinese government (as claimed by the Tibetan government-in-exile). Little ethnographic fieldwork had been done in Tibet until the 1980s, when the political environment in China gradually relaxed, making this kind of work possible for outside researchers. Because the claims from the two sides are so radically polarized, many works in this area unavoidably fall in the shadow of one or the other’s cultural representation. Indeed, the nature of the dispute has become so politicized that many cultural assumptions, including the very notion of culture, have been taken for granted—even manipulated—by both sides. This heated battle in the name of culture has in fact been continuously powered by two competing nationalisms that have been rising since the beginning of twentieth century. Among those ethnographic works conducted in Tibet, On the Margins of Tibet stands out by setting both sides’ claims about the development/genocide of Tibetan culture against ethnographic data collected during five months of fieldwork from 1998 to 2000 in the Tibetan areas outside the Chinesegovernment-designated Tibet (or Tibetan Autonomous Region [TAR]). As primarily a survey of the region, this book gives its reader much more than a field report with relevant theoretical and historical settings: the authors seriously examine the notion of culture. The introduction discusses both the general anthropological debate on culture and the particular application of culture in the modern Chinese/Tibetan context. This immediately brings the reader out of a conventional dualistic representation of Tibetan culture and puts the whole debate against a more complex cultural context of modernity and change in the contemporary world. If the concept of culture is becoming more complex in modern society, then cultural survival of one particular culture should also be treated as a contested area rather than simply a result that