Contested understandings of yaks on the eastern Tibetan Plateau: market logic, Tibetan Buddhism and indigenous knowledge

Abstract

The Tibetan Buddhist tradition of Tsetar rituals and practices, which direct many Tibetan pastoralists to either save or release livestock from being slaughtered in order to gain positive karma, has recently been popularised by Tibetan Nyingma masters in pastoral regions. The trend developed as they witnessed an increase in the slaughter of yaks and Tibetan sheep in the commercial meat market resulting from the growing integration of Tibetan pastoralists into the market economy. The contradictory visions of yaks as living beings, according to Tibetan Buddhist teachings, and as productive resources in accordance with market logic, have somehow worked together to shape pastoralists' understandings of, and relationships with, yaks in their everyday decision-making. By examining the case of Khenpo Jigphun's Tsetar movement and ethnographic studies of Tibetan yak herding practices in the south-eastern Tibetan Plateau, this paper examines how competing visions of yaks work together to produce a hybrid knowledge of Tibetan pastoralists that is simultaneously generated in their situated experiences in contemporary society. The paper suggests that the concept of situated knowledge has the potential to bring indigenous people from the margins into the centre where not only can they have meaningful conversations with actors possessing different forms of knowledge, but they can also find a space where the possibility of alternative development paths exist. Furthermore, I assert that conceptualising indigenous knowledge as situated does not uncritically celebrate hybridity, but rather allows for a view of indigenous peoples as contemporaries who should not be relegated to the ‘waiting room of history’, nor be viewed as romanticised models for an idealised future.