yeh, emily 2013. blazing pelts and burning passions: nationalism

Blazing Pelts and Burning Passions: Nationalism,Cultural Politics, and Spectacular Decommodificationin Tibet

EMILY T. YEH

A few months after the fourteenth Dalai Lama stated at the Kalachakra InitiationCeremony in India in January 2006 that Tibetans should cease wearing clothing linedwith endangered animal skins, Tibetans across the Tibetan Plateau destroyed millionsof yuan worth of otter, leopard, tiger, and other pelts. Outsiders interpretations ofthese events have flattened out the complexity of participants motivations, whichincluded not only religious and national loyalty, but also concerns about inequalitywrought by capitalist development, framed through a lens of modern Chinese history.This paper traces heated debates among Tibetans about the burnings, including theirimplications for Tibetans global reputation, the survival of Tibetan culture, and the possi-bility of a moral economy in an era of deepening commodification. It also explores theembodied, visual, and performative elements of the burnings through participantsvideos. The role of local filmmaking efforts in spreading the burnings makes the accom-panying videos especially relevant.

ON FEBRUARY 13, 2006, the herders of Tangkor (Wylie: Thang skor) Township inSichuan Provinces Dzg (Mdzod dge, Ch: Ruoergai) County gathered togetherto publicly burn what they estimated to be one million U.S. dollars worth of pelts ofendangered animals, including tiger, leopard, and otter.1 In an area where average percapita annual income is officially estimated at roughly 400 U.S. dollars, these pelts,which were used to decorate Tibetan robes, were in some cases investments madewith a familys life savings (see figure 1; see also video 1).2 This was only one of manysuch bonfires across culturally Tibetan areas of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC)in the spring of 2006.

The burnings were a response to the fourteenth Dalai Lamas request at the thirtiethKalachakra Initiation Ceremony, held in Amaravati, India, in January 2006, that Tibetanscease wearing such pelts. Roughly eight thousand Tibetans from the PRC managed toattend despite restrictions on cross-border movement, and through them the news

Emily T. Yeh ([email protected]) is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University ofColorado-Boulder.1I have spelled place names with the Tibetan and Himalayan Library simplified Wylie system,giving the Wylie transcription in parentheses, as well as Chinese pinyin for prefecture-level unitsand counties for which the Chinese and Tibetan are dramatically different.2References to videos refer to online video content (see http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021911812002227). The unattributed photo and videos in this article were donated anonymously.

The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 72, No. 2 (May) 2013: 319344. The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2013 doi:10.1017/S0021911812002227

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spread and the burnings ensued. Enraged by this evidence of loyalty to the Dalai Lama,officials arrested organizers of the burnings and began to force Tibetan governmentemployees to participate in summer festivals and appear on television broadcastswearing pelts of animals whose sale in China is illegal. Chinas accession to the Conven-tion on International Trade in Endangered Species in 1981 and its 1993 national environ-mental law banning all domestic trade in tiger parts were enacted in part to bolster itssovereignty by increasing its international standing through environmental stewardship.However, when the Dalai Lamas environmentalist message converged with Chinasown laws, the state was caught in the contradictions of entanglements of sovereigntyand environmental stewardship.

Figure 1. Participants in Tangkor lined up with their pelts beforeburning them.

Video 1. Burning in Tangkor, as participants shout Tashi Delek!

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Two years after the burnings, in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics, the TibetanPlateau witnessed an unprecedented wave of more than 100 protests. In hindsight, thepelt burnings have been interpreted as little more than a warm-up for, or harbinger of,the main nationalist events to come. However, this obscures more than it reveals; it flattensout the complexity of participantsmotivations, erases the role of environmental activism aswell as capitalist development, and is complicit with the states discursive practices in itsreduction of the fullness of Tibetan subjectivity to a binary stance on the status of thenation. While I will explore the important role that loyalty to the Dalai Lama and nation-alism played in the burnings, I seek to avoid what Michel Foucault calledde-eventalization, the ascription of a unitary, inevitable, and self-evident character towhat are in fact contingent processes. He advocated instead eventalization, a procedureof analyzing an event according to the multiple processes which constitute it and requir-ing a rediscovery of the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces, strat-egies and so on that establish what later appears self-evident (Foucault 1996, 27778).

Based on Tibetan- and Chinese-language interviews conducted during two monthsof fieldwork across the Amdo and Kham Tibetan cultural regions as well as the TibetAutonomous Region (TAR) during the summer of 2006, interviews conducted in Dhar-amsala, India, in 2007, and readings of secondary reports, radio broadcasts, and Chineseand Tibetan-language blogs, I seek to eventalize the burnings through a discussion ofthe many debates that took place among Tibetans, showing that neither the burningsnor how they were subsequently deployed were self-evident or inevitable. Elsewhere Ihave argued that transnational environmental advocacy around saving the wild tigerwas a major impetus for the Dalai Lamas Kalachakra speech, though one that wasobscured to most Tibetans (Yeh 2012). Here I focus on the question of why Tibetansburned their pelts. I examine how the burnings began and spread after the DalaiLamas speech, and how they were subsequently signified, contested, and debatedthrough a variety of competing interpretive frameworks. Rather than conclude that theburnings were definitively about one issue rather than another, I view them as conjunc-tural, a contingent coming together of multiple processes, movements, memories, andforces. These included not just environmentalism and nationalism, but also contestedregimes of value and commodification that have intensified in Tibetan areas with theOpen up the West campaign. I also explore the embodied, emotional, and visual dimen-sions of the events, suggesting that the performativity of the burnings contributes to anunderstanding of the burnings as a struggle over value in the context of state developmentefforts. Their spectacular nature, combined with the importance of the circulation oflocal film-making efforts in spreading the burnings and in capturing how the organizersand participants wished to represent themselves, make videos an especially relevantcomplement to the ethnographic material presented through text.

THE KALACHAKRA SPEECH

The fourteenth Dalai Lamas statement about pelt-wearing at the 2006 Kalachakraempowerment ceremony was not the first time he or other Tibetan Buddhist leadershad taken up this issue. The Dalai Lama first began to speak and write publicly anddirectly about environmental protection in the mid-1980s, through linkages made

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between the Tibetan Government in Exile and transnational environmental institutions,at a time of the rise of global discourses of indigeneity, traditional ecological knowledge,and the relationship between religion and environment (Huber 1997, 2001). However,pelts did not become a major concern until the early 2000s, when transnational conserva-tion organizations identified Tibetan consumption of pelts as the major new obstacle tothe survival of the wild tiger. In particular, the new emphasis on tourism and the commo-dification of Tibetan culture as a strategy for development that accompanied ChinasOpen up the West campaign had significant implications for tigers, and the otters andleopards whose pelts generally accompanied those of tigers in illicit trade routes(Cooke 2003; Kols 2007; Oakes 2007). The Open up the West campaign coincidedwith new representations of Tibetans within China as simple and spiritual, and ofTibetan areas as being romantic utopias, paradises where Han Chinese tourists couldseek natural beauty and exotic culture.

County and prefectural governments in Tibetan areas began to organize horse-racingfestivals at which participants were asked to come decked out in specific quantities ofcoral necklaces and pelt-lined chubas (phyu pa; Tibetan robes), which became part ofthe exotic image sold to tourists. Borrowing was necessary, as no single family ownedas much as was typically worn on such occasions. This became standard at events suchas the Khampa Arts festival, the first of which was held in Zhongdian (Rgyal thang, sub-sequently renamed Shangri-la) in 1997, and at which counties in the Tibetan culturalregion of Kham, spread across four provinces, competed to show off their wealth anddevelopment status through the hyperbolic display of jewelry and pelts on the bodiesof their Tibetan participants, often so much that participants had trouble walkingunder their weight (Kols 2007, 95; see video 2). The late 1990s also saw an explosion

Video 2. Participants of the fourth Khampa Arts festival, Kardz Pre-fecture, in 2004, heavily adorned with jewelry and pelts. Clip fromMeili Ganzi (Enchanting Ganzi), Sichuan Publishing Group.

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of Tibetan music DVDs in which popular Tibetan singers began to don outfits with ever-wider pelt trims. These new fashions, together with the deepening of market reforms andthe rising availability of cash, particularly from sales of caterpillar fungus, fueled competi-tive pressures to purchase ever more and larger pelts. They became requisite features ofweddings, summer festivals, and the New Year.

Transnational conservation groups on both sides of the Himalayas noticed this surgein poached tigers and leopards displayed upon Tibetan bodies (Yeh 2012). Undercoverinvestigations in Tibet produced material for news conferences and media coverage inIndia, leading Indian politician and environmentalist Maneka Gandhi to call for throwingall Tibetans out of India. This generated considerable concern among Tibetan exiles,dependent as refugees and noncitizens upon the goodwill of the Indian governmentand its citizens. In October 2005, the Dalai Lama gave a speech at the Tibetan ChildrensVillage stating that he had seen photos of such pelts being worn in Tibet: To be honest, Iam embarrassed! Real ornaments should be the knowledge and wisdom one possessesinside, not what one wears.

The Dalai Lamas speech at the Kalachakra several months later was very similar toseveral previous ones, with two exceptions. First, many of his remarks were directedspecifically at the Tibetans from the PRC, mostly Qinghai, Gansu, and Sichuan, whomanaged to attend despite restrictions on passports. Second, the message was deliveredwith unprecedented strength:

As I get older, if Tibetans behavior continues to worsen, then I sometimes feelthat it makes no difference if I continue to stay any longer. If the personality,behavior and reputation of Tibetans continue to worsen, then I have no confi-dence in my rebirth and whether it will be of any use. I am not being boastful;this is what I truly feel sometimes.

Tibetans in the audience wept as they heard this, as did those who watched videos of thespeech later. Their emotional outpouring was a reaction to his calling into question notonly how much longer he would remain alive, but also the very possibility of future rein-carnations of the Dalai Lamamanifestation of Avalokitesvara, bodhisattva of com-passion, patron and protector of the land of Tibetand thus their connection to thehistorical past and to a symbol of the Tibetan nation itself. The disgrace of wearingpelts, he suggested, jeopardized all of these.

The Dalai Lama also made more lighthearted but still pointed references to nationalidentity:

[In addition to wearing pelts] there are some who show off their wealth bywearing two or three large gold rings on their fingers. Its to the point wherethey cannot even bend their fingers to knead their own tsampa.

Tsampa, roasted barley flour typically mixed with yak butter and tea and kneaded intoballs of dough, is the Tibetan staple, and a potent marker of Tibetan-ness, sharedacross regions of the Tibetan Plateau with vastly different dialects, livelihoods, dress, reli-gious schools, calendars, and histories of political rule. Indeed, tsampa-eaters is asynonym for Tibetans and the phrase calling all tsampa-eaters has been used to




mobilize Tibetans in protest against Chinese rule from 1959 through the demonstrationsof 2008 (Barnett 1994; Shakya 1993). In not so many words, then, the Dalai Lama calledthe wearing of pelts and large rings un-Tibetan, acts that reject rather than reinforce aTibetan national identity.

Intertwined with this message about Tibetans potential forfeiting of their nationalidentities was a strong focus on the reputation of Tibetans. Labeling their jewelry and pelt-wearing a disgrace, the Dalai Lama stated, You should tell them in Tibet that because offoolish activities such as the craving for ostentatious jewelry and the making of garmentsout of carnivore pelts, the collective Tibetan reputation is being ruined, and the DalaiLama is ashamed. This concern about Tibetans collective reputation is acute for exilesgiven their precarious positions as noncitizens of India. The global reputation of Tibetanswith regard to environmental protection has also been a key component of the struggleover the legitimacy of Chinese rule in Tibet. At the same time, the reputation of Tibetansis also very relevant to Tibetans inside Tibet, struggling with their constant positioning atthe bottom of the ethnic hierarchy in the family of nationalities (minzu).

BACK ACROSS THE HIMALAYAS

The Dalai Lamas message spread very quickly, as Kalachakra participants called andreturned home, bringing with them DVDs and audio tapes of the event, as well asenvironmental flyers and posters that were passed out by conservation NGOs there. Tibe-tans also heard the news through Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. The firstreported burnings took place on January 31, in Kardz (Dkar mdzes) and Tawu (Rtau)Counties in Kardz (Dkar mdzes; Ch: Ganzi) Prefecture.

A week later, another burning took place in the Amdo county of Repkong (Reb kong),Qinghai, begun by a prominent local businessman who had attended the Kalachakra. Thesame day as the Dalai Lamas speech, he arrived at a tent where a Tibetan environmentalorganization had been passing out posters and encouraging participants to take oaths tostop wearing pelts. Along with about 3,000 others, he took the oath. He also stated inpublic, I have 40,000-some renminbi worth of otter pelts, and I swear that I will burnthem as soon as I get home. Arriving back in Repkong on February 6, he discussedhis plans with his family late into the night. The following morning, he brought 48,000renminbi worth of his familys otter pelts, most of which he had purchased just theyear before, to the courtyard of Rongwu Monastery. After speaking briefly about hisreasons to the crowd that had gathered, he burned his pelts. Three families joined in,and the spectators donated 7,000 renminbi in support, which they used to purchasebutter lamps to light around the monastery for the lives of the animals that had beenkilled for their pelts. A much larger burning was planned for six days later, but thelocal government banned the event; some families subsequently burned their pelts,but in private.

News about the Repkong burning spread quickly by word of mouth as well asthrough a number of Internet sites, including Tibetan writer Woesers blog,3 where an

3Woeser is a high-profile Tibetan poet who writes in Chinese, and whose book, Notes on Tibet, wasbanned because it praises the Dalai Lama as a religious leader. Fired from her government job as

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active discussion about this and other burning incidents ensued. Among those who heardabout the Repkong burnings were eight young Tibetan men in Ngawa (Rnga ba; Ch: Aba)County, Sichuan, all local intellectuals, including a doctor, a teacher, and two herders.Deciding that they too should do something, they debated amongst themselveswhether to simply burn their own pelts in private or to make an impression in public.Settling on the latter, they chose the most heavily attended day of the MonlamChenmo festival at Kirti Monastery, so that their actions would have a larger impacton those who might witness them. To prepare, they downloaded relevant Chineseenvironmental protection laws and wildlife photographs from the Internet. On theflyers announcing the burnings, they wrote, Protection of the environment and wildlifeis the responsibility of all in the Peoples Republic of China. The imbalance of the eco-system brings about a sense of fear and insecurity to mankind (Tibet Info Net 2006a).

The film that a ninth man produced about the Ngawa burnings (see video 3) beginswith shots of the posters made by the eight, such as a photo of a forlorn tiger cub crying,Mother! Mother! Whose body is your skin ornamenting? These images of anthropo-morphized, tragic megafauna, not unfamiliar from globally circulating idioms of environ-mental protection, are followed by shots of the framed PRC wildlife protection law, theannouncement in Tibetan about the need for environmental protection and the plans forthe bonfire, and then pelts hung from a rope strung along the side of Kirti Monastery, on

Video 3. Beginning of the 18-minute video produced by organizers inNgawa.

editor of the official journal of the Literature Association of the TAR, she now lives in Beijing.Woeser continued to write in a dissident voice on multiple blogs, which were shut down in succes-sion. She now writes on a blog hosted outside China. She is frequently under house arrest alongwith her husband, Wang Lixiong, and her blog serves as a prominent source of information forwhat is happening inside Tibet.




display before burning. The rest of the video, which was widely distributed, features thecrowd looking on and cheering as a pyre is built, the fire lit, and leopard, otter, and otherpelts offered and burned (see video 4). Afterward, the organizers were arrested anddetained for fifteen days.

A number of herders from nearby Tangkor Township attended the Monlam festivalin Ngawa. The organizers there, who learned about the Dalai Lamas speech and theRepkong burning from the Internet and phone calls, initially faced some skepticismfrom other villagers about whether these were just rumors. Villagers witnessing of andparticipation in the Ngawa event overcame their doubts and encouraged many ofthem to burn their pelts in Tangkor two days later. A few days prior to the date theychose, the organizers had also begun to wear leopard skin trims, draped around theirbacks, around the township as a way to publicize their plan. They received permissionfrom the local monastery to hold the event just outside its courtyard, where manypeople would be gathered for the Monlam festival. The magnitude of the burning farexceeded the expectations of the organizers, who had earlier considered burning theirown pelts in private because they feared others would not participate.

Several monks from Tangkor who were studying at Ts (Gtsos, Ch: Hezuo) Monas-tery in Gansu had come home for the Monlam festival. They brought images back to Ts,which was subsequently the site of one of the biggest burning events on the Plateau,lasting four to seven days according to different accounts (see videos 5 and 6). Again,the photographs and videos from Tangkor helped convince many to participate.Among the organizers and key participants in Ts were monks, including monasticleaders, and local government cadres. Participants estimated the market value of peltsburned within the first two days at over two million U.S. dollars (Tibet Info Net 2006b).

Video 4. The crowd watching and participating in burning in Ngawa.

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Burnings were not confined to Amdo. Several events were reported in Lhasa, andmany in Kham, including parts of Nakchu (Nag chu; Ch: Naqu), TAR, and Kardz Pre-fecture in Sichuan. One of the larger burnings in Kardz took place in Litang (Li thang)County, where the annual horse-racing festivals had previously been occasions of some ofthe most extravagant pelt displays on the Tibetan Plateau. It was also the site of a 2005

Video 5. Piling on pelts about to be burned in Ts.

Video 6. Men lining up to burn leopard pelts in Ts.




undercover investigation by the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency,photos and videos from which were subsequently used in publicity campaigns andshown to the Dalai Lama prior to the Kalachakra. One image displayed a young manwearing an almost complete tiger pelt that his father, a wealthy caterpillar fungus busi-nessman, had purchased for about 10,000 U.S. dollars. When, at the Kalachakra, hisfather saw the photograph of his son featured on a poster connecting the pelts to thedemise of the tiger, he felt deeply embarrassed and called home saying, That peltmust be burnt! Their family was the first to burn in their village, where residentsburned ivory and coral jewelry alongside pelts. As with Ngawa, the organizers focusedon the bonfire as an act of environmental protection, in accordance with PRC laws.

PERFORMING SPECTACULAR SPACES OF SURPLUS

The burnings were spectacles. As I discuss below, their spectacularity was crucial toparticipants efforts to destroy the commodity-nature of the pelts. The visual character ofthese events was reinforced by their widespread capture in still photographs and digitalvideo, generally by the participants themselves. Their films were part of a broader trendsince the late 1990s of Tibetans producing home and civic videos both for their own con-sumption and to circulate for a wider global audience (Barnett 2010). Though many ofthese efforts produced only raw footage, often of poor quality (see video 5), otherswere set to music and edited to present a clear message (see, e.g., video 3). Some whofilmed described their desire to show the world through their videos that Tibetanswere no longer so backwards in their environmental consciousness compared to otherethnic groups, and to serve as an inspiration for other Tibetans. Others sought to gettheir videos delivered to the Dalai Lama, to present evidence that Tibetans stillheeded his teachings.

In addition to being dramatic, visual events, the burnings were also bodily perform-ances. Given an understanding of space not simply as a container in which social actionunfolds but rather as produced through specific performances, what kinds of uniquespaces did the burnings bring into being (cf. Gregson and Rose 2000, 441)? First, thespaces were characterized by the privileging of the (male) embodiment of pelts.Women, for the most part, watched and tore small trims off of their chubas, but didnot make a dramatic show of the burnings (see video 7). Men, on the other hand, spec-tacularly exhibited the pelts upon their bodies before sacrificing them.4 In Ts, rows ofmen stood in the public square, wearing their fox hats, with otter and wide leopardpelts draped upon and encircling their bodies; some were adorned with pelts literallyfrom head to toe (see video 8). They stood for significant periods of time, the centerof attention as they modeled the soon-to-be-burned pelts, before swaggering forwardslowly to the flames. In Litang, men lined up to approach the bonfire (see video 9). At

4An analysis of the noticeably gendered aspects of the burnings is beyond the scope of this paper.Not only was the wearing of pelts gendered (otter pelts were worn by both men and women, buttiger and leopard pelts generally only by men), but so too were the spaces performatively producedin the process of burning, as women sat demurely on the sidelines while men strutted and displayedthe pelts.

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each mans turn, he carefully unfolded and threw his pelts into the flames, sometimes in along, graceful arc that seemed to suspend the skins momentarily in mid-air, so that allgathered could witness his sacrificial moment. Cheers and claps followed each turn,and afterwards, monks on the other side of the pyre presented each man with a ceremo-nial scarf.

Furthermore, these were emotionally charged spaces, made so in part through spec-tacle and the multiple layers of meaning read into the events. As Tolia-Kelly (2006, 215)remarks, collectivities of affect are engendered, shaped and empowered through visualand social registers. In Tangkor, a cacophony of whoops and cheers preceded the

Video 7. Women in Tangkor tearing off pelt trims.

Video 8. Men displaying pelts on their bodies before burning.




burning, as participants sat and stood in rows displaying their pelts and chubas, andcalling out Chod! or Offering! (see video 10). After the fire had been going for awhile, several monks led the crowd in pumping their fists in the air, shouting againand again Tashi Delek!a phrase connoting auspiciousness and joy (see video 1). InTs (see videos 5 and 6), a gargantuan pile of pelts formed as participants threw their

Video 9. Men burning pelts and receiving scarves in Litang.

Video 10. Participants in Tangkor shouting Offering!

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contributions onto the pyre as they yelled and whooped, while firecrackers were set offand lungta (confetti-like pieces of colored paper inscribed with prayers) rained down,creating spaces suffused with emotion, not as the property or possession of single individ-uals, but rather as a relational force, the fulfillment of each participants capacity to bothaffect and be affected (Deleuze 1988; Pile 2010; Tolia-Kelly 2006). Participants laterdescribed the events with phrases such as the happiest day of my life, as they recalledthe surfeit of feeling that their embodied performances brought into being. As one put it,I was so happyI felt the power of Tibet. Everyone was united. Far from disembo-died, transparent space, as public spaces are often conceptualized (Longhurst 2000,455), these were embodied and suffused with a conviction for their participant-producers, however fleeting, of Tibetan community and unity.

ALTERNATIVE FRAMINGS AND ORIENTATIONS

The euphoric spaces and embodied emotions produced in the events did not, however,indicate agreement on the essence of the act of burning. The herders, farmers, business-men, students, monks, and intellectuals who participated inscribed a diverse set of mean-ings and motivations to the bonfires. The rationales they offered and the debates thatensued show that, even as the burnings would not have happened without the DalaiLamas speech, neither would they have happened in the absence of a convergence ofother processes, conditions, and pressures. Furthermore, though the rejection of peltsoccurred expansively across cultural Tibet, it was not universal. Both the presence orabsence of burnings and the fierce debates about them in their aftermath reveal schismswithin Tibetan society and the complex cultural politics of contemporary Tibetan-ness.

Religious and National Loyalty

Loyalty to the fourteenth Dalai Lama first and foremost as a religious leader but alsoas a form of national loyalty was a key motivation for most if not all Tibetans who chose toburn their pelts. His questioning of his continuation on this earth in both this and futurelifetimes had a potent impact. As a participant from Repkong put it, We [Tibetans] aresaying, even though we cannot see you [the Dalai Lama], we are waiting for yourcommand. A monk from Tangkor who helped organize the burnings there describedhis reaction, in Tibetan, after watching a video of the Kalachakra speech:

It made a big impression on our feelings, because if the worlds sun [i.e., theDalai Lama] disappears, then everything will be plunged into darkness. If Bod-hisattva is not here, the world would experience a huge loss. I thought,whether or not I am capable, I need to do something.

Another lay participant stated, also in Tibetan:

I was so excited, I couldnt control myself. I shouted, May He live 10,000years! I had to shout this a few times before people started to chant withme. Of course, I didnt actually mention his name, but everyone knew who Imeant. I just couldnt control myself [despite the danger].




That religious loyalty to the fourteenth Dalai Lama was a key motivation for theburnings is also evident given the places where Tibetans did not burn, and where ordinaryvillagers (not just cadres) continued to wear pelts several years after the events despitethe widespread taboos that had developed around them. No Bnpo villages inNakchu, in the northern TAR, burned their pelts though Buddhist villages did.Indeed, one young Bnpo man in Nyenrong (Gnyan rong) County who reportedbuying new leopard skins in 2008 after their prices had dropped drastically because ofthe burnings stated, The Buddhists burned their pelts and now their fortune is gone;now it is the Bnpos turn to build up their wealth, which we can do because we havethe best caterpillar fungus-harvesting areas [which provides substantial income].5

Another exception that confirms the importance of religious loyalty is Drit (Bristod), a remote and very sparsely populated pastoral county on the upper reaches ofthe Yangtze River in Qinghai. Gongsar Monastery, the only monastery throughout theentire county of more than 80,000 square kilometers, is a center for the worship ofDorje Shukden, the Geluk protector deity that has been at the center of an intense con-troversy since the 1990s, when the Dalai Lama spoke out forcefully against its worship(see Dreyfus 1999; Lopez 1998). In the diaspora, those who continue this practicehave been ostracized and labeled a cult; they in turn have accused the Dalai Lama of vio-lating human rights and religious freedom. Within China, Shukden worshippers arelooked upon askance by most Tibetans, but have been supported by the Chinese govern-ment (Hillman 2005). This creates quandaries for its worshippers. In 2011, I was told by ayoung driver in Drit who propitiated Shukden that I could offer no proof that the DalaiLama had ever said not to wear pelts. He told me, All Tibetans like the Dalai Lama. TheDalai Lama is a king, so of course he would never say such a thing. Those who say so arelying.His odd stance attempted to uphold a kind of national identity of Tibetans throughthe Dalai Lama, while rejecting his religious teachings by denying their existence.

Equality

Even among those who burned their pelts, a wide variety of motivations and mean-ings far exceeded both the original message in the Dalai Lamas speech and the interpret-ations ascribed by observers. Among the most important of these was the argument thatdestroying the pelts was necessary for creating greater social harmony and reducingvisible signs of jealousy due to wealth differentiation that had been growing with the dee-pening of economic reforms. The Repkong businessman who played the pivotal rolethere emphasized that his primary motivation was to eliminate the social difficultiesengendered by the wearing of pelts. He argued that social pressure to display ever-largerpelts on chubas during festival occasions was causing tremendous rivalry among andwithin families, and that the annual Lrol festival had become a scene of constant evalu-ation: who was wearing what, and who had borrowed what from whom? These competi-tive pressures were leading, he argued, not only to jealousy within families but also toprocesses of indebtedness, as poorer families began to perform extra labor for wealthierones so that they could borrow a pelt or jewelry to wear. Villagers were increasingly

5Thanks to Yonten Nyima for this interview quote.

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making decisions to spend meager incomes on pelts rather than agricultural inputs inorder to avoid the embarrassment of pelt-free outfits at festival time.

Many attendees of summer horse-racing festivals in 2006 told me that it was moreenjoyable than in the past because now everybody is wearing the same kind of outfit.Now there is no difference between rich and poor people. Everyone is equal now.Numerous participants framed the pelt burnings as an action that helped close the gapbetween rich and poor, and contributed to poverty alleviation by relieving social pressureupon poorer families. When I asked about the benefits of the burnings, one herderreplied, First, the animals that are in danger of going extinct can now recover.Second, Tibetans have very little money, but spend all of it borrowing money to buypelts for weddings and so forth. Even poor families had to do this. Its good that wedont have to do this anymore.

In other words, for many participants, the burnings encapsulated a critique of dee-pening inequality from a perspective congruent with socialist ideologies of egalitarianism.Starting in 2005, Chinese leaders Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao began to break from thegrowth at all costsmodel of economic development, calling instead for the constructionof a harmonious society and a new socialist countryside to address growing inequal-ities and rural welfare. The aims of many of the pelt-burning participants werewell-aligned with these goals. Indeed, one monk-organizer sought to convince othersto participate in the burnings by saying to them:

Many Tibetans do not eat well. Our arms and legs hurt; our backs are bent-over. But instead of using our money to address this [through medical treat-ment] we use it on pelts. What do you think, is this good or bad? If we giveup wearing these, we could use the money to send our children to school, orto go to the hospital when we need to.6

Despite the convergence of Tibetan desires with the stated aims of Hu Jintaos scientificdevelopment, however, Tibetans understandings of their own actions as motivated by adesire for greater social harmony and equality in the context of deepening capitalistrelations were roundly ignored or rejected by state officials because of the associationof the burnings with the Dalai Lama.

National-Historical Orientation

Like Chinese officials, Tibetan exiles and observers read the burnings as definitiveproof of Tibetans orientation toward the diaspora. However, some Tibetans in thePRC interpreted and framed their own actions through references to Chinese, ratherthan Tibetan or Indian, history and culture, revealing the complexities of Tibetan subjec-tivity in the PRC.7 Responding to critics who suggested that the pelts should have beenplaced in a museum rather than burned, Pema, an intellectual and one of the eight

6This argument is in line with teachings by Tsultrim Lodr. As I discuss in Yeh (2012), the DalaiLamas teaching was similar to those of some Tibetan Buddhist leaders, especially from theLarung Buddhist Academy in Sertar (Gser thar), before 2006.7For example, I never came across any references, either in interviews or blog posts, to Gandhisbonfire of foreign cloth as an inspiration or comparison.




organizers arrested in Ngawa, argued to me, in a conversation that mixed Tibetan andChinese:8

I say no. Human memory is a museum. Some things which are put in a build-ing are forgotten. Some things that are not memorialized in this way will never-theless always be remembered. For example, Lu Xun. The Lu Xun Museum isnot important, not one bit. The reason he lives on in the hearts of the Hanpeopleindeed, the reason he lives on in my heart, is because of humanmemory.

Pemas references to Lu Xun, the most influential writer of Chinas May Fourth move-ment, are integral to his interpretation of the pelt-burning movement in terms ofmodern Chinese history. He argued that calling it the incident of pelt-burning was amistake, obscuring the true meaning of the event. Pelts themselves were not important,he said. Rather, it was a cultural movement. It is just like the Han minzus May Fourthmovement.9 It is a cultural movement of Tibetans in contemporary times. In associatingthe burnings with the famous 1919 Chinese movement, Pema implied that they were nota blind following of a traditional religious leader, but rather a nationalist and anti-imperialist Tibetan awakening to science, democracy, and modernity.

Pema also unapologetically aligned his views with those of Zhokdung (Zhogs dung),the widely known, radical modernist Amdo intellectual who was very controversial at thetime for arguing that Tibetans needed to modernize and abandon many elements of tra-ditional culture, customs, and values in order to overcome their dejected state. Zhokdunghad also written about environmental protection prior to the Dalai Lamas speech, andPema credited his own knowledge and original inspiration to protect the environmenta key element of the public presentation of the burnings in Ngawa (see video 3)to Zhok-dungs works. Zhokdung was highly unpopular with bothmonks and lay Tibetans, who ofteninterpreted his writings as calling for a complete eradication of Tibetan language andculture (Hartley 2002). For example, in his controversial article Blood-letting That WillOvercome the Tumor of Ignorance: Against the Old Decaying Propensities, publishedin an official 1999 volume commemorating the centenary of Lu Xuns death, Zhokdungargued:

We have no choice but to stubbornly destroy and discard our old propensities.The ancient religion of worldly deities the [Buddhist] teachings of no-self andkarmasuch views are the old propensities about which we are talking.(Hartley 2002, 19)

Indeed, many saw him, at least until his arrest in 2010, as following official Chinese Com-munist Party (CCP) lines.10 Residents of Ngawa were similarly wary of Pemas views.Calling them Zhokdungwa (followers of Zhokdung), they argued that Pema and his

8All interviewees names are pseudonyms.9The Chinese term minzu (Tibetan: mi rigs) translates very loosely as nationality or ethnic group;Pema used the term in both languages.10On his arrest see Kyi (2010).

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co-organizer friends knew little about Buddhism. Yet they were the ones who successfullyorganized a very large burning at Kirti Monastery, showing how very different subject-positions came together contingently and collaboratively.

Despite its apparent opposition to traditional culture, Pemas stance was clearly res-onant with that of the fourteenth Dalai Lamas Kalachakra speech in its strong concernfor Tibetans global reputation. Noting that Tibetan areas were now the worldsprimary sites of tiger, leopard, and otter consumption, Pema stated:

If we say something that doesnt sound good about Tibetansand I say this as aTibetanthen [if we compare the earth to a body] Tibetans are just like blood-sucking parasites on a person. They suck away that thing which has the mostvalue, the most nutrition.

Like the Dalai Lama, he was sharply critical of Tibetans. However, his critique wasframed in terms and analogies most familiar within a Chinese social context:

On this, Tibetans are profoundly ugly. This is my own analysis of my ownminzu, like a doctor putting a patient on an operating table. Its difficult forme to bear, but one must accept the reality. The only hope is to let thewhole world see that the minzu that sits on the roof of the world is one that isgoing upward, one that once criticized will reform itself.

Pemas remarks about the ugly Tibetan echo Taiwan-based intellectual Bo Yangs([1985] 1992) well-known polemic on Chinese national character, as the uglyChinese, which was published in the PRC in 1986. Pema critiques Tibetans as aminzu, a classificatory category that makes sense only within the context of the PRC.He poses his criticisms from a stance of standing apart from Tibetans as a group, dissect-ing their faults as an impartial scientific observer, a surgeon. The vision is a radical mod-ernist one, not unlike Zhokdungs. His reading of the pelt burnings as a new May Fourthmovement also suggests a great sense of hope that a new Tibetan political consciousnesscan develop. Thus, he presents a narrative of the burnings that is nationalist, in the senseof a deep pride in Tibetan national identity, but not religious, and not of unquestioningloyalty derived from tradition. This narrative is informed by and steeped in references toa specifically Chinese cultural history, rather than being oriented toward India or thedominant narratives and ideologies of Tibetans in exile.

WHY BURN? THE DEBATE OVER CULTURE

Tibetans who burned their pelts in 2006 thus brought with them variegated under-standings of why it was important, or necessary, to destroy that for which they had (inmany cases, recently) paid so dearly. Exigencies of environmentalism, national identity,religious loyalty, and social inequality came together contingently in the event of theburnings, and just as quickly, broke apart. Even as burnings were ongoing, newdebates emerged about what they meant, and whether or not they should have happened.One of the most prominent was an argument about whether Tibetans were destroying




their own culture, and the related question of whether the pelts should have beenburned, or instead put in a museum or simply not worn.

The extent to which the wearing of tiger, leopard, and other pelts was an importantmarker of Tibetan culture was a major flashpoint for this dispute among Tibetans (aswell as between participants and state authorities). The outlines of the broad historyare generally accepted. During the Tibetan Imperial period of the 600s700s CE,tiger pelts were presented to war heroes after victories in major battles. Leopard pelts,not as prestigious, were a secondary award (Dawa 2004). However, these traditionswere limited to parts of Kham, and ordinary people who could not afford such luxuriesdid not wear tiger, leopard, and otter (though fox hats were more common). As aresult, many Tibetans, particularly in Amdo where such pelts were not traditional,expressed outrage after 2006 when the government began to insist that television broad-casters and ordinary citizens wear pelts in order to preserve traditional Tibetan culture.

At the same time, though, some Tibetans insisted that the burning of pelts was devastat-ing to Tibetan culture. For them the pelts are Tibetan culture, and thus by burning them,Tibetansweredestroying their ownheritage.As discussed above,manyparticipants expressedrelief and satisfaction at the elimination of the compulsion to wear pelt-lined outfits athorse-racing festivals and thus of competitive pressure and jealousy. However, althoughmany festival-goers replaced their pelt-lined chubas with beautiful brocades, many others,particularly men, came to the festivals wearing jeans and button-down shirts. Thus someargued that the burning of pelts accelerated the demise of Tibetan cultural identity.

One cadre in Jyekundo, Yulshul (Ch: Yushu) Prefecture, Qinghai, articulated thisposition very strongly to me at the horse-racing festival there in 2006. Unlike Amdoand parts of Central Tibet, this Kham area had a strong historical tradition of wearingpelts. It is also one of the few major places of Shukden worship, and has a long-standingreputation of leaning more favorably toward China and the CCP than areas such as Lhasaor Kardz. The cadre defended the wearing of pelts by asking rhetorically, in Chinese,Who doesnt like their own minzus traditions and costumes? In a mirror image ofPema from Ngawa, this cadre combined a spirited defense of Tibetan tradition with anincisive critique of contemporary Tibetans: in a few years time, Tibetans would assuredlybe spending yet more hard-earned money to buy and wear pelts because, as they say, weTibetans have no brains. Thus, he said, Tibetans could not hold firm in their resolveagainst the irresistible pull of the beauty of traditional outfits for long. Parroting officialdiscourse, he also praised the CCP, arguing that its benevolence is what had allowed somany Tibetans to be able to afford to wear peltsunlike in the past when only elites andwar heroes could do so. In other words, it is thanks to the CCP that Tibetans can fullyexpress and participate in their own culture. Yet even as he seemed to simply mimethe official narrative, he also departed from the most important issue in state andparty discourse by refusing to criticize the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Instead, like thosein Drit, he claimed not only that the Dalai Lama had not asked Tibetans to burntheir pelts, but also that the Dalai Lama said that Tibetans are crazy for burning theirpelts and destroying things of value. That is, he attempted to stake out a position inwhich loyalty to the Dalai Lama was perfectly congruent with the ideology of the CCPand with the defense of Tibetan cultural traditionrejecting in his own creative waythe demands of both the Chinese party-state (to disavow the Dalai Lama) and the Tibe-tans who burned their pelts (to renounce what he viewed as Tibetan culture).

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The debate about Tibetan culture raged online as well, where the act of burning wasoften associated with the Cultural Revolution. The following entries are taken fromdifferent contributors to Woesers Chinese-language blog in February and March2006, where many observed (correctly) that the Dalai Lama had never mentionedburning the pelts, and suggested that while the pelts should not be worn, neithershould they be violently destroyed:11

Since some people agree with such extreme actions [as burning] and others evencrush their agate jewelry, let me bring up another suggestion: Lets erase ourown history. Lets bring out all people who have participated in the killing ofendangered animals and put big hats on them, parade them in public.Doesnt it sound cool? There are thousands of years of history of Tibetanswearing pelts. This is our minzu culture, so why are we denying it all, changingit into a sin? Is it necessary to burn, destroy, and deny all that history?

Such savage actions as burninghow is that different from burning culturalrelics to destroy the Four Olds during the Cultural Revolution?

Im an ordinary Tibetan. I agree that Tibetans should not wear these pelts but Idont agree with burning. During [Tibetan emperor] Songtsen Gampos time,Tibetans had magnificent architectural technology, but everything was burnedduring the Cultural Revolution and cannot be recovered. Its the same now.[We should] put them in museums.

For these contributors, the spectacular destruction of the pelts by fire amounted to asecond Cultural Revolution, a furious wave of destruction that Tibetans were unleashingupon themselves. Like those who burned their pelts, those who objected saw their pos-ition as one that promoted Tibetan cultural and national identity, but for them, havingclothing that distinguished them from the Han was of paramount importance. Their fre-quent appeals to the Cultural Revolution index not only the importance of modernChinese history as an interpretive anchor for contemporary Tibetan intellectuals, butalso how fraught the terrain of culture has become. Some contributors also suggestedthat the violence of burning would run against the global reputation of Tibetans as beingof a peaceful and intelligent nature and further that the act of burning did not matchthe Dalai Lamas orientation toward nonviolence. In this view, burning was aligned notwith the Dalai Lama, but with the Cultural Revolution as the apotheosis of a long-standing process of the destruction of Tibetan culture.

Echoing concerns about the reputation and shame of Tibetans as a people, a numberof commentators suggested that the pelts should have been put in museums, as a lessonfor future generations and others around the world, a reminder that Tibetans had onceworn these pelts to show off their wealth, and more importantly, that they had now cometo see the error of their ways. Other critics suggested that the pelts should be donated to

11Though both forums for Tibetan debate, Chinese-language blogs such as Woesers tended toattract comments that were more critical of the burnings than Tibetan-language blogs.




monasteries, in the manner that guns and knives have traditionally been offered as a sym-bolic gesture of regret and an oath for the donor to never use such implements again.

Defenders of the burnings, however, argued that it would be too dangerous becauseTibetans short memory would soon lead to their wearing of pelts again, defying thefourteenth Dalai Lama and resulting in the extinction of wild animals. Like the cadrein Yulshul who cynically predicted that Tibetans would start buying and wearing peltsagain in a few short years, their position was anchored in a strong, modernist self-critiqueof Tibetans. However, the solution for them was to destroy the pelts so that the tempta-tion would be removed for good. A similar debate played out over the wearing of syn-thetic pelts. Some felt this was a perfect solution, obviating the further killing of wildanimals while allowing Tibetans to perform their unique cultural identity throughbodily adornment, while others feared that this would be a slippery slope back towardthe consumption of real pelts.

SPECTACULAR DECOMMODIFICATION AND REGIMES OF VALUE

Aside from culture, the other major point of contention was over whether burninghad been a terrible waste of money and valuable resources. As one online commentatoron Woesers blog put it, They didnt steal, they didnt rob. They earned the pelts throughtheir hard work, through a lifetime of labor. Why burn? They could just not wearthem. Another argued, I think its really too much of a waste to burn them. Whycant we exchange them for money? We can donate that money to temples or keep itfor our families. We have already spent money on the pelts, why do we want to endup with nothing? A third asked, If we really need to sacrifice personal benefit for theenvironment, then why cant we donate our pelts to bring warmth to poor people?

Those in favor of the burnings invoked several rationales to rebut these critiques.First, they argued that the spectacle of the burnings was necessary to motivate otherTibetans. Only witnessing something so visually dramatic could affect and move manyTibetans. Indeed, those who initiated burnings invoked this logic of the spectacle. Theintellectuals in Ngawa decided to make a statement in public to make an impressionand offer a lesson to observers. The Repkong businessman stated that withoutburning in public, all there would be was talk, talk, talk. His purpose was to letpeople watch in order to mobilize them: If I burn my pelts in front of you and youare still wearing them, then naturally you will become embarrassed and think aboutwhy you are still wearing pelts.

To this, he added, by burning them, I reduce them to zero. Burning was a perfor-mative declaration that this is trash, this is worthless; it has no value whatsoever. Inarguing for the need to visually demonstrate the reduction of the value of the pelts tozero, he invoked a logic of decommodification that was significant among the competingmotivations and interpretations. The burnings were a deliberate act of decommodifica-tion in the sense that they destroyed the exchange value of the pelts, along with their sym-bolic and use values. Tibetans confronted with critiques about burning as a shamefulwaste rejected this argument by in effect rejecting the very possibility that they shouldhave had value in the first place. Only by destroying exchange value, they suggested,could the possibility of the future circulation of value through the pelts be eliminated.

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The need to nullify exchange value also explained why they argued against putting thepelts in museums. Indeed within a few days of the first burnings, pelt prices werereported to have dropped by a factor of ten.12

Returning to the visual images of the embodied events, we can see the burnings asspaces both of destructionof exchange valueand productionof moral worth and ofa surplus of feeling. Those who looked on at the burnings bore witness to the destructionof monetary exchange value but, in doing so, facilitated its conversion into the value of acollective recognition of those who participated as pious bearers of righteousness andmoral worth. Burning effectively converted exchange to moral value, trading oneregime of value for another.

In addition to the value of the pelts themselves, the burnings were also an act ofdecommodification in a broader sense of a political, social or cultural process thatreduces the scope and influence of the market in everyday life (Fridell 2007; Vail2010, 313; Wallerstein 2002). Like other forms of decommodification, the act ofburning was a search for and an attempt to promote a more egalitarian agenda and toilluminate the true costs of consumption desires, in this case, their social costs ofstrife, jealousy, and impoverishment, and the costs to the lives of endangered animals.It also sought to effect an ethical and emotional transformation to realign preferenceswith a new collective ethos (Vail 2010).

Thus, in response to critiques by both Tibetans and local Chinese officials that theburnings were a shame because they were such a waste of money, one Tibetan participantstated, They say why cant you all think clearly? But they are the ones who cannot thinkclearly. All they think about is money. Or, as one organizer in Ngawa put it:

Those who arrested us said, What a shame to burn all these pelts! Why not sellthem? Their psyches have only one thing in it, and that is money, nothing else.If you should be able to see 10 kilometers away but have nothing but money inthe world of your mind, your vision will be reduced to one kilometer. You willonly lead yourminzu in the wrong direction. Being too focused on money cloudsones vision, making one unable to think about what is good for ones people.

From this perspective, the deliberate and spectacular decommodification of thepelts can be understood as an attempt to articulate a vision of a moral economya setof moral sentiments and norms that should influence, rather than be overridden by, econ-omic forces (Sayer 2003, 2007). This moral economy is articulated specifically in responseto the entrenchment of a capitalist regime of value in post-reform China. Since the 1980s,and particularly since the Open up the West campaign and the deepening of neoliberalreforms in the 2000s, state legitimacy in Tibet has been increasingly linked to the pro-vision of commodities and the satisfaction of consumer desires. Statist developmentefforts across China have prioritized the increased circulation of commodities and thecultivation of a commodity consciousness or vision of commodity production

12Though those who burned desired to reduce the exchange value of the pelts to zero, they did notsucceed. In areas where burnings did not take place, some Tibetans sought to take advantage of thelower price to buy more pelts. The illicit trade in pelts from India also did not disappear. The dropin demand was quickly compensated by an increase in consumption in the Chinese market.




(shangpin yishi, shangpin shengchan yanguang) as a necessary prerequisite for becomingmodern Chinese citizens suitable for Chinas growing global power (Makley 2007, 48; Yan2008, 120). The horse-racing festivals at and through which the wearing of endangeredanimal pelts had been encouraged were but one of many venues in which Tibetanculture has been increasingly commodified, even while Tibetans themselves have beenurged to learn to turn themselves into commodities to generate income fromtourism (Hayes 2008; Kols 2007).

Some Tibetans commented directly about the commodification of culture as a per-formance for tourism dollars, stating that horse-racing festivals give a huge falseimpression of Tibetan economic development and improvement of peoples living stan-dard. Tibet is still poor! But the deeper rejection was not of a false representation ofliving standards, but of the very terms on which the project of development has beenofferedone in which Tibetans must be forever grateful and compelled to performtheir loyalty by cultivating themselves as subjects with the proper commodity conscious-ness. In deliberately seeking to obliterate the commodity-nature of the pelts, Tibetanswere in effect refusing what anthropologist Charlene Makley has called their politicsof conversion to both loyal Chinese citizen and the ascendant model of homo econom-icus, who is now supposed to represent Chinas path to its historical destiny as a worldpower (Anagnost 1997; Makley 2006; Won 2005).

CONCLUSION

Burnings of a very different kind swept across the Tibetan Plateau in 201112: a hor-rifying series of self-immolations by Tibetans, both lay and monastic, many young. Anextreme tendency among state authorities to react to all Tibetan agency as a direct chal-lenge to state sovereignty fueled a greatly intensified militarization, particularly inNgawa, provokingTibetans to take their own lives in a fiery reclamation of their sovereigntyover their own bodies.13 But protest against the Chinese state was not the singular hiddenintention of those who burned their pelts in 2006. Those who participated generally saw nocontradiction between their acts and their Chinese citizenship insofar as their actions werein accordance with Chinese national environmental law. Indeed, there was no contradic-tion until one was created by state officials after the burnings. The reading of the pelt burn-ings through a whole set of assumptions about Tibetans and their motivations ischaracteristic of the narrowing of space for Tibetan identity within the PRC that hasfueled further protests. In approaching the pelt burnings as an event, a product of contin-gent, multiple, and sometimes contradictory processes, connections, and meanings, thispaper has beenwritten against the tendency toward the simplification of Tibetan subjectiv-ities, aspirations, and desires that characterize opposing positions on the Tibet Question.

Why, then, did Tibetans burn their pelts? I have argued that there was a complexcultural politics to the burning, a set of interpretations, debates, and motivations that

13Ngawa, an epicenter of self-immolations, has been the site of greatly intensified security spendingsince 2006 (Human Rights Watch 2011). As of January 2013, there have been ninety-nine self-immolations in Tibet since 2009, ninety-eight since 2011. Of these, thirty-five have taken placein Ngawa Prefecture. See Sangster (2012) for an analysis of circulating videos and photographsof the self-immolations.

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far surpassed the imaginations of both the Chinese state and the transnational Tibetmovement. Religious loyalty to the Dalai Lama was clearly central to the events. Thechoice not only not to burn, but also to continue wearing pelts in Drit and parts ofNakchu reveals religious fault lines within Tibetan society. Religious loyalty was closelyintertwined with, but not the same as, burning as an assertion of Tibetan national identity.On the one hand, some were greatly inspired by and supported the burnings as a show ofTibetan national unity; on the other, those who opposed the burnings pointed out that theDalai Lama had, after all, never told anyone to burn their pelts. Some even argued thatthe Dalai Lama had never told Tibetans to cease wearing pelts, and that Tibetans shouldwear them to maintain their distinction from the Han.

Even those who supported the burnings brought a wide range of motivations to theevents. Some found inspiration in lessons from modern Chinese history and its intellec-tuals, particularly those of the early twentieth-century May Fourth movement. For many,burning was a deeply modernist, reflexive act of self-critique as well as self-salvation, anindictment of Tibetans moral standing among the ethnic groups of the world and a pathtoward the restoration of Tibetans fallen reputation. This focus on reputation echoed theKalachakra speech, but also both mimics and seeks to subvert the Chinese states officialpositioning of Tibetans as an always backward, underdevelopedminzu in need of the ben-evolent state and the older brother Han to help them catch up. Some even surmisedthat state officials had encouraged Tibetans to wear pelts precisely to ruin their reputationand make them look bad in the eyes of the world.

Others, however, framed their participation in and support for the burnings in termsof religious rationales, the need to protect innocent wild animals, and, more commonly,the desire to address the social strife that was increasing with wealth disparities in thecontext of Chinas neoliberalizing political economy. For them, the display of wealththrough pelts was both a false semblance of development and a cause of new conflicts.Destroying the pelts was thus beneficial to the cause of social harmonya clearlystated goal of the central government since 2006. This logic also dictated that the peltscould only be destroyed, not donated to museums, as only this could destroy theircommodity-nature, breaking the possibility of the circulation of exchange value. Unlikethe original bonfire of the vanities, the spectacle of fire here did not destroy objectsthat might be occasions of sin, but rather was a deliberate attempt to halt the future cir-culation of exchange value through these objects. The embodied performances of theburnings created spaces in which the acts of pious sacrifice were witnessed and convertedinto a moral value sanctioned by those present, striving toward an alternative regime ofvalue than that ruled by homo economicus.

Still others argued that the pelts should not have been destroyed because doing sowas ultimately a violation of Tibetan culture and tradition. State officials adopted this pos-ition after the burnings as they required some Tibetans to wear pelts at festivals and ontelevision in the name of Tibetan culture, highlighting the way in which culture is a malle-able and unstable surface upon which politics is practiced and fought. In a sense, thosewho burned their pelts adopted a more flexible view of culture as something that canchange to fit evolving circumstances. In this view, which also characterized the DalaiLamas speech, Tibetans should pick and choose from among their traditions, definingnew forms of cultural identity in the face of new circumstances and knowledge. Thosewho opposed the burnings took a more conservative position, one that also defended




cultural identity, but in a way that privileged concerns about Sinification and the CulturalRevolution-like destruction of Tibetan culture by Tibetans themselves. Ultimately, thosewho participated in and debated the burnings asked: is there a right way to be Tibetan inthe contemporary world, and if so, what is it?

Acknowledgments

This piece could not have been written without the assistance of numerous Tibetansin Tibet who unfortunately cannot be named. I am also grateful to Hu Zhiying for assist-ance during the research process and to Kunga Lama for video editing. The paper wasimproved significantly by comments from audiences where I presented earlier versionsof this paper, at AAG, University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, Univer-sity of Toronto, CU Boulder, Duke, University of Wisconsin, and UC Santa Cruz. Thankstoo to Holly Gayley, Nicole Willock, Jeff Wasserstrom, and the anonymous reviewers forcomments on earlier drafts of the paper. The video component of this publication wasmade possible by funding from the Shelly & Donald Rubin Foundation.

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344 Emily T. Yeh



Blazing Pelts and Burning Passions: Nationalism, Cultural Politics, and Spectacular Decommodification in TibetThe Kalachakra SpeechBack Across the HimalayasPerforming Spectacular Spaces of SurplusAlternative Framings and OrientationsReligious and National LoyaltyEqualityNational-Historical Orientation

Why Burn? The Debate Over CultureSpectacular Decommodification and Regimes of ValueConclusionAcknowledgmentsAcknowledgmentsList of References

yeh, emily 2013. blazing pelts and burning passions: nationalism

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