This edited volume brings together a series of papers, written by anthropologists or based on ethnographic fieldwork, that explore social conflict among Tibetan, Mongolian, and Siberian peoples in the Soviet Union, Mongolia, and China. Containing two different versions of communism (Soviet and Chinese) and two dominant Buddhist cultures (Tibetan and Mongolian), along with their less “converted” peripheries, such as Altai or Nepal, Inner Asia as it is defined in this volume offers a rich sphere for comparative study. Numerous themes in the papers overlap, but many opportunities for cross-fertilization remain only implicit.
Three essays address instances of ethnic conflict, or what has been interpreted as ethnic conflict, and strive to give them greater complexity. Melvyn Goldstein, Ben Jiao, and Tanzen Lhundup trace the history of the Nyemo Ani incident in Cultural Revolution–era Tibet, a much longer version of which has recently appeared as a book. David Sneath gives an overview of modern Inner Mongolian history, and Andrew Fischer discusses boycotts and ethnic tensions between Tibetans and Hui (Chinese-speaking Muslims) in Qinghai Province. All three essays demonstrate that even conflicts that seem obviously ethnic must be understood in light of elite political aims and struggles for resources. Oddly, it is Fischer, a development economist, who strives to place his discussion firmly within a theoretical context of primordialist versus instrumental debates. Anthropologists Sneath and Goldstein (along with his coauthors), by contrast, write much more like historians, leaving theoretical points mostly implicit. Fischer's work might have been sharpened, however, by reference to Donald L. Horowitz's Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985).
Charlene Makley and Jill Sudbury both consider the social memory of conflict generated by the Cultural Revolution and the destruction of monasteries. Both find that in the memory of participants, there is a deep belief in karmic retribution, combined with a reluctance to acknowledge complicity beyond a few collaborators who are scorned behind their backs. Makley's article, which is based on the third chapter of her book The Violence of Liberation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), stands out by its attention to gendered images of authority, both of the Chinese state and of the tantric lamas. By contrast, in Mongolia, Ines Stolpe finds that the cultural campaigns carried out in the Mongolian People's Republic during the 1960s and 1970s have been remembered not as occasions of conflict, but rather as expressions of progress.
Jill Sudbury's article on the destruction of the Bodongpa monasteries in Central Tibet draws on Martin Mills's study of Buddhism in Ladakh as the suppression of chthonic forces in both the person and the locality (Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism: The Foundations of Authority in Gelukpa Monasticism [New York: Routledge, 2003]). Although she does not refer to Mills's work, Agnieszka Halemba's study of religious conflict in the post-Soviet Altai republic of Russia shows that this Buddhist logic of converting the local spirits is recognized—and feared—by adherents of the native mountain cult. Her fascinating discussion of local conflict over nature parks and Buddhist stupas demonstrates the fruitfulness of viewing this southern Siberian region in both Russian and Tibeto-Mongolian contexts. The prominence of these themes of religion and locality in these studies, however, only points out their absence in other papers, where they might be relevant, such as Sneath's or Goldstein, Jiao, and Lhundup's contributions.
Finally, Fernanda Pirie and Heidi Fjeld contribute two studies on the classic anthropological question of how social conflict (feuding among Golok nomads, and property division in Tsang village, respectively) can be consistent with the maintenance of social order and norms. This was a core issue for structural functionalism, and the authors do not entirely reject this theoretical heritage, although they are more open to the possibility of unresolved conflict. Here, too, theoretical resources used fruitfully in one paper, such as Fjeld's discussion of hierarchy in the works of Robert Hertz, Rodney Needham, and Louis Dumont, are not picked up on by other authors, even where they might be relevant.
Particularly undeveloped, or developed only in problematic ways, is the comparison between Chinese and Soviet communist versions of top-down social change. Stolpe's study of hygienic and cultural campaigns in Mongolia is a valuable look at a topic not studied before by Western scholars. To draw from it, however, the general conclusion that “[t]he Cultural Revolution, of course, involved a much more dramatic upheaval in the social order that the Soviet campaigns carried out in Mongolia” (p. 12) is highly misleading. A comparison of Chinese campaigns against spitting in the 1980s, for example, with the Mongolian or Buriat collectivization, purges, and destruction of monasteries in the 1930s would lead to the opposite, and just as misleading, conclusion. The revolutionary upheavals of Soviet and Chinese communism had their own separate but parallel time scales, and comparison needs to compare like phases with like.
Such problems aside, Conflict and Social Order in Tibet and Inner Asia is a valuable collection of groundbreaking field research on modern social change in Inner Asia. The book is too expensive for class use, but many of the articles would be excellent supplementary reading in classes on Tibet, Mongolia, ethnicity in China, or Asian religions. The volume makes the case for the fruitful potential of more comparative studies in Inner Asia, but also highlights the further cross-fertilization and broad based comparative awareness necessary to make such potential actual.
