China Information http://cin.sagepub.

com/

Subaltern placiality in modern Tibet: Critical discourses in the works of Shogdong

Dan Smyer Y China Information 2013 27: 155 DOI: 10.1177/0920203X13479860 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cin.sagepub.com/content/27/2/155

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for China Information can be found at: Email Alerts: http://cin.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://cin.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://cin.sagepub.com/content/27/2/155.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Jul 8, 2013 What is This?

Downloaded from cin.sagepub.com by Nicola Schneider on October 23, 2013

Article

china
INFORMATION

Subaltern placiality in modern Tibet: Critical discourses in the works of Shogdong

Dan Smyer Y

Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany

China Information 27(2) 155172 The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0920203X13479860 cin.sagepub.com

Abstract I attempt to write this article as a pathology of modernity in connection with how place, memory, and subalternity are expressed by urban Tibetans in China. The literary works of Shogdong, a contemporary Tibetan writer and cultural critic, are the focus of my interpretation of the sociopolitical, religious, and psychological meanings of an anti-traditional discourse among urban Tibetans. My pathologizing this intra-Tibetan discourse is meant to discern how modern subjectivity or its mindscape in the case of urban Tibetans is inherently conditioned by place as both geographic landscape and locus of memory. I then argue that the negation of anti-traditional Tibetans of their native traditional cultural and religious values and practices is a remembering process which is inversed as a process of seemingly intentional subversion, rejection, and forgetting; and I further argue that the anti-traditionalist imagining of a modern Tibet, though it uses nomenclature identical to that of Chinas socialism, is not a replica of Chinas modernity, but an exercise of a power discourse in a subaltern sense. Keywords Tibet, Shogdong (Tagyal), place, memory, forgetting, radical modernism, subalternity The writings of Shogdong (), one of the leading Tibetan cultural critics among Tibetans in China, have been at the centre of the intra-Tibetan debate concerning whether or not traditional belief systems and practices are the root causes of what many Tibetans perceive as the weakening and declining of Tibetan culture. Shogdongs popularity among Tibetan students, scholars, writers, and cultural critics began at the turn of the century when his book The Call of Reason () was published in 2001 by Gansu Peoples Press. The book, written in Tibetan, expanded his public presence in
Corresponding author: Dan Smyer Y, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Hermann-Fge-Weg 11, 37073 Gttingen, Germany. Email: smyeryu@mmg.mpg.de

156

China Information 27(2)

Tibetan communities from Xining and Lanzhou to Beijing and elsewhere. Shogdong, his pen name, is more popularly known than his given name Tagyal (). His recent publications such as Overturning the Sky and the Earth ()1 have added more controversies to the ongoing intra-Tibetan debates on issues of modernity/modernization in Tibet. International media representations of Shogdong often make comments on Shogdongs past as a state-sanctioned writer antithetical to Tibetan cultural tradition,2 but very few such representations give their readers a clear contextualization of how Shogdong has evolved from his alleged pro-state stance to his current position simultaneously in antithesis to his native cultural tradition and to the Chinese states version of modern Tibet. By focusing on the readership of Shogdongs published works I attempt to write this article as a pathology of modernity concerning the current collective sentiments of Tibetans who share the same perspective as Shogdongs or of those who negate Shogdongs seemingly anti-traditional viewpoints, but are obviously infatuated with counter-attacking them without the awareness that their counter-attacks are, in fact, also manifested pathos, for example, emotions, feelings, and pain resulting from the collectively felt consequences of modernity in the context of contemporary China. My pathologizing of this intra-Tibetan discourse is meant to discern how modern subjectivity or its mindscape is simultaneously being constructed and constructing itself in relation to knowledge and power in the Foucaultian sense while it inherently hinges on place as both geographic landscape and locus of memory. I then make a threefold argument. First, the paradox of Shogdongs affection for his homeland and disavowal of his traditional cultural fabric is a paradox of modernity worldwide, but is differently manifested among Tibetans whose lifeworld, trans-locally situated between their homeland and urban China, is a world of self-temporalization and self-objectification in their encounter with the disembedding, disembodying, and displacing forces of modernity. Second, his negation of Tibetan traditional cultural and religious practices is a remembering process that is inversed as a process of seemingly intentional subversion, rejection, and forgetting towards pre-socialist beliefs and practices. Finally Shogdongs imagining of a modern Tibet, although using identical nomenclature as Chinas socialism, is not a replica of Chinas modernity, but is an exercising of a power discourse in a subaltern sense. Tibet and Tibetans in this article mostly refer to a Tibet experienced by Tibetans who live and work in urban China and yet retain their command of their native language. They also make frequent visits to their home region. In relation to Shogdongs discourse, this group of Tibetans comprises mostly university students, writers, and cultural critics.

Pulling one hair moves the entire body paradoxical mindscape of modernity
In 2008, Shogdong had his Contemplation and Reflection () published by Gansu Nationality Publishing House. The first section of the book, Nine Wacky Things (), is based on his trip to Lhasa. It is indicative of his mental state in the physical landscape of Tibet as he travelled from Xining to Lhasa:

Smyer Y

157

It is hardly possible that a Tibetan would not want to go to Lhasa. Among them, some head to Lhasa for glamour and honour, and some for their next lifetimes ultimately ensured enlightenment. Most of them regard their homage to Potala Palace and the statue of Sakyamuni in Jokhang Temple as the most grandiose quest of their lives. Lhasa in my mind is not only a Buddhist sacred place where one receives empowerment from ones circumambulatory pilgrimage, but, more importantly, it symbolizes the epitome of Tibetan political, economic, cultural, and historical fate. It is a point where pulling one hair will move the entire body [; implying a domino effect]. As expected, for the sake of searching for the roots of our past splendour and present decay, I set out to Lhasa. I felt elated when I saw Lhasa but also felt hurt because of the unbearable sights and my mind full of doubts; I felt blissful because I paid homage to Zanpos [ king] Palace [Potala Palace] but also felt disgusted about myself because I had ditched my soul; and I was hurrying myself because I wanted to see more, but I was also slowing myself down because I was in a state of incomprehension. This mishmash of anger and joy, sorrow and elation, and loss and gain was my first sensation upon arriving in Lhasa.3

The mental state of Shogdong is inextricably woven with the physical landscape of Tibet as he travels through it to Lhasa. This mindscapelandscape connectivity clearly shows what Oakes calls the paradox of modernity in which Place, then, can be read as a geographical expression of modernitys paradox that tension between progress and loss a creative yet ambivalent space carved out somewhere between the oppressiveness of the new order and the imprisonments of tradition.4 In the case of Shogdong, the stream of his consciousness moves with the physical place of Tibet but constantly displaces it in his mindscape: he is in place but feels placeless; his elation in Lhasa confirms his regaining the lost paradise, but simultaneously he feels estranged from it because of its modern transformation and because of the self-alleged loss of his soul. The pulse of self-negation in the midst of his recollection of Tibets past and things traditional is markedly polarized. The pathos of modernity endowed to native peoples worldwide is the same: the natives reclamation of his or her past is painfully coterminous with the almost omnipresence of the psychically intrusive, bipolarizing force of modernity.5 What is being remembered and recollected is at the same time undergoing fragmentation as if the invoked collective past cannot stand alone, but needs justification and legitimization by modernity. The rooting of modernity in the interior of natives turns against them every time when they attempt to re-embrace their pre-modernized identity by overwriting their reinvoked collective memories with an automated self-correction as if the past had to be kept in the distance, being judged and exiled, or being reordered and reshaped. Shogdongs pilgrimage writing bears the consistent pattern of a dual depictionvisualization of Tibetan landscape en route to Lhasa. His native vision of the landscape is frequently juxtaposed and even overwritten by his modern geological and cartographic vision of the Earth consisting of tectonic plates and places gridlocked into longitudes, latitudes, and altitudes. He writes:
If you ask an Amdowa how on earth the sky-like, immense Blue Lake [Qinghai Lake] came into being, he would ceaselessly tell you a story without an origin, mixed with speculations and history. If you ask a pa [ a person of Central Tibet] where Lake Lhamo Namtso []

158

China Information 27(2)

came from, you will receive a fairy tale of humankinds infancy. In fact, a long time ago, this place [Tibet] was a vast ocean. Later different tectonic plates collided into each other. In this process, rising mountains formed a basin and retained parts of the ocean [as the current lakes]. High snow mountains have continuously fed water into these lakes until the present day. However, Tibetans have not yet liberated themselves from their minds full of gods and demons; instead their fairy tales from the Age of Ignorance continue.6

Shogdong and many of his peers physically live in a bifurcated world, a world in which the gravitational relation of homeland and job-based urban living environment is inversed. Their childhood was spent in rural areas and townships of Amdo, such as Chapcha, Chekha, Shamdu, and other places known among Tibetans for producing modern educators, cadres, writers, and filmmakers. They attended colleges in Xining, Lanzhou, Chengdu, and Beijing. Many of them found a career in these cities upon college graduation as schoolteachers, professors, government officials, Tibetan language publication editors, and media professionals. Amdo, their homeland, is often only two hours away by bus, private vehicle, or airplane. Home has become a place to visit on weekends or holidays. As their urban professional and social network becomes more rooted, home recedes more and more into the background. Their urbanization and continuing systemic immersion in Chinas modern infrastructure and superstructure undoubtedly contribute to the solidification of the paradox of modernity in their mindscape. In my ethnographic work I have found that the group of Tibetans attracted to Shogdongs writings in urban China continues to expand their repertoire of modern neologisms from Chinese, re-animating them with the meanings and contexts of their existential, psychological, and spiritual agonies, dilemmas, and marginalities in their bifurcated living environment. The sense of revisiting, remembering, reconstructing, or revolutionizing their collective past is resiliently present among them but, at the same time, their collective mindscape is clearly incarcerated in the paradox of the old and the new, the backwardness and the progressive. Such a paradox is a miasmic force almost contagiously infecting the collective consciousness of Tibetans whenever it is in contact with their minds in the course of debates on modernity and a modern Tibet that writings like Shogdongs have brought about. However, regardless of the inversed gravitational pull between homeland and urban settlement, and regardless of their positioning in the modern superstructure of China and in the intra-Tibetan discourse, many Tibetan urban dwellers whom I have met continue to be empowered by the landscape of their homeland, albeit often in their mindscapes in the forms of memories, discursive thoughts, and creative expressions. Modernity may have taken deep roots in their mindscapes as a miasma that creeps in whenever there are openings; however, leaving behind the landscape of ones homeland or keeping a geographic and an ideological distance from it does not entail the vanishing of its potency. Shogdongs paradoxical negation of his tradition and empowerment by the landscape of Tibet is a telling example of the potency of place as Casey calls it.7 Such placial potency in the Tibetan context is also embodied in the mindscape of Tibetans. The Tibetan landscape is not only a geological formation but is embedded with spirit worlds, humans ritualized and intimate relation with gods and spirits, tracks of memories pertaining to the origin of Tibetan people, and finally the dominion of the immense landscape itself

Smyer Y

159

over human existential and spiritual realities.8 When such a potent landscape becomes an object of Shogdongs negation, rejection, and dismissal, it speaks back to him in its powerful visual expressions when he is physically enveloped in it:
That morning after eating tsamba [ roasted highland barley] kneaded together with plain water for breakfast, I saw a golden ray of the sun on the tip of the mountain behind me. I wondered if he [the mountain] was having a luminous moment in his mind. Towards noon, the horizonless Earth kept company with an insect moving forward while admiring the eagle soaring up above. What remarks would he [the insect] utter about differences between species? That night, like a dog without a master, I took residence in a cave free of charge. Facing the endlessly flowing Milky Way, I asked myself, Have I made a courageous vow to change Tibetans current state of affairs? Acting on their faith, Tibetans have carried countless sacks of gold in exchange for empowerment from countless gods and spirits. Age after age this same pilgrimage path may continue to compound the infinite number of Buddhas. In the religious eye, the Buddha and enlightened heroes manifest themselves on the magnificent mountains; the canon of the Buddhas teachings written with golden ink covers the Earth. In this infinitely expansive time and space, when all moving bodies are seen as bodies of the Buddha and all uttered speech is heard as mantras, all minds will receive enlightenment from the Buddha Dharma. When remembering the compassion of Avalokitesvara and Amitabha and when reciting the six-syllabled mantra with animals and birds, one is in a delightful state of being. When imagining the homeland of King Gesar, one sees his deified 30 generals as well as Nyanchentalha [ one of the nine original mountain deities of Tibet] and other gods of worldly creation [].9

The natural flow of his place-induced narratives clearly confirms the paradoxical manifestation of the modernity he attempts to promote in his other works mostly written in the cities of Xining and Lanzhou and in close proximity with the overall sociopolitical ethos of contemporary China. These narratives, as intimately enmeshed with his affection for the landscape of Tibet, are the resurfacing of his repressed native cultural upbringing as well as the landscape of homeland itself, which speaks back to him. I would like to reemphasize that place has its own being, whether or not it is built or natural. Casey points out that we are implaced beings to begin with, that place is an a priori of our existence on earth.10 Shogdong and the participants in his discourse of modernity are not exceptions. In my ethnographic understanding, implacement signifies first and foremost ones situatedness in a physical place to start with. This place then is ones birthplace home, village, town, and finally nation. Such a place of intimacy has both a geological character and a social being both of which are embodied in the place itself as part of its own being and in the human mindscape as collective memories.

Forgetting as remembering
Many of my Tibetan students and friends in Beijing see Shogdong as a radical modernist, which resonates with Hartleys findings in the late 1990s.11 My reading of Shogdongs recent writings is that he questions how we understand his paradoxical expressions of affection and detestation towards his native cultural practices. His emotionality and his

160

China Information 27(2)

place-based consciousness consistently show a multilayered pattern of the inextricable dependency of his imagined modern Tibet on his intentional rejecting and forgetting of Tibetan traditional modes of being, and the bursts of what can only be described as awe-filled affection towards his homeland, in the ecosublime sense, when he is physically immersed in the landscape of his homeland. Here, I do not attempt to trivialize his radical modernism but continue to read it as pathos from his paradoxical relation with modernity. In my ethnographic work with a few of Shogdongs college peers from Northwestern University for Nationalities, who are now writers and scholars in Beijing, I find they still retain such an anti-traditionalist image of their college mate, but some of them have begun to change their viewpoints after reading his newer publications. When I proposed interview sessions with three of Shogdongs college mates in late 2010, two dismissed his publications as unworthy because of his anti-traditional writings. Obviously they had not yet read Shogdongs recent writings. So, one of them, a writer, sat down with me on an evening in a pizzeria outside the university where I worked. He warned me not to look upon Shogdong as an anti-traditionalist. He emphasized that Shogdong, unlike other urban Tibetans who are not literate in Tibetan, had his full upbringing in Amdo until he went to college in Lanzhou. He stressed that Shogdong is knowledgeable about Tibetan Buddhism and culture. It was this writer who recommended that I read Shogdongs Nine Wacky Things for the sake of seeing his affective but mixed emotions towards his homeland. This writer/filmmaker is apparently indebted to Shogdongs narratives as his recently written film script about a young Tibetans pilgrimage to Lhasa shows the visible influence of Shogdongs depiction and reflection of his trip to Lhasa, including the imagery yielded from his actual walking, bus riding, and cave-dwelling experiences in the landscape of Tibet. To make sense of Shogdongs version of ethnic revival, it is necessary to review current trends of ethnic identity studies across disciplines. In contemporary studies of ethnic revival, the return of the suppressed and repressed pasts is the basic theme of reclaiming and renewing an identity. Contemporary studies of Tibetan ethnic revival carry the same theme without exception. It is an almost unanimous understanding that the revival of Tibetan cultural identity rests upon the return of traditional contents and forms of Tibetan culture. Since the late 1990s in the wide range of scholarly works on the topic by such authors as Goldstein and Kapstein,12 Makley,13 Huber,14 Barnett,15 and Smyer Y,16 the returning Tibetan cultural identity, in spite of its envelopment in Chinas modernity, appears primarily with a Buddhist orientation coupled with an embedded primordial perspective on collective identity. The ethnic identity of Tibetans in these contemporary works, grounded in Tibets past, is a case of cross-disciplinary consent that the core notion of ethnic identity is woven together with a collectively claimed history, language, culture, and territory. However, Shogdongs case is not classically primordialist. As a native Tibetan, he proposes abolishing his primordial past, allegedly laden with superstitious practices and thus hindering Tibet in its ability to be a modern nation like every other constitutionbased republic in the world. Shogdong is not reclaiming his primordial roots, but rather he is promulgating a new Tibet whose roots have yet to grow in a future under imaginative construction. This dynamic presents a predicament to the current scholarly common

Smyer Y

161

sense about ethnicity as a substantive conception. When an anti-traditionalist native calls for ethnic solidarity, on what ground(s) can he unite his compatriots since their shared past is no longer considered the foundation of their identity? Shogdongs case of ethnic revival is situated in urbanized Tibetans endeavour to formulate a modern newness for Tibetans to redefine their identity, nationhood, and social presence within the boundary of China. This future-oriented ethnic revival is identical to the early period of modern China during which cultural elites were determined to construct a new China by abolishing what they perceived as the old China. In this mental and physical transition from the old to the new, native intellectuals were the vanguards of a revolution sending shockwaves through their entire nation as they smashed down temples and burned books.17 However, participants of Shogdongs radical modern discourse are not committing themselves to the same acts of their Chinese counterparts. In fact, there is not much to destroy in Tibet as the Chinese communist revolution has already completed the physical transformation of Tibet. Tibetan monasteries and religious practices, albeit under the Chinese states restriction, are being rebuilt and resumed. What is comparable between the contemporary Tibetan case and the historical Chinese case is the role of native intellectuals as the new priesthood of the nation.18 In my earlier works about Tibetan intellectuals situated in this modern priesthood,19 I mostly emphasized their role in reorienting younger generations of Tibetans to re-embrace their Buddhist past through the traceable tracks of Tibets Buddhist theocratic history. Now Shogdongs priesthood role among his peers and younger generations, especially university students and emerging cultural critics born in the post-Mao era, is played out not as a charismatic leader involving a crowd of Tibetans who share the same view with him; instead, his role has engendered a critical mass, through the circulation of his writings in books, journal articles, and online publications, with a diverse body of opinions, though with a uniformly expressed desire: equal treatment from the state as their Han majority counterparts in relation to sociocultural respectability and professional and economic opportunities. Unlike his Buddhist-leaning contemporaries such as Tsering Oser and Tsering Norbu who direct their public contentions to the state,20 Shogdong makes clear statements in his writings that it is the Tibetan traditional mode of being that has hampered Tibetans progress towards a true, strong, modern Tibetan nation. His position is the opposite of his traditionalist counterparts. Shogdong makes it clear that he wants his tradition to take the blame for contemporary Tibetan backwardness and suffering:
We must admit the state of our decline and must search for the roots of the decline. As we know, the root of our decline is our old habit []. This old habit has begotten and nurtured a culture and its environment for thousands of years. Because of the decline of this culture, this old habit has also become aged, coarse, and petrified. The old symbolizes things of the past and the young symbolizes things new. This is the nature of existence. The old represents ageing and weakening; whereas the new represents development, growth, and perfection. When new things do not replace old things, everything is stagnant without progress. The ultimate state of Dharma holders or the state of Buddhahood, is achieved by breaking with old habits. The happiness and fulfilment of a worldly life is attained by breaking with old habits, too. Therefore, we must resolutely abolish our old habits in order to build authentic new habits [].21

162

China Information 27(2)

Begcheg ( habit), initially a Buddhist term, refers to reflexive behaviours or habits that have become second nature to a person. In Tibetan Buddhist philosophical and doctrinal discussions of human social behaviours and acts of the mind, begcheg signifies a set of habitual behaviours which take shape in the external environment and through the internal, karmic propensity of a person. When it is materialized as ones tangible personal habit, it reflexively expresses itself through ones bodily act, speech, and volition. Shogdongs use of begcheg, in my reading, mostly refers to the external, material culture of traditional Tibet, but in a highly temporalized and objectified fashion when he adds the adjective old to it and juxtaposes it with his neologism new habit. When it comes down to what he means by new habit, Shogdong does not offer a clear definition or descriptions in his texts other than connecting it with freedom (), equality (), humanistic culture (), and other similar terms which is in contrast to his numerous expressive critiques of the old habit such as in the following:
What we call the old habit is the primitive worldly theology [] which assumes that everything in this world is governed by celestial gods [], waterborne spirits [ ], and earthly deities [], and consists of trickeries of channelling, astrology, oracle reading, performing magic, and welcoming and sending off gods and spirits, and of the doctrine of nonself and karmic consequences. This old habit has consumed our society, life, livelihood, and state of being until today. Time and time again it has thrown us into a bottomless abyss. This old habit has shackled our aspirations and memories. It has cut off our minds from all wisdom. Therefore, we are heading from decline to decline. This is how we see the current state of affairs: the primary reason for our decline is not because of warships and shackles, but is because of the soul of the old habit, which suffocates development and innovation.22

In his juxtaposition and dichotomization of old habit and new habit, Tibet, in Shogdongs mindscape, exists not in the present but in the past and the future. The present is what he perceives and experiences as backwardness, suffocation, and being shackled. Pathologically speaking, his way of coping with the present is shown in his temporally reassigning the present pain of Tibetans to a past alleged as the fundamental cause of such pain. From here he goes deep into this past in an attempt to put an end to it, as a diagnostic move and a healing act. On the surface this sounds logical and persuasively reasonable to many of his readers; however, his frequent mental journey moving in and out of the past and the future appears to be geared towards blaming the old habit or the traditional Tibet for the present sufferings of Tibetans. The building blocks of the old habit, a construct of his own making, are funnelled through his radical modernism. This is similar to the selfvictimization seen in some trauma patients.23 His intent to forget the past is a process of intensely remembering the past by inversing, constantly bringing it back to the present for critiquing and public testimony against the wrongs of which it is accused. As a matter of fact, the presence of the old habit is seen everywhere in Tibet. Shogdongs determination to make it disappear is indeed resolute, but is also unimaginable to bystanders. In my fieldwork in Shogdongs home area in Amdo, I see the old habits of common Tibetans routinely: they circumambulate stupas, offer incense and butter to monasteries, and invite monks or yogis to perform offering rituals for mountain deities. However, looking at these religious practices through the lens of his radical

Smyer Y

163

modernism, Shogdong sees them as practices of what he calls deity culture (), his own neologism created in juxtaposition with his other term, humanistic culture. In his view, both are opposite to each other: the former is the way of gods and spirits while the latter the way of people as the word chu ( dharma, path, law, pattern) suggests. He lumps all Tibetan religious and traditional cultural practices together as deity culture, the repository of what he perceives as backwardness and decline. The alleged weakness of Tibetans, in Shogdongs eyes, inherently lies in their religious practices, which he views as acts of ignorance. His modernist mental state even alters his physical vision of his compatriots devotional acts when he describes prostrating Tibetans as trees being felled from their roots.24 He connects prostration with the servility and submissiveness of Tibetans to hierarchy, inequality, and selfenslavement. In his book The Call of Reason, he particularly designates a chapter to prostration with his modernist value judgment reflected in its title Prostration is a slave mentality (). Shogdong attributes this slave mentality to Tibetans being accustomed to submitting themselves to supernatural beings and worldly powers. Thus from his modernist view, these devotional acts become acts of ignorance and baseness. He writes,
We are slaves. We want to be slaves and we have the slave mentality inside of us. It is because for a long time we have not had a consciousness of equality [], freedom [], selfpower [], respect [], and autonomy []. What is more important is that we have performed for generations all kinds of Dharma ceremonies that inculcated our slave mentality. We came to the world with this slave mentality.25

Shogdongs radical modernist vision of Tibets present is so intense that he posits the possibility of a total annihilation of the old habit or tradition, as he bemoans,
The time-wheel of humankind has turned to the epoch of economic knowledge, but why arent we searching for the roots of our decline except continuing to numb ourselves? Looking around and looking back we see that the roots of our decline are in our old habit. To impart to our mind and wisdom infinite freedom and full development, we must kill this old habit even if it were as despotic and authoritarian as our parents.26

This militant emotion of Shogdong coincides with the trend of ethnic revivals mimetic of modern nationalism. In other words, modern nationalism empowers ethnic revival by supplying it with political consistency and staying-power.27 Smith offers two accounts of how ethnic revivals are fuelled by ideas and practices from modern nationalism, namely citizenship with equal rights and public presence with legitimate sociopolitical recognition. He notes, To make any real headway in the modern world, ethnic movements must take their claims in political and economic terms as well as cultural ones.28 Obviously there are two parallel developments of the Tibetan ethnic revival. One is commonly recognized as the predominant trend, that is, the reclamation of Tibets traditional past, particularly its Buddhist past. Another appears on the margin of the dominant trend, desiring, rather, to make a complete severance with Tibets past by constructing a Tibetan identity aligning with modern conceptions of nation. Both developments hinge

164

China Information 27(2)

their discourses and debates on how the past should be remembered. On one side, the past is being remembered as the continuation and preservation of Tibetan culture as the body of a unique civilization. The Buddhist-oriented revival thus positively re-embraces Tibets Buddhist civilization based on the Lhasa- and Dalai Lama-centred history. This trend is conspicuously shown in its uncompromising demand for the larger autonomy of Tibet in China by claiming Tibets primordiality. On the other side, the radical modernist case, like that of Shogdong, is lesser known but its voice is becoming louder. To this group of Tibetans the past is being remembered in order to forget it and make room for modern empowerment of future Tibetan citizens. As Hartley notes, this Tibetan radical modernism appears to align its ideology with the Chinese experience of modernity.29 It is true that many of Shogdongs writings were published in state-owned venues such as Gansu Peoples Press. His anti-traditionalist view was also publicly acknowledged by the state.30 To both Tibetans and Chinese statesmen, Shogdong is seen as a Tibetan version of Lu Xun, a radical writer in the Republic era known for his satirical depiction of traditional China as a cannibalistic society.31 I have addressed the Buddhist-oriented Tibetan ethnic revival elsewhere in terms of how memories are re-invoked towards a unified understanding of Tibetan civilizational identity.32 Shogdongs case also involves recalling Tibets collective memories, but they are intended for erasure because of their lack of mechanisms to address Tibetans inequality in China. In this respect, ethnic solidarity can also be grounded in the common sociopolitical experience of its members in relation to their social marginality. This grounding oftentimes results from native cultural elites discernment that their traditional cultural and governing system is devoid of means and ways for ensuring social equality and tolerance, if not appreciation, of ethnic and cultural differences. Sympathetically speaking, when a national identity bases itself mostly on a religion, especially a world religion with a universalist and transcendental orientation, the particularity of its nationality/ethnicity is often repressed and even overshadowed, because when an ethnic identity appears universally embracing, it loses its boundaries as its particularities are represented in a universal fashion. At the practical level, it loses its territorial and cultural defence since any external offence could be forgiven out of its collective belief in universal compassion or in a universally applicable godhead. In other words, an external offence to an ethnic group could be seen as akin to the biblical case of offering the other cheek or a Tibetan Buddhist case of Drume Kunden (), a legendary Tibetan saint who offered his wife, children, and his own eyes to those who asked for them. In this sense, the precepts and universal moral framework of a world religion such as Buddhism are not intended as practical political provisions for exercising modern citizenry rights and economic interests especially under the circumstances of several ethnic groups coercively unified within a single political framework.33 In this context, it is understandable that native radical modernists follow the same course of the modern nationalism of large nation-states for the sake of reclaiming their freedom and exercising equal rights. Anderson remarks, Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.34 Nationalism and modernity go hand in hand in the process of imagining and constructing a new nation. Looking at the modern nation-building experiences of the Chinese, North Americans, and Europeans, I see that what modernity endows nationalists in these

Smyer Y

165

regions is indeed a collective imagination of nation-state with morals based on the Enlightenment idea of humanity. Modern nationalism, on a large or small scale, thus signifies the sense of individual freedom in a sovereign nation. Shogdongs repeated calls for both collective and individual freedom attest to this characteristic of modern nationalism. Belated as it appears, Shogdongs radical modern discourse is synonymous with modern nationalism that uncompromisingly secularizes the traditional universe and society, and calls for severance with the past as well as for a new feeling of life and a new religious fervour.35 Shogdongs fervour is expressed in his impassioned absorbing and promulgating of modern ideas of equality, freedom, and democracy, all of which come from his reading of modern world history and the philosophies of Western Europe. Modernity, once a culturally, geographically, and historically specific idea in Europe, is now a universalizeduniversalizing event throughout the world. Its universal quality lies in its grand narrative or an overarching storyline of modern humankind.36 From a post-colonial perspective, it could be argued that modernity is a universalized regional phenomenon; however, from the current globalization perspective, modernity stands its own ground as it has become a deposit of diverse human experiences from different locales of the globe. Each of the experiences appears to identify its particular expressions of humanity with the universal understanding that individual freedom and rights are an inalienable property of humanity. Any hindrance has to be removed. Thus, in the 21st century, modernity can no longer be understood only as a product of Europe, but a commemorative and collaborative project of different human communities. Like elsewhere in the world, the Tibetan experience of modernity also shows the features of modernity, namely, disembedding, discontinuity, reordering, and recasting, as Giddens characterizes it.37 Then, a place is no longer only local but is simultaneously global as well. Its roots are no longer found only in its past but are transplanted from elsewhere in the world and grow towards their intended future. This is the condition and consequence of modernity in which place becomes increasingly phantasmagoric: that is to say, locales are thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them.38 The simultaneity of the local and the global quality of place is not a given geographic common sense but is a separation of time and space39 in the mindscape of the modern individual. The geographic feature of the place remains the same; however, its imminent modern physical transformation has begun with the temporalization of it in ones mindscape, meaning that the modern temporalization of place is a qualitatively ideological event in which a contemporary geographic location could be envisioned as a place of the past or an imagined future. Whether the mental clock moves back to the past or into the future, the place is being reassessed, remapped, and reordered with a set of new beliefs and values. In other words, place has to be temporally disembedded from its present in order to enter into a new, envisioned space. Giddenss words best describe this disembedding quality of modernity manifested in contemporary ethnic nationalisms such as Shogdongs version, By disembedding I mean the lifting out of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.40 Like bigger versions of modern nationalism, Shogdongs envisioned modern nation of Tibet is an invention of a new tradition or a new Tibetan ethnogenesis based on

166

China Information 27(2)

modern principles and values. Resembling his Chinese intellectual counterparts throughout the 20th century, Shogdong, likewise, is initiating a collective forgetting and erasure of Tibets past. In my reading of his writings, I see a pattern of forgetting through recalling and remembering the past. His intentional forgetting is visibly dependent upon remembering details of Tibetan cultural practices, particularly those religious ones that are deemed as expressions of ignorance. Ultimately it is a reflexive remembering process but it appears as a deliberate forgetting process. Whatever is identified as ignorant and backward has to be revealed in order to be the object of his erasure; however, these traditions are not merely embodied in the landscape of Tibet but also in the collective mindscape of Tibetans who were raised in Tibet. Though intending to discredit it, his chapter Tossing the [old] habit into the abyss ( )41 exemplifies the linkage of his modern disembedding intent towards his own culture and his reflexive memories of it. He writes:
In the process of cultural development, humankind had the ignorant habit of a primitive belief in gods and demons; however, those nations, which had reached civilization earlier, already tossed this old habit into the abyss. But, who on earth has numbed us until now? Among the gods and demons whom we have not been able to exorcise from the old habit, there are those who were forced out of India, exiled from the hinterland of the Han people, banished from Bhutan and Nepal, or indentured from other places. All of them had not found their dwelling places until they flocked together like flies to the feet of the snow-mountains. And pointing at this phenomenon we rather praise it as the splendid culture of the Snowland. How ridiculous!42

The sequence of Shogdongs forgetting and remembering shows this pattern: reflexive recollecting public discrediting/ridiculing collective remembering. The recollecting pattern appears as what Ricoeur refers to as the habit-memory nexus,43 which is a moving point or a reflexive movement44 of memory, linking body, place, and mind. In such a nexus the past, the present, and the future are simultaneously present. The weight of this reflexive, memorial movement is the place-based habit. Habit in this sense is identical to begcheg, mostly as a product of ones lived environment as aforementioned. Like Ricoeur, I also prefer to understand Shogdongs habit along the lines of Bourdieus habitus the disposition of the individual consciousness that is inherently collective because it is environed in its native, physical but humanized place with a set of specific social and cultural meanings.45 The reflexivity of habit-memory thus is trans-temporal and trans-spatial in the mindscape of the individual as a transpersonal flow of a collective memory. Because of its reflexivity and often unconscious state, it surfaces but is not surficial in nature as it is deeply rooted in the mindscape as second nature to the individual. In this sense, habit-memory is synonymous with deep memory;46 that is, the perpetual ground for the individual to exercise intentional forgetting, selective remembering, and finally reordering his memory for both personal and social needs. Forgetting and remembering then do not belong to separate domains of the mindscape, but are interlocked into a dialectic relationship. Each simultaneously weakens and strengthens the other, as Ricoeur remarks, forgetting is experienced as an attack on the reliability of memory. Memory defines itself as a struggle against forgetting.47 In the context of Shogdongs modernism, forgetting and remembering appear as both a natural temporal recalling of a past and a deliberately disembedding, temporalizing

Smyer Y

167

process embedded with the matrix of modern values and practices. However, on a deeper level, his recalled past is consistently lodged in specific placial terms: the Himalayas, the Snowland, Amdo, to name a few. In this regard, what is dated and temporalized is recollected reflexively as place; thus, place survives in time, but is frequently subject to displacement and replacement with fresh layers of encrustation added from the present context of the individual or the group. In spite of the commotions and violence resulting from the new encrustation, place retains itself in the midst of dis- and re- actions of the mind and body. It is because place is lived spatiality.48 Lived place is entrusted with memorability from the lived body/mind. Thus, habit-memory is habituated in place but moves with the moving body/mind: [p]laces inhabited are memorable par excellence49 and memorable places are the inherent encrusted layers of mindscape likened to geological layers of the earth. A deep mining of it only makes it ever more present.

Placiality of pathogenic power and subaltern subjectivity

In the medical sense, a pathogen, as a living agent, seeks entry into new hosts for replicating and expanding its population until it turns the hosts into its home or until its agency replaces those of the hosts entirely.50 This is the pandemic possibility of a pathogen. It can be likened to a xenobiotic compound that disrupts an organism when its accompanying toxin impairs the host; thus the xenobiotic claims the host as its rightful place. My metaphorical use of pathogen in the medical sense is meant to point out that our own agency is susceptible to paradigmatic changes and agentive shifts without our awareness that our mindscape has harboured a foreign agent or when a foreign agent has nativized itself in us. This reversal or conflation of the guest and the host can also be shown in dramatic changes occurring in our mindscape due to external epoch-making events around us. Terms such as paradigm shift, consciousness raising, or simply revolution are common verbal expressions resulting from our mental commotions and transformations. They do not always allow us to be appreciative of our own being, in a Heidegerian sense, as they have a destabilizing effect, like a pathogen, in both psychological and psychic senses. Modern nationalism, on the one hand, bestows paradigmatic visions to ethnic revivals worldwide in terms of its universal ideas of liberty, equality, and democracy, as Smith points out. On the other hand, it is also pathogenic in nature, especially when a given ethnic group discards its myth-symbol complex51 as the basis of its ethnie, because it is deemed irrelevant to its current, and future-projected, collective condition and mode of being. When cultural elites promote what I call a foundational shift from a mythohistorical identity-claim to the set of modern values as the operating system as the new basis of their collective identity, they expect empowerment from these newly embraced modern practices of politics and governance because of their obvious experience of sociopolitical marginalization. However, in the Tibetan case, this type of romantically charged modern ethnic revival does not seem to change the marginality of urban Tibetans in China. Shogdongs advocacy of a politically stronger Tibetan population in terms of autonomy and equality has instead turned against Tibet and Tibetan culture itself rather than debate and contend directly with the Chinese state. In this regard, I see the pathogenic dimension of Enlightenment-based modern nationalism as it nativizes in the

168

China Information 27(2)

collective mindscape of urban Tibetans. It is no longer a question of commonly perceived ethnic revival or cultural revitalization but a power discourse in a subaltern fashion. Like Hansen, I also raise the same question, Why is there no subaltern studies for Tibet?52 In the past I attempted a subaltern study of Tibetan intellectuals in China who are all pro-traditionalists advocating Tibetans re-embracement of Buddhism as the foundation of Tibetan cultural identity. My emphasis was mostly on how this group of Tibetan intellectuals uses the language of the powerful53 to exercise dialogues, debates, and contentions with the Chinese state. Their reclamation of Tibets past is clearly meant to destigmatize the state-issued pejorative images attached to it. To them, Tibets traditional cultural practices are undoubtedly not seen as superstitious acts, as Shogdong sees them, but are fairly inherent to the fabric of Tibetan civilization. The national discourse of protraditional Tibetans resembles that of Indian subalterns who parse their lifeworld into the outer domain and the inner domain. As Chatteerjee points out, while the outer domain refers to the public sphere of the dominant, which has been transfigured from its traditional appearance to the current space of modern science and technology, the inner domain signifies the distinctiveness of ones spiritual culture.54 In this inner domain, Indians find national solace and solidarity as they retain collective memory and spiritual practices. It is this inner domain that serves as the foundation of Indian nationalism and marks a distinction between Indians and the British.55 While Indian nationalists sanctify their inner domain as the indisputable bedrock of Indian civilization and national primordial belonging, they have also absorbed the British version of modernity to establish their new, Indian, self-governed civic life. In this respect, pro-traditional Tibetans ethnic revival bears similar outlooks to their Indian counterparts. However, subaltern studies of Tibet continue to remain at an impasse for complex reasons. To answer Spivaks question, Do subalterns speak?56 in the context of Tibetans in China, my answer is positive. Tibetan subalterns do speak in public but it is rather the voice of the dominant that speaks through them. Tibetan subalterns are at once dominated by the Chinese state and empowered by the modern universalistic discourse of rights, freedom, and democracy. The way they exercise this discourse is perceptibly oriented towards their desired vision of a modern Tibet divorced from its past. Shogdong and his contemporaries have shown their passion and have felt called to wake up their fellow Tibetans. In my view, there is nothing to wake up from; instead, it is insurrection that Shogdong is attempting to introduce to his compatriots, as he elaborates:
what we mean by insurrection absolutely goes beyond the political meanings of what weapons signify. It means to look at how our seeking for saviours, depending on others, and dreaming for changes this incumbent and narrow consciousness completely destroy our personality, our social life, and our values. As we forever expect saviours, help, empowerment, and nectar, we are most willing to subject ourselves to this dubious, no-eye-, no-nose-, and no-body- [ derived from The Heart Sutra] Old Habit. We are not debating the relevance of the word insurrection in our thought-world. Like an armed struggle that overthrows a reactionary government, we overthrow the rule of gods and demons, and non-self. This is how we launch a new thought-revolution.57

Smyer Y

169

This statement appears to mobilize a change in the collective consciousness, but its directionality shows that, instead of turning to the source of inequality and oppression, it turns against itself by finding everything wrong with ones history and cultural practices. Placing this statement in subaltern studies, I see Shogdongs internal displacement and temporalization of Tibets present and past as a subaltern consciousness that is tightly gripped or possessed by the dominant. This dynamic is also common among Indian subalterns. In Spivaks assessment, this consciousness, in fact, is not the subalterns but rather the oppressors.58 It is a reproduction of the dominant consciousness in the subaltern consciousness. As a matter of fact, this was how Chinese modernity was constructed by its cultural elites: on the one hand they expressed their anti-Western imperialism but, on the other hand, they absorbed the power-language of the West to re-articulate and reconstruct a modern Chinese identity that has little cultural association with Chinas past. This aspect of subalternity shows that the subaltern reproduces the social image of the dominant by critically contending with the language of the dominant and yet deeply internalizing it until it becomes unconscious. Unlike their Chinese counterparts a century ago who turned the language of Western modernity against Western imperialism, Shogdong turns it against traditional Tibet. I share the same sentiment as Spivak that the subaltern consciousness is negative.59 In the Tibetan anti-traditionalist case, it is a selfnegating process. Notes
1. Shogdong (Tagyal), (Overturning the sky and the earth), Xining: Qinghai Minzu Press, 2010. 2. An Leye, Jumu zhanshi de Xuedong (dong) shijian (The eye-catching incident of Shogdong), 2010, http://blog.boxun.com/hero/201005/dongsai/3_1.shtml, accessed 16 November 2012. 3. Shogdong (Tagyal), (Contemplation and reflection), Lanzhou: Gansu Nationality Publishing House, 2008, 7. All excerpts from Shogdongs writings are the authors translation. 4. Tim Oakes, Place and the paradox of modernity, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87(3), 1997: 511. 5. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, 26. 6. Shogdong, Contemplation and Reflection, 12. 7. Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000, 184. 8. Dan Smyer Y, The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China: Charisma, Money, Enlightenment, London: Routledge, 2011, 5174. 9. Shogdong, Contemplation and Reflection, 89. 10. Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, x. 11. Lauran R. Hartley, Inventing modernity in Amdo: Views on the role of traditional Tibetan culture in a developing society, in Toni Huber (ed.) Amdo Tibetans in Transition: Society and Culture in the Post-Mao Era, Leiden: Brill, 2002, 126. 12. Melvyn C. Goldstein and Matthew T. Kapstein (eds) Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet: Religious Revival and Cultural Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 13. Charlene E. Makley, The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 14. Huber (ed.), Amdo Tibetans in Transition.

170

China Information 27(2)

15. Robert Barnett, Beyond the collaborator-martyr model: Strategies of compliance, opportunism, and opposition within Tibet, in Barry Sautman and June Teufel Dreyer (eds) Contemporary Tibet: Politics, Development, and Society in a Disputed Region, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006, 2566. 16. Smyer Y, The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China. 17. Peter van der Veer, Smash temples, burn books: Comparing secularist projects in India and China, The World Religious Cultures, no. 73, Spring 2012, 17. 18. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986, 157. 19. Dan Smyer Y, Emotions under Local Nationalism: The Primordial Turn of Tibetan Intellectuals in China, Pacific Rim Report no. 42, San Francisco: USF Center for the Pacific Rim: 2006. 20. Tsering Oser, Forbidden Memory: Tibet during the Cultural Revolution, Taipei: Locus, 2006. 21. Shogdong (Tagyal) (The call of reason), Lanzhou: Gansu Peoples Press, 2001, 2. 22. Ibid., 6. 23. Bessel A. van der Kolk and Alexander C. McFarlane, The black hole of trauma, in Bessel A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, and Lars Weisaeth (eds) Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Body, Mind, and Society, New York: Guilford Press, 1996, 7. 24. Shogdong, The Call of Reason, 103. 25. Ibid., 101. 26. Ibid., 41. 27. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Revival, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, 19. 28. Ibid., 20. 29. Hartley, Inventing modernity in Amdo, 1. 30. Ibid., 11. 31. Lu Xun, Diary of a madman, in Lu Xun, Outcry, Modern Chinese Literature Digital Library, 2009, 718, http://61.153.231.109/cms/books/lx6.pdf, accessed 24 January 2013. 32. Smyer Y, The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China, 14872. 33. George A. De Vos, Ethnic pluralism: Conflict and accommodation: The role of ethnicity in social history, in Lola Romanucci-Ross and George A. De Vos (eds) Ethnic Identity: Creation, Conflict, and Accommodation, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1995, 35. 34. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, New York: Verso, 1991, 15. 35. Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origin and Background, New York: Macmillan, 1951, 4. 36. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990, 2. 37. Ibid., 616. 38. Ibid., 19. 39. Ibid., 20. 40. Ibid., 21. 41. Shogdong, The Call of Reason, 2541. 42. Ibid., 29. 43. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 435. 44. Ibid., 436. 45. Ibid., 441. 46. Ibid., 441. 47. Ibid., 413.

Smyer Y

171

48. Casey, The Fate of Place, 5. 49. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 42. 50. Tsaft Peery and Michael B. Mathews, Viral conquest of the host cell, in David M. Knipe and Peter M. Howley (eds) Fields Virology, Vol. 1, Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2007, 170. 51. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 1516. 52. Peter H. Hansen, Why is there no subaltern studies for Tibet?, The Tibet Journal 28(4), Winter 2003: 8. 53. Smyer Y, The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China, 149. 54. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 6. 55. Ibid., 26. 56. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the subaltern speak?, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988, 271313. 57. Shogdong, The Call of Reason, 14. 58. Spivak, Can the subaltern speak?, 11. 59. Ibid., 28.

References
An, Leye (2010) Jumu zhanshi de Xuedong (dong) shijian (The eye-catching incident of Shogdong). http://blog.boxun.com/hero/201005/dongsai/3_1.shtml, accessed 16 November 2012. Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso. Barnett, Robert (2006) Beyond the collaborator-martyr model: Strategies of compliance, opportunism, and opposition within Tibet. In: Sautman, Barry and Dreyer, June Teufel (eds) Contemporary Tibet: Politics, Development, and Society in a Disputed Region. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2566. Casey, Edward S. (1997) The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Casey, Edward S. (2000) Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chatterjee, Partha (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. De Vos, George A. (1995) Ethnic pluralism: Conflict and accommodation: The role of ethnicity in social history. In: Romanucci-Ross, Lola and De Vos, George A. (eds) Ethnic Identity: Creation, Conflict, and Accommodation. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1547. Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Goldstein, Melvyn. C. and Kapstein, Matthew T. (eds) (1998) Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet: Religious Revival and Cultural Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Notes on Italian history. In: Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Ed. and trans. Hoare, Quintin and Smith, Geoffrey Nowell. New York: International. Hansen, Peter H. (2003) Why is there no subaltern studies for Tibet? The Tibet Journal 28(4): 722. Hartley, Lauran R. (2002) Inventing modernity in Amdo: Views on the role of traditional Tibetan culture in a developing society. In: Huber, Toni (ed.) Amdo Tibetans in Transition: Society and Culture in the Post-Mao Era. Leiden: Brill, 126. Huber, Toni (ed.) (2002) Amdo Tibetans in Transition: Society and Culture in the Post-Mao Era. Leiden: Brill.

172

China Information 27(2)

Kohn, Hans (1951) The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origin and Background. New York: Macmillan. Kolk, Bessel, A. van der, and McFarlane, Alexander C. (1996) The black hole of trauma. In: van der Kolk, Bessel A., McFarlane, Alexander C., and Weisaeth, Lars (eds) Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Body, Mind, and Society. New York: Guilford Press, 323. Lu, Xun (2009) Diary of a madman. In: Lu, Xun, Outcry. Modern Chinese Literature Digital Library, 718. http://61.153.231.109/cms/books/lx6.pdf, accessed 24 January 2013. Makley, Charlene E. (2007) The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Oakes, Tim (1997) Place and the paradox of modernity. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87(3): 50931. Peery, Tsaft, and Mathews, Michael B. (2007) Viral conquest of the host cell. In: David M. Knipe & Peter M Howley. (eds) Fields Virology. Vol. 1. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 169208. Ricoeur, Paul (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. BlameyKathleenPellauerDavid. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shogdong (Tagyal) (2001) (The call of reason). Lanzhou: Gansu Peoples Press. Shogdong (Tagyal) (2008) (Contemplation and reflection). Lanzhou: Gansu Nationality Publishing House. Shogdong (Tagyal) (2010) (Overturning the sky and the earth). Xining: Qinghai Minzu Press. Smith, Anthony D. (1981) The Ethnic Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Anthony D. (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations. New York: Basil Blackwell. Smyer Y, Dan (2006) Emotions under Local Nationalism: The Primordial Turn of Tibetan Intellectuals in China. Pacific Rim Report no. 42. San Francisco: USF Center for the Pacific Rim. Smyer Y, Dan (2011) The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China: Charisma, Money, Enlightenment. London: Routledge. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988) Can the subaltern speak? In: Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois, 271313. Tsering, Oser (2006) Forbidden Memory: Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. Taipei: Locus. Veer, Peter van der (2012) Smash temples, burn books: Comparing secularist projects in India and China. The World Religious Cultures, no.73: 1726.