Barbarians at the Border and Civilising Projects: Analysing Ethnic and National Identities in the Tibetan Context

Abstract

During her presidential address at the opening convocation of the Tenth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Janet Gyatso called for Tibetan Studies to engage with emerging trends in interdisciplinary critical theory.2 Noting that studies of Tibetan society often place themselves outside the broader comparative frameworks offered by literary criticism, history, anthropology, postcolonial studies and other disciplinary areas, Gyatso suggested that Tibetology would benefit from engaging in dialogue with such scholarly approaches.3 As a contribution to that larger project, here I take some preliminary steps towards opening a productive dialogue between Tibetan Studies and contemporary anthropological theory on the topic of ethnicity. My goal here is to trace the genealogy of ‘ethnicity’ as a concept through Tibetan Studies as a discipline, and offer some observations on its use, or more often, lack thereof, in a manner consonant with its theoretical deployment in cultural studies of other world areas. I suggest that the absence of a nuanced analytical framework for understanding ethnicity in the Tibetan context is linked to the difficulty of recognising Tibetan roles as dominant orchestrators of their own ‘civilising projects’ in addition to being victims of Chinese ones. ‘A civilising project’, as defined by Stevan Harrell in the Chinese context, “is a kind of interaction between peoples, in which one group, the civilising centre, interacts with other groups (the peripheral peoples) in