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The Politics of Presence: Voice, Deity Possession, and Dilemmas of Development Among Tibetans in the People's Republic of China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2013

Charlene E. Makley
Charlene E. Makley*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, Reed College
*
makleyc@reed.edu
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Abstract

Taking inspiration from linguistic anthropological approaches to the work of the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), this article uses a Bakhtinian perspective on voice as contested presence to analyze the post-Mao revival of mountain deity possession practices among Tibetans in China's northwestern province of Qinghai. I respond to recent work that suggests that state-led development processes have intensified grassroots contests over the moral sources of authority and legitimacy in China, by contrasting the ambivalent voices of an urbanizing village's Tibetan Party secretary with those of the village's deity medium, during a mid-2000s village conflict. The conflict underscored a crisis of authority or moral “presence” among Tibetans under intensifying central state-led development pressures that for many carried forward the disenfranchisement of Tibetans that started in the 1950s.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2013 , pp. 665 - 700
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2013 

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