I was pleased to learn of the publication of Tenzin Jinba's ethnography of recent state-local conflicts (in the first decade of the 2000s) over discovering the ancient locale of the so-called “Eastern Queendom” amidst a tourism boom in the Gyarong region of the Sino-Tibetan frontier zone. For a variety of reasons, gender as an analytic has been a nonstarter in Tibet scholarship both within and outside of the People's Republic of China (PRC). This is one of only a handful of books and articles (in any language) since the 1990s addressing gender politics among Tibetans, and it is the first book since my own in 2007 that situates gender as an important aspect of the politics of ethnicity among Tibetans in the PRC's western frontier zone.Footnote ¹

Further, as a Gyarong Tibetan scholar who got his PhD in anthropology in the United States at Boston University, Tenzin Jinba provides us with an unprecedented glimpse of the complexities of contemporary identity politics in Gyarong, a particularly hybrid and marginalized cultural-linguistic and political region now straddling two eastern Tibetan autonomous prefectures (Ganzi and Aba) in mountainous western Sichuan Province. Gyarong residents claim contested histories of migration and speak multiple languages that may or may not be dialects of Tibetan, even though most residents were classified as “Tibetan” (Ch. Zangzu) in the 1950s during the nascent PRC's “ethnic identification” project (pp. 15, 21). There is next to no English-language scholarship on the political history of the region, and most academic studies of Gyarong are linguistic analyses. Finally, this study is particularly important because since the 2008 military crackdown on the unrest that broke out across Tibetan regions of the PRC and continues in these parts in an unprecedented series of self-immolation protests, independent and long-term fieldwork by foreigners, which was a new possibility in eastern Tibetan regions in the post-Mao 1990s, is once again politically difficult if not impossible. Tenzin Jinba's book, based on a yearlong fieldwork stint in 2008–9, is thus perhaps a harbinger of a new era of PRC frontier ethnography to be dominated by scholars who are citizens of China.

In a highly pithy account (only 127 pages, divided into five short chapters framed by a brief introduction and conclusion, three small maps, a couple of diagrams, and a handful of photos), Tenzin Jinba unpacks a dispute, beginning in 2005, between Gyarong Tibetan male elites (teachers, local officials, and businessmen) of neighboring townships (Suopo and Zhonglu) over Danba County support of their competing claims to be the locale of the “Eastern Queendom.” That, the author tells us, was a matriarchal polity reported in villagers' legends and Chinese imperial texts and supposedly dating from prior to the expansion of the Tibetan empire in the seventh century, when the queens and their courts fled eastward to end up in what is now Danba County.

According to Tenzin Jinba, ordinary villagers in the county knew little about the queendom until the early 2000s, when intensified competition for the burgeoning Han Chinese ethnic tourism market led prefecture and then county officials to brand Danba as the erstwhile political hub of the queendom (p. 18). That local state entrepreneurialism unleashed in turn a historiographic movement at the lower township levels, as Suopo and Zhonglu township elites claimed their respective sites to have been the queendom's capital. The author argues that the Suopo Tibetan men's efforts in particular worked to differentiate their tourist destination from those of neighboring regions, where morally problematic quasi-sex tourism had emerged around legends of a sexually free, exotically ethnic “women's country,” as well as, since 2001, local governments' new “charm festivals” featuring beautiful young Gyarong Tibetan women (p. 59).

Drawing on a very selective reading of theorists of borders and the situational politics of ethnicity (like those of his professor Fredrik Barth, and for the PRC, those of Stevan Harrell, Louisa Schein, and Dru Gladney), Tenzin Jinba tells us his training in the United States distanced him from “the essentialist frame of mind” he found among the Suopo villagers he worked with (p. 17). Navigating his delicate position as both an insider and an outsider (Suopo villagers identify with Khampa Tibetans and many speak the Kham dialect, while he is from a different part of Gyarong and does not speak Kham Tibetan), the author strays from the local role villagers assigned him of Suopo's advocate for the queendom brand (p. 16). He argues instead that the Danba County queendom dispute was a microcosm of shifting, macro-scale, gendered, ethnic politics playing out both in the Sino-Tibetan “convergence zone” and across the PRC (pp. xiii, 7, 118).

In this, Tenzin Jinba rightly complicates older center-periphery arguments in Sinology circles and, inspired by James Scott's recent work on the highlands “Zomia” region of Southeast Asia,Footnote ² advocates for a focus on dynamic “state-society” relations (p. 116), through which Gyarong Tibetans navigate “multiple marginalities” vis-à-vis a variety of ethnic and linguistic identities and state administrative scales (p. 6). Ultimately, he argues that for Suopo male elites the queendom dispute was a “symbolic stage” (p. 75) on which Suopo residents could legitimately protest what they saw as corrupt county officials favoring Zhonglu township and advocate for crucial tourism resources for Suopo instead.

Tenzin Jinba's concise (or better: elliptical) analysis of these exquisitely complex frontier zone politics is perhaps emblematic of recent market pressures on the length of academic publications in the United States. But for me, what is left unsaid and under-synthesized here raises more important questions about the risks and limitations of native anthropology under political repression in Tibetan regions of the PRC. Based at a university in the PRC's west, Tenzin Jinba knows well the extreme risks of publicly debating Tibetan history and politics since the new wave of protests, arrests, and interrogations began in 2008. Yet even when he discusses the methodological dilemmas of native anthropology he never explicitly addresses those politics. Reading the book in that light, I realized that this study is itself an example of the very “political ingenuity” (p. 75) the author says his Suopo informants practiced: he must “write between the lines” in an artful form of self-censorship that yet preserves a sense of academic detachment and ethnographic truth.

Recent years have seen a small spate of Chinese scholars writing about the practice of self-censorship in Chinese art, literature (including the flap over Mo Yan's 2012 Nobel Prize), and journalism. Some argue that such practices allow for a modicum of “media freedom” in the PRC.Footnote ³ But what are the implications when they are transferred to US-based academic publications? It strikes me that this book is not a window onto a complex “local Tibet,” as Stevan Harrell states in the foreword, but a prism—it refracts and scatters data and narratives across chapters and footnotes, refusing the work of explicit synthesis that would clarify and foreground the author's voice and stances. In terms of the “scale-making practices”Footnote ⁴ so important within the administrative hierarchies of repressive states, here Tenzin Jinpa, just like his Suopo interlocutors, practices strategic forms of “downscaling” (avoiding linking his findings on conflict in Gyarong to broader political economic processes and the policies of higher state officials). The ironic effect is that the book ultimately de-historicizes and de-Tibetanizes the analysis, even as the queendom conflict is centrally about a high-stakes politics of history-making, and Tenzin Jinba himself seems concerned to refute Tibetans' widespread assumptions that Gyarongwas are less authentically “Tibetan.”

Thus, for example, in a move typical of Chinese-language social science writings, he buries on pages 73–76 his (brief) discussion of the sources of local protestors' grievances since 2005 (resource extraction and land expropriation unleashed in the 2000 state-led capitalist “Develop the West” campaign) and his only mention of the silencing effect of the 2008 military crackdown, relegating many of the crucial details to footnotes. Further, the book refuses to engage in any comparative ethnohistorical analysis in this largely Tibetan region, keeping to a bare minimum any engagement with Tibet scholarship, including my own work, which found important parallel gendered ethnic processes that could have shed light on the Gyarong situation. This evasive downscaling is clearest in Tenzin Jinba's perhaps symbolic gesture toward James Scott's 2009 book on highlands “Zomia,” The Art of Not Being Governed.Footnote ⁵ Eschewing discussion of Scott's complex historical argument about state-building as a process of annexation, “enclosure,” and resource extraction, Tenzin Jinba conflates it with 1990s postmodern theories of the “creative hybridity” of borderlands (p. 7), and likens Suopo villagers' efforts to compete for state-distributed benefits (p. 126) to Scott's examples of border peoples withdrawing to autonomous lands to evade state controls. In Tenzin Jinpa's account, Scott's notion of Zomia as a “shatter zone” of resistance to state projects is thereby neutralized as a cultural “convergence zone” (pp. 8, 122) in Gyarong. It thus took me hours of cross-checking maps and historical accounts to re-locate this study in especially Kham Tibetan regional history. (Gyarong prior to Chinese Communist intervention was ruled not by a queendom but by a network of chiefdoms or kingdoms in complex relations with other chiefdoms across Kham.) That resynthesizing work was all the harder because Gyarong has been so marginalized in Tibetan and Chinese studies.

Finally, Tenzin Jinba's artful self-censorship here is also manifest in his strategic “upscaling” practices (avoiding analysis of processes below the township scale so as to sidestep the most contentious village or household politics, relegating any mention of them to footnotes). Yet those more local scales, as I argue in my book, are precisely where the trans-scalar relevance of gender as a cultural politics is most visible (e.g., in shifting divisions of labor; sexual practices; and kinship and lineage claims to land, rights, and authority). The author's efforts to avoid those most deeply political relations, which could implicate certain residents in the submerged story he is telling of ongoing state-led ethnic assimilation and resource extraction, perhaps explains why gender here (as a priori or universal notions of femininity and masculinity) is not really an analytic tool but a cultural resource used in township male elites' ethnic identity politics and entrepreneurial agendas: the ancient queendom as exotic and sellable difference is a politically safe way to claim an erstwhile sovereign polity, ennobling (masculinizing?) Tibetan femininity and sidestepping a more recent history of fiercely autonomous Khampa masculinity. (Kham Tibetan guerrilla fighters famously organized armed resistance against Chinese Communist occupation in the 1950s.) Tenzin Jinba thus frequently lapses into referring to “Suopo villagers” as a collective subject, even though he tells us women had little to do with local leadership in general or the queendom dispute in particular. That would seem to belie Suopo queendom advocates' claims that Gyarong women enjoy higher status than other Tibetan and Chinese women. Yet again buried in the middle of the book, the author gives us a brief glimpse of the intriguing emergence in 2009 of women-only sit-in demonstrations at the county government offices. As with other such politically sensitive allusions, we never learn what those efforts were about; they are not specifically contextualized or unpacked.

Ultimately, I am left agreeing with Harrell, as stated in the book's foreword, that this is an important and rare study by a native anthropologist who has taken some risks in publicly addressing ethnic relations in the contentious Sino-Tibetan frontier zone. But the book also raises troubling issues for all scholars working under the pressures of China's authoritarian capitalism: when the political and economic stakes are so high, how do we weigh the costs and benefits of self-censorship for academic inquiry? And how do we parse out how much of our discretion is merely conscious strategy and how much are the very parameters of thought itself narrowed over time by political repression that reaches across national boundaries? Tenzin Jinba's analysis here “hides in plain light,” but how would uninformed readers know that? I would say that ethnographic writing like this, especially now that in-depth research by non-China-based anthropologists in those parts is next to impossible, needs to be accompanied by a reading guide or college course, one that helps readers follow the trail of crumbs Tenzin Jinba has left us to really discover the multi-scalar implications of such important cultural politics.