Paul Kocot Nietupski, Labrang Monastery: A Tibetan Buddhist Community on the Inner AsianBorderlands, 1709–1958Labrang Monastery: A Tibetan Buddhist Community on the Inner Asian Borderlands,1709–1958 by Paul Kocot NietupskiReview by: Charlene MakleyHistory of Religions, Vol. 52, No. 4 (May 2013), pp. 425-426Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669655 .

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that alone, which makes it definitely recommendable. Those who want to learn about

the current state of theory, especially if they tend in the realist direction, will find this

book very useful. Constructivists acquainted with theory will likely find it less so.

TIMMURPHY

University of Alabama

Labrang Monastery: A Tibetan Buddhist Community on the Inner Asian Borderlands,1709–1958. By PAUL KOCOT NIETUPSKI. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011. Pp.

xiþ273, 3 maps. $80.00 (cloth).

With this monograph, Paul Nietupski continues his decades-long investigation into

one of the largest and most complex Buddhist polities in the world. As he tells us, Lab-

rang Monastery, founded in 1709 through an alliance of a Mongol lord and a famous

Tibetan lama, developed relatively late in the complex Sino-Tibetan frontier zone but

rapidly grew to be a prestigious Geluk sect monastic university (housing up to three

thousand monks in its heyday) and independent political economic center until Chinese

Communist intervention in 1958 (xviii, 19–20). As such, the rise of Labrang Monastery

as an important polity in eastern Tibet (Amdo) was part of a much larger process of the

expansion of Geluk institutions east (into Amdo and Khams) and north (into Mongolia)

after the ascendance of the Great Fifth Dalai Lama in Lhasa and amid the increasing

interest ofMongol andManchu (Qing) lords in patronizing and controlling Tibetan Bud-

dhist communities in those regions (8–9, 18). Here, Nietupski expands on his book Lab-rang: A Tibetan Buddhist Monastery at the Crossroads of Four Civilizations (1999), inwhich he curates and contextualizes an archive of photographs taken by the Griebenow

family of Christian missionaries who occupied Labrang in the early twentieth century.

By contrast, in this study, which begins with the succession struggles in Lhasa after the

death of fifth Dalai Lama, and only briefly touches on the twentieth century in the end,

the Griebenows recede to their rightfully marginal place in Labrang’s history, and Nie-

tupski provides the most in-depth English-language account of the rise and expansion of

this multiethnic polity.

The study is thus an important scholarly contribution, not only because it is one of

the very few ethnohistorical accounts of Tibetan Buddhism to take an entire polity,

and not just a monastery or a ritual system, as the unit of analysis. It is also important

because Labrang rose as a Buddhist center on the very cusp of major transitions

between competing regimes and emerging modernities in the still poorly understood

inner Asian frontier zone. In very clear (if somewhat dry) prose, Nietupski thus pre-

sents his account as a case study of a premodern political system that belies modernist

assumptions about secular, constitutional governance and clearly defined national

state boundaries (xx, 79). Participating in a broader trend among Western scholars to

expand the range of sources in the historiography of Tibetan regions, Nietupski draws

on an impressive array of both Chinese and Tibetan-language written sources, as well

as oral accounts gleaned from his fieldwork in the region and elsewhere and in part

accessed through his relationships with local Tibetan elites like Apa Alo (1903–97),

erstwhile lay commander of Labrang (xii). Methodologically, this nuanced perspec-

tive allows Nietupski to make a stronger claim to have understood Labrang “on its

425History of Religions

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own terms” (206). Thus, as opposed to the anachronistic accounts of Chinese national-

ists or the scathing moral assessments of Christian missionaries, Nietupski fleshes out

the complex nature of legitimate authority at the time, making the important point that

multiple, competing visions of sovereignty coexisted in the frontier zone (114). Ulti-

mately, his main argument is that Labrang was a cohesive and relatively autonomous

Tibetan society and polity under the charismatic Buddhist leadership of the Jamyang

Zhepa lineage of incarnate lamas, even as they and other important lamas maintained

strong ties with Lhasa as well as with variousMongol andManchu lords (xix, 203).

The book is laid out in a clear and accessible way, with the five main chapters

framed by a very brief introduction and conclusion. Two useful appendixes provide

further information on the ruling families of Labrang and, for specialists, the correct

Tibetan spellings of key names and terms. Three maps at the beginning nicely contex-

tualize the region in space, though they are too small, especially the hand-drawn Chi-

nese language one. Having conducted fairly extensive research on this region myself,

I am very impressed by the accessibility of Nietupski’s narrative, which opens an

important window onto a highly complex phenomenon for nonspecialists. However, it

still seems that the main chapters, especially the most important chapters 4 and 5,

which present the bulk of his original research, remain too general, glossing over the

most interesting and controversial of personas and politics. Perhaps a different organi-

zation, condensing the first three summary chapters into one, for example, would have

reduced some redundancy and allowed more space for delving. Further, the focus on

“Labrang” as an abstract subject throughout makes the narrative voice come across at

times as too dry and distanced, backgrounding the important methodological points

and the stakes of this account: Nietupski states at one point that the goal is “neutral

description” (54), but given the post-Mao stakes of Tibetan Buddhist revival in China,

especially after the widespread 2008 Tibetan unrest in which Labrang was a key site

of protest, Nietupski’s is anything but an apolitical history. This problematically dis-

tanced tone in the account comes across most strongly in Nietupski’s depersonalized

treatment of oral accounts (referring to them as unnamed or unsituated “interviews”),

in his lack of engagement with post-1958 Chinese historiography, and in his realpoli-

tik approach that relegates the intricacies of Buddhist cosmology and ritual to “reli-

gious myth” (73) or to “visions” versus “realities” (113, 203). All in all though, this is

an important study that represents the culmination of decades of in-depth research and

should be enlightening reading for specialists and nonspecialists alike.

CHARLENEMAKLEY

Reed College

The Orthodox Church and Russian Politics. By IRINA PAPKOVA. New York: Oxford

University Press, 2011. Pp. xiiiþ265. $65.00 (cloth).

There are many parts of the world where the role of religion in politics is said to be

on the rise. Contradictory assessments of the influence of Orthodox Christianity on

Russian federal policy show how often such claims lack conceptual clarity and empiri-

cal backing: What is religion? What is politics? How do we measure influence? In a

most welcome contribution, political scientist Irina Papkova parses through available

426 Book Reviews

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