I am more than happy to see the release of this important book, although what Makley tells us here is not really a happy story. Anxieties among Tibetans about the survival of their culture and nationality have been growing for well over a decade (and indeed have brewed for decades) in China. The 2008 Tibetan unrest and subsequent self-immolations simply serve as footnotes to Tibetans’ strong sentiments regarding the status quo, among which are confusion, disbelief, shock, frustration, despair, grief, anger, fear and a sense of betrayal. The Battle for Fortune captures and unwraps these sensibilities, which have been emerging in the Rebgong Tibetan community on the Sino-Tibetan borderlands of Qinghai, against a backdrop of China's Open up the West campaign (as well as the “rise of China”). In so doing, Charlene Makley skillfully demonstrates an alternative story about development there. This book foregrounds the worth of anthropological-qualitative research in studying development issues in China and elsewhere. Moreover, it promises a hope for anthropology with regards to its humanistic touch.
Makley argues that Chinese state-led development projects often disenfranchise, rather than empower, Tibetans. More often than not, these projects entail expropriating local resources and land, desacralizing holy sites or abodes of deities, and “depoliticizing” (actually dismissing) Tibetan expressions of cultural autonomy and religious identity (including marginalizing Tibetan-language secular education) as intrinsically a matter of “development” (based on the logic that social problems and political unrest can be resolved through state investment and economic growth). Even worse, as spotlighted in the book, this development agenda enhances intragroup tensions in local communities and among Tibetans (for example, “patriotic” Tibetans vs “rebellious” Tibetans, officials vs the masses, elders vs youth, deity-medium vs state cadres/ “puppets,”), or pits Han Chinese against Tibetans (for instance, Tibetans may be portrayed as being “ungrateful” or “terrorists,” p. 219). Nonetheless, local Tibetans engage actively in these development projects, with the hope of sustaining their communities’ relative autonomy and cultural continuity.
Notably, it is Makley, an anthropologist, who tells this alternative story about development. Makley has immersed herself in various Tibetan communities in Rebgong and Labrang for decades, to witness, observe, experience and examine different aspects of sociopolitical change, such as social memory, religious revival, gender relations and development. Makley's role as anthropologist or ethnographer was, however, entangled, with her other roles, say, as a foreigner (American) during her fieldwork at a politically volatile time and as a patron (gift master) for local communities. To be specific, while her role as the gift master potentially undermined her detached positioning in relation to local Tibetans and compromised the anthropologist's supposed “objective” angle of observation, her status as foreigner could complicate her relationship with her local hosts and interlocutors. Even worse, she was likely to be evicted temporarily or even permanently by local state and police. Her bafflement and subsequent reflections come to prominence through her vivid descriptions of these moments.
These moments feature the dialogic ethnography that Makley aims to illustrate and develop. Such ethnography problematizes an ethnographer's own privileged access to resources or their superior status vis-à-vis their interlocutors (with the flavor of postcolonial critiques indeed), with particular importance attached to people's embodied experiences of personhood and otherness (or “the politics of presence” according to Makley; see p. 209). Specifically, Makley's multiple roles, statuses or personas, such as above-noted ethnographer, gift master and foreigner, among others (female, professor, etc.), unfold in varying (e.g. macroscopic or microscopic) contexts in multivalent and inconsistent manners. Likewise, her multiple inter-dialogic ethnographic interlocutors – humans, state (officials/cadres/police), deities, spiritual medium (someone caught between this and other-worldly spheres), the dead, nature, etc. – (re-)present themselves in non-uniform, unstable and transformative ways.
Doing so places Makley (and other ethnographers) and various interlocutors as prospective equivalents – this kind of equal status manifests itself through the dynamics of self–otherness in which both parties are entangled. That is, ethnographers are displaced from their status as privileged “self,” and instead they have to grapple with their own otherness in ethnographic encounters, as does Makley. This also suggests that other interlocutors may conceivably empower themselves through this self–other interplay. For example, local elders tried to convert foreigners (“others”) like Makley into locals’ (“our own”) patrons as part of their own counter-development strategy against state-led programmes that deprived locals of their right to pursue their communities’ socioeconomic sustainability and cultural continuity (see chapter four).
Makley's approach highlights anthropology's strength in identifying sociopolitical changes and people's embodied experiences thereof in multi-faceted and holistic but nuanced ways. Such a narrative hence is quite different from those stories of development told through quantitative approaches commonly found in other disciplines. Despite the strength of quantitative research in identifying a panoramic picture of development, such as its pitfalls, structures, models and patterns, it runs the risk of reducing people – with individuality, emotions, concerns, interests and embodied experiences – to nameless numbers or uncredited statistics, or simply to instrumental beings. Thanks to its deep-seated humanist concerns, anthropological-qualitative research is more valuable than ever at a time when humanities and some “soft” social sciences (such as sociocultural anthropology, qualitative research in sociology) are in danger of being marginalized due to the growing importance attached to science or “scientific” (“objective,” and hence quantitative) research.
Finally, I see this dialogic ethnography as having more room for further development. A most significant interlocution usually takes place during an ethnographer's situational and multifarious self–other positioning or among her/his multiple personas. Then, another kind of dialogue occurs between an ethnographer/author and her/his readers like myself. Thus, readers should also be seen as crucial interlocutors. For instance, in building in-depth dialogues with Makley, Western and other anthropologists, I ask: as a Western-trained and overseas-based native (Tibetan) anthropologist from China, does this suggest that my embodied experiences of personhood and otherness entail me to see things (about development, Tibetan cultural survival, divergences in Tibetan society, or the Chinese Party-state system) differently? Doing so allows us to further our interlocution by inquiring into the broader implications of the “rise” of native anthropologists/scholars for the future of anthropology and also for Western and other forms of academic hegemonies. I explore this theme in my own forthcoming book, which can probably also be redefined as a dialogic ethnography. In this way, Makley's book serves as a stepping stone to future intensive interlocutions on the pitfalls and promises of the “rise” of “native anthropologists” among Western and non-Western (“native”) scholars on China, Tibet and far beyond.
