During the past half century, most Western students of Tibetan societies have, at one time or another, availed themselves of several valuable introductory works, namely, Rolf Stein's La Civilisation tibétaine (Paris: Dunod, 1962; appearing in English in 1972) and David Snellgrove and Hugh Richardson's A Cultural History of Tibet (London: Shambhala, 1968). The Tibetans, which author Matthew T. Kapstein consciously styles as a “cultural history,” is in many ways a successor of these earlier volumes, and a timely update of their contents in terms of new research insights of the past few decades. The scope and nature of The Tibetans is also defined by its place within Blackwell's excellent Peoples of Asia series, under the general editorship of Morris Rossabi. Kapstein has had to confront the same fundamental challenge as all writers of this genre: crafting a portrait that is at once sophisticated and reflective of the state of the art in contemporary scholarship, yet brief and accessible. The Tibetans is a most admirable attempt by an outstanding scholar to meet such a challenge.
Not surprisingly, Kapstein begins by discussing what a possible “Tibetan civilizational sphere” or “Tibetan world” might (and might not) include. Kapstein's own prudent boundaries for the book are “the main lines of Tibetan history, language, and religion, as well as the Tibetan plateau itself and the special environmental conditions that obtain there” and, more critical for the final outcome, “the traditional Tibetan world as it was before the mid-twentieth century” (pp. xii–xiii). Readers seeking a closer understanding of contemporary Tibet will find only a thirty-page final chapter, “Tibet in the Modern World,” to satisfy them, with just half of this treating events after the rebellion and exile of 1959. This is not a criticism, as it is impossible to do justice to every historical period within a volume of this sort.
For most readers, the manner in which the topic of religion (or perhaps better “Buddhism”) is dealt with in The Tibetans will be crucial because it has become so emblematic of a wider and politically explicit “Tibetan” identity in recent times. Indeed, we find the great personages, institutions, and political history of Tibetan Buddhism all surveyed at some length in this book (especially in chapters 3, 4, 5, and 7). Refreshingly, Kapstein has been careful to emphasize and demonstrate throughout his text that the Tibetan religious world is a very multifaceted spectrum of concerns, techniques, and actors, with institutionalized Buddhism, and often archaic concerns of the mundane world, such as healing, divination, protection, or astrology, all part of the mix in ways that defy easy classification and simple analysis. Thus, he rightly offers occasional cautionary statements, such as “there is no single body of ritual which engages all Tibetans in common” (p. 209).
The volume is rounded off with an excellent apparatus, befitting a high-quality introductory work. We find footnoted references, including those to the various finely translated excepts from original Tibetan sources cited by Kapstein, a list of proper spellings of the many phonetically rendered Tibetan names and terms employed throughout the main text, a topically arranged bibliography covering the best reading a student can turn to in contemporary European-language scholarship, and a comprehensive and user-friendly index.
If there are limitations and possible flaws that one can identify in this book, they are in an acute sense directly reflective of the state of contemporary Tibetan studies itself, and reveal the often huge gaps in our data about so many aspects of premodern Tibetan life and history. For instance, Kapstein is sometimes forced to “stretch” his materials in a manner that some might not be comfortable with. In a discussion of events in the immediate postimperial era, we find a passage describing the life of a nineteenth-century lama inserted to provide an example (p. 88)—a historical leap of a millennium. Straddling chapters 3 and 4, there is an ongoing discussion of the vexing period of the demise of the Tibetan empire and the end of imperial patronage of Buddhist monasticism (pp. 81–88), which Kapstein engages with repeated reference to the economic circumstances of the day. Yet one must realize—and perhaps we should have been better informed of this—that this discussion is entirely a speculative enterprise; we simply do not have any hard data on the Tibetan economy of the period to use as evidence. At another point in the narrative, one that we appreciate for raising the problem of easy generalizations and “attempts to treat Tibet globally,” Kapstein states of the “conditions of traditional Tibetan life” that “[i]nfant mortality rates were in all cases high” (p. 204). Yet the leading historical demographer of Tibet, Geoff Childs, recently recalled for us that “[v]irtually nothing is known about levels of mortality in Tibet prior to the 1980s” (Tibetan Transitions [Leiden: Brill, 2008], 196), and he has demonstrated how wrong or misleading our oft-repeated assumptions about premodern Tibetan population dynamics (e.g., the notion of long-term decline) have been and can be. I must emphasize that there are but few such minor imperfections in Kapstein's otherwise stainlessly erudite text, and most readers will simply pass over or absorb them unawares. Yet such points also clearly signal some of the great challenges that still lie ahead for research in the field of Tibetan studies.
The Tibetans offers the best single overview of Tibetan cultural history currently available, and it is highly recommended reading for students and professional scholars alike. It is surely destined to be the standard work of its type well into the foreseeable future.
