Historical Social Organisation on the Eastern Tibetan Plateau

The groups known as tsho-ba in Tibetan are both historically and ethnographically significant for their central role in local social organisation across large stretches of the eastern Himalayan Plateau. Available scholarly descriptions, however, remain both terse and discrepant. To remedy this situation, this article presents a diachronic picture of these groups in the Reb-gong region of eastern Qinghai, People’s Republic of China. Its analysis highlights an important historical shift in the constitution of these units, which often seem to have arisen as individual hamlets yet shed their territorialised identities over time. These findings, as a comparative discussion illustrates, markedly benefit our cross-regional understanding of tsho-ba, which in turn yields an instructive etymology of the term tsho-ba itself. Lastly, the paper addresses the forwarded historical hypothesis that these groups are the remnants of an older but now defunct clan system—a notion it argues must be rejected.