This book is the outcome of fifteen years of research on the large Geluk monastery of Labrang and its adjacent town, situated in today's Gansu Province—but in an area still referred to by Tibetans as “Amdo,” one of their three traditional regions. Drawing on extensive interviews and archival research in Tibetan and Chinese, Charlene Makley's study covers the period from the turn of the twentieth century, when Labrang was a mostly Tibetan but contested multiethnic frontier zone, to the present day. This pioneering, comprehensive, and theoretically sophisticated anthropological monograph analyzes the incorporation of Labrang Tibetans into the People's Republic of China (PRC) through a double focus: religious revival, a central source of state–local tension, and gender.
Within the realm of Tibetan Buddhism, Makley concentrates on the figure of the trulku (reincarnate lama) and the social, political, economic, and spatial relationships (coined “mandalization” by the author) established with his lay followers, as well as on popular lay worship, the ideal models of the ordinary monk and nun, the monastery's yearly festival, and state policy. She looks at how both religious revival and political incorporation into the PRC have been structured by the reproduction or creation of gender inequalities, whether they be in symbolic representations of masculinity and femininity, male–female relations, divisions of labor, personal identity, or sexuality.
The “gendered fault lines of state–local conflict in post-Mao Labrang” (p. 77) are exposed in five chapters, in which Makley constructs an impressive number of arguments that are intricately built on each other. The central argument is pitched in the very title of the book: the “violence of liberation.” It plays on two understandings of “liberation” to explain the clash (and, paradoxically, the interrelatedness) of the two types of “violence” associated with either local Tibetan trulkus or the Chinese state: on the one side, a Buddhist understanding (liberation from samsara) in which violence is ritual (Tantric), and on the other, a socialist understanding (liberation from feudalism and oppression) in which violence is physical, social, and political (terror and repression in Maoist times; subtler forms of marginalization since the reforms). Simply put, Makley interprets the state–local conflict as it has been experienced by Labrang Tibetans—and in which religion plays a crucial role—as primarily an ongoing clash/dialogue of masculinities, in which the women actively participated by carrying a less noticeable bodily and moral burden.
The first of these “androcentric social orders” (p. 24) is based on the trulkus, whose authority over the whole Tibetan community is seen by Makley as derived from their being “inherently successful tantrists” (p. 58) and “divinized embodied agents operating from the center of a mandala” (p. 53). Because of specific lay–monastic masculine alliances (p. 62), they commanded a Fatherland (pha-yul), a “patrifocal mandalic sphere … that continually worked to recruit subjects amidst intensifying competition for their loyalties” (p. 34). The second order is that of “the fearsome colonizing agent” (p. 105), the Father State, Apa Gongjia, a Sino-Tibetan hybrid expression conveying the Tibetan (new) experience of a unitary, abstract, and paternalistic state. During the Maoist years, its strategy to domesticate the authority of trulkus was violent secularization. This process was best epitomized by female cadres, emblematic revolutionary agents (oppressed in both class and gender) whose “socialist androgyny” (p. 85) was a main factor in the “marginalizing (emasculating) of Tibetan trulkus” (p. 78). The later market reforms, also felt as forcefully imposed by Apa Gongjia, have seen the dilemmas of tourism (revival of tradition) and development (economic/capitalist drive).
The process of reconstructing the main sites of Tibetan masculine authority (both Buddhist power places and the ideal patrilocal household) has implied the active moral participation of women. According to Makley, female pilgrims remain on the periphery of the monastery (most circumambulators are female; they abstain from visiting the wrathful protective deities’ chapels) in order to keep its symbolic center “pure” (because the female body is impure) and “powerful,” an active choice made in a context in which the trulkus' too close association with the state and with the seductions of capital is seen as dangerously compromising (p. 177). In the domestic sphere, the women's reemphasized role as emblematic mothers, held by reproductive labor inside the household, contrasts with that of mobile men engaged in market-related activities outside.
The last two chapters extend in two directions: sexuality among the laity, and discipline and violence among the monks. The “disciplined masculinity” of the monks, presented as a third gender, is opposed to lay masculinity in the way their respective “heroisms” are construed and in their differential access to the use of violence (pp. 232–33). In a context in which the state tries to control the monks, their engaging in spontaneous bodily violence highlights the tension between the two “violences of liberation.” All of the chapters converge on the author's postulation of “the traumatic process of national incorporation as emasculating for all Tibetans in the Labrang region” (p. 288).
Makley is careful to limit her analysis to Labrang and not to apply it to all Tibetans living in the PRC. Indeed, in contemporary central Tibet, for example, the expression Apa Gongjia is unknown, and female pilgrims actually enter most inner sanctums. Some key Buddhist conceptualizations, however, are generally standardized across Tibetan regions. Makley's elaborations on the status of a trulku, for instance, stand at odds with usual Tibetological understandings. To a Tibetan devotee, a trulku is not considered a male, but a spiritual entity whose sexual body is inconsequential. Makley acknowledges this (p. 34, 37), but then dismisses it on the grounds that maleness (purity) is unmarked in Buddhist doctrine, whereas femaleness is marked as relatively impure (p. 37). This alone builds her case for the actual masculinity and eventual emasculation of trulkus by Maoist secularization and post-Mao economic marginalization, claims that will likely irk Tibetan sensitivity.
Moreover, she characterizes trulkus as “humans innately empowered to wield tantric ritual technologies” (p. 36). Trulkus can be, but are generally not seen as, experts in Tantric rituals. They are venerated for what they are (the enlightened mind of their predecessor), not for the rituals they do—which, in any case, fall more often on the peaceful rather than the wrathful side. Makley even mentions that they are not those who perform the yearly public Tantric ritual of “violent liberation” described throughout chapters 1 and 6 as the key “mandalization” display connecting lamas and laity. This is supposedly attributable to “the relative invisibility of their tantric prowess to ordinary patrons” (p. 296 n. 18). However, I am more inclined to see “tantric powers” (mthu, nus-pa, Tibetan concepts not evoked by the author) as the attainments of Tantrists (sngags-pa) or yogis (rnal-'byor-ba), to whom the laity shows devotion on those explicit grounds. While Makley's trulku- and Tantra-centric rendering of religious life in Labrang is quite intriguing, I had also expected, in this extensive analysis of lay worshipping practices, a closer examination of the central concept of blessings (byin-rlabs), which lay followers avidly seek from numerous religious figures and artifacts.
Makley's work is a powerful and audacious piece of scholarship: a must-read for all scholars of contemporary Tibet, Sino-Tibetan relations, the history of Amdo or anthropology of Buddhism; and a should-read for analysts of state–local relations, religious revival, minority nationalities, or capitalism and gender in China. It will provide thought-provoking arguments for all social scientists examining gender, colonization, modernity, or the interrelatedness of space, body, and identity.
