China's ‘Tibetan’ Frontiers presents an ethnography of reform-era cultural negotiations in and around the frontier county of Trinde/Trindu (officially Chindu, Tibetan: Khri 'du, Chinese: Chengduo), Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, China. The placement of ‘Tibetan’ in inverted commas within the title of this book is significant. As we read in the conclusion, and as is stated in variant forms throughout the book:

The “broader contexts and discursive fields” are wide-ranging and interesting, and include new forms of prosperity and questions of morality, development and material hierarchies, difference and citizenship, locality and civilizational hierarchies, NGO involvement in education, localization and personal political ambition, (marginal) ritual and (modern) reputation, and the ambiguity of new media imaginaries. Meriam worked as a teacher in Trinde between 2002 and 2003.

I found it a very untidy book, both in terms of its handling of what might be called sociocultural or ethnographic detail and in terms of thinking through its questions. In many ways it is still the thesis it was developed (or simply converted?) from, and too little has been done both in terms of correcting errors or rethinking how the author's interpretation might be better communicated. Meriam has not succeeded in communicating what is significant or how it is significant.

Some of the untidiness relates to confusions of language as well as what can only be called an unreflective approach to the author's interaction with her informants and their responses to her questions. One glaring example of a tenuous grasp of what she is hearing is found in a discussion of “identity” in her introduction where “self-knowledge” is glossed as “M.[andarin] rongxi,” apparently “a spoken Putonghua term that is familiar to students at the school” (p. 22). It is not familiar to me as a Putonghua term for “self-knowledge.” The term is in fact recognizably a Yushu pronunciation of the Tibetan word rang shes (i.e., self-knowing). That it is in fact a Tibetan term Meriam should herself know, because rong-shi [sic] is her “Trindu-Key” (i.e., Trindu dialect) gloss for “Identity” in the “Multilingual Glossary of Principal Political Terms” (pp. 301–2). It is also important to note that the Tibetan Script terms in the glossary are very often not the spelling of the accompanying term in the Trindu-Key column, but a more formal synonym of the dialect term, or in some cases a dictionary term that is not related to the sense of the political term in question. Again, for the term “identity” two written equivalents are offered: thob thang and ming thob. Both Tibetan terms are closer to “status” and are standard dictionary glosses for the Chinese shenfen (status, identity), the first carrying a strong sense of rights or privilege and appearing on Resident Identity Cards. Neither term is a good equivalent for a discussion of cultural or ethnic identification, but would all the same have made an interesting point of contrast had they been discussed. No note is offered alerting the reader to these or similar disparities in the glossary.

This is not an isolated problem, for example, *tesi for Mandarin tese (“characteristic,” p. 23), *rgyal.k'ab for Wylie Tibetan rgyal.khab (“country,” p. 25), and the list could go on (the use of a stop for the Tibetan syllable separator has by-and-large been discontinued). Far more worrying than these is the way discussions of abstract terms like “identity” and “autonomy” are managed; when textbook answers are not forthcoming, rather than picking up and exploring the sense that might be available in emic explications, more often than not her teacher colleagues’ responses are brushed aside (sympathetically!) as so much confusion, disparity, or evidence of isolation. These problems begin and are perhaps most concentrated in the long introductory chapter, but they are found throughout. I expect there is a rich local vocabulary through which many of the issues Meriam canvases are discussed and debated, but what we get instead are responses framed by her attempts to pin down concepts she was importing and muddled interpretations of less constrained local suggestions (as evidenced above).

Likewise a disconcerting and continually unmarked shift between general Tibetan (or pan-China) levels of analysis and local events makes for very muddy reading (particularly serious in the historical section of the introduction) and I am left wondering how a reader who is not familiar with the region could ever tell which is what. In the middle of a discussion of village structure in the Trinde area, for example, Meriam cites (“for a general description”) Diemberger's work on Porong on the opposite (i.e., southwestern) side of Tibet (and again, the reader is left unsuspecting) (p. 8). Given the overall stance—the book as a whole maintains an uneasy relationship with what it calls “Tibetological” knowledge—this is hardly consistent with the emphasis on deconstructing “reified cultural types” (p. 290).

Under different circumstances I might be tempted to conclude that the overall untidiness is a consequence of the approach cited in the first paragraph of this review. If power is nomadic and labile, then cultural analysis in frontier regions might be expected to bear a certain amount of parataxis. Unfortunately, the examples above point to a more basic failure to organize detail and articulate theory: observations on cultural negotiations come one after another, but, unsupported by extended argument, “the mechanisms of their constitution and maintenance in practice” remain unelaborated (p. 290).