Charlene E. Marley: The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China

Abstract

The Violence of Liberation is an extremely serious and innovative first-hand ethnographic account of the social history of Labrang, which is situated in China’s Gansu Province and considered by exiled Tibetans as part of their “Greater Tibetan Region.” As the sub-title of the book indicates, exploring “gender and Tibetan Buddhist revival in the post-Mao China” is the author’s central theme. Without directly getting into the sensitive political debate between Beijing and Dharamsala, Marley offers an alternative angle from which to study Sino-Tibetan relations: the trans-local gender perspective. Socialized in the official discourse that credits the regime change or “liberation” of Tibet in 1951 as a progressive attempt to liberate the suppressed Tibetans, men and women, most mainland Chinese readers might have difficulty embracing the author’s view that “for most Tibetan men and women in Labrang, socialist transformation was thus not only a forced secularization of their lives; it was also a fundamentally emasculating process” (27). Yet such observation is not ungrounded. Marley spent more than fifteen years gathering primary sources from the region during her numerous fieldtrips and the anthropological approach that she applies to study the topic is fundamentally lacking among her Chinese colleagues, no matter whether the topic is taboo or not. This contribution is instrumentally important to inter-disciplinary audiences, including those not specializing in gender politics like this reader. As an international relations scholar, this reader is particularly impressed by the inclusion of certain constructivist elements in the author’s account. How linguistics and discourses transformed Sino-Tibetan relations is an aspect which receives minimal focus in the discipline, and is also one of the least understood aspects among the lay community. Indeed, in response to the recent upheavals in Tibet, most official commentaries—which merely highlight the contribution made by the partystate to the Tibetans—can be classified as an intentional attempt at continuously J OF CHIN POLIT SCI (2010) 15:207–208 DOI 10.1007/s11366-010-9098-y