Abstract
Since the end of the last century, a wave of literary production has taken place in the Tibetan region known as Amdo in the west of China. Though fiction and poetry writing has been at the center of this movement, texts on the history of local pastoral communities have also mushroomed at an unprecedented rate. These texts about the history of pastoral Tibetans have been written neither from the official state perspective nor from the point view of the subalterns – those who have been the “people without history” for centuries. This dissertation is a case study of this newly emerged history writing amongst Amdo Tibetan pastoralists in post-Mao China. The analysis focuses primarily on three different texts about Wongtak (Bong stag), a Tibetan pastoral community with more than eighteen sub-groups. This dissertation examines the language and linguistic techniques employed in these texts to understand not only their style but their underlying messages and the ways in which they glorify past people and events. These texts use different styles and approaches for diverse purposes and agendas; some follow the traditional textual tradition of Tibetan historiography while others follow the official gazetteer style of the modern Chinese state. This dissertation is also concerned with how these history texts reclaim their landscape and reinforce their Tibetan identity in a precarious era by presenting various arguments for their Tibetanness, while simultaneously negotiating a space for their existence by agreeing with some portion of official history. For instance, on the one hand, two of the texts assert their Tibetanness by making an argument for the Sakya origins of Wongtak pastoralists, while another text aims to refute a non-Tibetan origin narrative presented in official documents assembled by the provincial government of Qinghai in the 1950s. On the other hand, one text concludes that Kunlun, a Taoist sacred mountain, is located in Wongtak, even though Chinese scholars are having difficulty drawing a unanimous conclusion about its location. As a first attempt to understand newly written history texts on Amdo pastoralists by their own members, this dissertation aims to provide a set of multi-faceted answers to questions about why and how these histories are written and aims to open further avenues of discussion about these new Tibetan history texts in post-Mao China.