Charlene Makley's The Battle for Fortune sets a new standard for ethnographic studies of Tibetan communities in China. The book, which derives from research in the Rebgong region of Qinghai Province, is written at three levels. First are descriptions of material markers and symbolic enactments of identity in everyday life. A second level comprises analyses of micropolitics and debates over how to forge a meaningful future. The third level consists of applications of theorized constructs drawn from sociocultural and linguistic anthropology. Makley stresses this last level in her goals for the book, that is, to contribute to a dialogic model of social relations and demonstrate how interpretive practices shape experiences of materiality, embodied personhood, and power under state-led development. The book's five chapters illustrate Rebgong villagers’ encounters with state agents and their efforts to secure state favor, which Makley sums up with the metaphor of a battle for “fortune,” referencing ideas associated with the Tibetan concept of yang. This is one of many ways in which she incorporates Tibetan understandings of spiritual forces into her analyses.
The book rests on research conducted over the decade that included China's Olympic year. The introduction recalls the anticipation and national pride created by China's sponsorship of the Games and how this was reversed for Tibetans by the civil unrest that began in Lhasa in March 2008, spread across Tibetan regions, and prompted a military crackdown. Makley notes that while her aim of writing a dialogic ethnography ideally would have involved the sharing of analyses with her interlocutors, this aim and more immersive, village-based research were not feasible. Instead, she focuses on public events and efforts that villagers made to secure development resources under an unpredictable political order. The chapters draw primarily on conversations with local people and various forms of media. Makley's analysis also relies on an array of evocative and fluid key concepts. These concepts include the chronotope, alternatively timespace, which is drawn from the work of M. M. Bakhtin and marks how experiences of time and space conjoin; Michel Foucault's notion of heterotopias, or other-spaces; varying formulations of Anna Tsing's concepts of scale and scale-making, used to show how local groups contend with the ideologies and politics of the powerful Chinese state; and Tsing's notion of the economy of appearances.Footnote 1
Chapter 1 discusses the pathways for securing fortune that have succeeded one another in recent decades, summed up under the rubrics of Buddhist lama–lay leader alliance, Maoist socialism, and authoritarian capitalism, ideas and practices associated with offering scarves and strategic uses of hospitality.
Chapter 2 analyzes the cultural politics of authority as they played out in a conflict that pitted agents of the Chinese state against the medium of a local mountain deity. At issue here was community sovereignty and the loss of lower valley farmlands that had been incorporated into the rapidly expanding town. In this battle for fortune, the agents of the state gained the upper hand.
Chapter 3 continues the analysis of objects imbued with special cultural value. The chapter's leading vignette concerns the renovation of a courtyard wall for a highland village school, a project to which Makley contributed. This is a fine illustration of the economy of appearances and how building materials are used to convey modernity, with the emphasis placed on exterior façades, rather than books, curriculum development, or teachers.
Chapter 4 focuses on the dilemmas faced by villagers who, lured by promises of new homes and better access to government services, resettled on the valley floor, but whose resettlement led to their proletarianization. Here we see strategies to maintain communal identity and rights to highland territories through the construction of a temple complex.
Chapter 5 considers the impacts of the 2008 unrest on ordinary citizens. For one thing, Buddhist monasteries organized prayer assemblies for the victims of the disastrous Sichuan earthquake, which seemed to transcend ethnic tensions and involved what Makley describes as “a situated politics of presence participating in the ongoing battle for fortune” (p. 225). Overall, however, the military crackdown reinforced the sense of vulnerability, alterity, and pride linking Tibetans across the nation.
The book thus documents the strategies that Rebgong Tibetans used to achieve recognition from local representatives of the state to aid their rights to use their land as they wish, maintain community-based schools and religious establishments, and live their lives in culturally meaningful ways. The epilogue reflects on the negative impacts of ongoing capitalist commodification and Tibetans’ efforts to restore communities and ensure auspicious sovereignty for future generations. It also discusses more recent events of self-immolation to demonstrate the high stakes associated with the battle for fortune.
Makley brings great insight to the seemingly small details of everyday life and how Tibetans negotiate local bureaucracies, repressive surveillance during periods of unrest, and authoritarian capitalism. These details include the etiquette and meanings associated with offerings and hospitality, the power of modern officials versus traditional spirit mediums, the built environment, and the construal of local histories. The stakes clearly are high for rural villagers who wish to create a meaningful future and resist further marginalization and the erasure of inconveniently located communities. Makley convincingly demonstrates why individuals struggle over these issues, at the cost of friends and jobs, because the ways in which they are resolved are likely to have lasting impacts. At the same time, The Battle for Fortune relies on a structured mode of analysis that draws heavily on an apparatus of highly theorized terms and phrases. It is up to the reader to decide if this theoretical armature illuminates or encumbers a rich ethnography on how life is being lived in historically Tibetan regions of China in the twenty-first century and aids Makley's aim of constructing a dialogic model of social relations accessible to her interlocutors.
