Papers by Charlene Makley
Punctum Press, 2024
We are pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of our edited volume Redacted: Writing in ... more We are pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of our edited volume Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State, with Punctum Press in Spring 2024!
When it comes to the political, the act of redaction, erasure, blacking out, sits in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderless access, and frictionless communication. But there ought to be more than this brute juxtaposition of truth and secrecy?
Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State brings together a collection of essays, poems, artwork, and memes, a bricolage of media that conveys the experience of living in state-inflected worlds in flux. In critically and poetically engaging with redaction in politically charged contexts (from the United States and Denmark to Russia, China, and North Korea), the volume examines up close and turns loose this disquieting mark of state power. The work aims to trouble the liberal imaginaries that figure the political as a left–right spectrum, as populism and nationalism versus global and transnational cosmopolitanism, as east versus west, authoritarianism versus democracy, good versus evil, or the state versus the people, these age-old coordinates that no longer make sense. Because we know from the upheavals of the past decade that these relations are being reconfigured in novel, recursive, and unrecognizable ways, the consequences of which are perplexing and ever evolving.
This book takes up redaction as a vital form in this new political reality. Contributors both critically engage with statist redaction practices and explore its alluring and ambivalent forms, as an experimental practice that can open up new dialogic possibilities in navigating and conveying the stakes of political encounters.
High Peaks Pure Earth, 2023
This is the latest post from the Amdo Translation Collective (ATC) on the blog High Peaks Pure Ea... more This is the latest post from the Amdo Translation Collective (ATC) on the blog High Peaks Pure Earth. High Peaks Pure Earth provides insightful commentary on Tibet related news and issues and provides translations from writings in Tibetan and Chinese posted on blogs and social media from Tibet and the People’s Republic of China. This essay and poem translation offers a deeply annotated and contextualized translation of an extremely rare alphabetic poem criticizing the Communist revolution in Tibet. It was handwritten by the late Tibetan doctor and monk Akhu Tsultrim Sangpo (1932-2021) and hidden away during the horrific violence of the Cultural Revolution in Amdo in 1970. Akhu Tsultrim presented it for the first time to two members of the ATC in 2018.
High Peaks Pure Earth blog, 2022
These are translations of a suite of 9 poems composed by the Tibetan exiled poet and activist Man... more These are translations of a suite of 9 poems composed by the Tibetan exiled poet and activist Mangrawa Dukar Bum in the 1990s, during his multiple imprisonments at the hands of Chinese authorities in Amdo (Qinghai province), China. They were translated by the Amdo Translation Collective and posted on the blog High Peaks Pure Earth.
High Peaks Pure Earth Blog, 2022
These are poems written by Tibetan exiled dissident poet and activist Mangrawa Dukar Bum about hi... more These are poems written by Tibetan exiled dissident poet and activist Mangrawa Dukar Bum about his grief after the untimely death of the Tenth Panchen Lama (second in the Tibetan Buddhist Geluk sect hierarchy to the Dalai Lama) at age 51 in 1989. They are translated by the Amdo Translation Collective and posted on the blog High Peaks Pure Earth.
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 2022
Review essay of three important recent monographs on Tibetan Buddhist politics in Inner Asia:
F... more Review essay of three important recent monographs on Tibetan Buddhist politics in Inner Asia:
Faith and Empire: Art and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism edited by Karl Debreczeny. New York: Rubin Museum of Art, 2019. Pp. 271. Open-access e-book available at https://rubinmuseum.org/page/rubin-museum-publications.
Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Karmapa and the Invention of a Tradition by Ruth Gamble. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xv + 322. $130.00 hardcover, $129.99 e-book.
Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and the Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet by Max Oidtmann. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. xvii + 330. $75.00 cloth, $27.99 e-book.
Critical Asian Studies, 2018
Emily and I are pleased to announce the publication in Critical Asian Studies of a special collec... more Emily and I are pleased to announce the publication in Critical Asian Studies of a special collection on Education, Urbanization and the Politics of Space on the Tibetan Plateau.
Here is the link to the whole collection: https://criticalasianstudies.net/news/2018/12/8/education-urbanization-and-the-politics-of-space-on-the-tibetan-plateau
The first 50 downloads of our introduction are free! (see link above).
This article provides an introduction to a special collection of five articles showcasing the work of rising scholars in the geography and anthropology of Tibetan regions in China (Eveline Washul, Andrew Grant, Tsering Bum, Huatse Gyal and Duojie Zhaxi, published in Critical Asian Studies 50: 4 and Critical Asian Studies 51: 1). It contextualizes the authors’ contributions in the recent promotion of planned urbanization in Tibetan regions as the key to achieving the “Chinese Dream” under President Xi Jinping. The paper calls attention to these authors’ focus on Tibetan experiences of new urbanization policies and practices, as well as their less-appreciated entanglement with shifting education priorities. Providing brief summaries of each author’s case study and arguments, it points to the ways in which all five articles address the relationship between space and subjectivity, as well as the issue of constrained agency (versus simple notions of “choice”), in statist urbanization processes.
KEYWORDS: China, Tibet, urbanization, education, development
Ateliers d'anthropologie, 2018
In this contribution to the special issue, "Tibetan Trichology: Hair and Its Treatment in Tibet,"... more In this contribution to the special issue, "Tibetan Trichology: Hair and Its Treatment in Tibet," Françoise Robin, Nicola Schneider and Nicolas Sihlé (ed.s), we (Donyol Dondrup and Charlene Makley) introduce readers to the Amdo Tibetan comedian, poet and performance artist Menla-kyap [sMan bla skyabs] through a translation of his 2009 autobiographical narrative, “Views on Hair and Hairstyles.” The Introduction section provides a broader context for Menla-kyap's life and times as well as a reading guide for this enigmatic piece. The translation is carefully annotated, yet attempts to stay as close as possible, formally and poetically, to the original text. Ultimately, we argue that the piece speaks not only to Menla-kyap's life but also to his critical views on all Tibetans' complex experiences of Chinese state rule since the 1960s.
Pod Vodárenskou věží 4 | 182 08 Praha 8 -Libeň | Czech Republic e-mail: aror@orient. cas. cz | ww... more Pod Vodárenskou věží 4 | 182 08 Praha 8 -Libeň | Czech Republic e-mail: aror@orient. cas. cz | www.aror.orient.cas.cz
cz | www.aror.orient.cas.cz The Amdo Research Network (ARN) brings together a diverse range of sc... more cz | www.aror.orient.cas.cz The Amdo Research Network (ARN) brings together a diverse range of scholars from different study fields and disciplines, all of whom have a focus on the geographical region of " Amdo. " This initial volume, subtitled " Dynamics of Change, " follows the first ARN workshop held at the Humboldt University of Berlin in December 2014. Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork and other new data sources, the contributors of this unique volume touch on a wide range of both contemporary and historical topics, ranging from socioeconomic transformations and the dynamics of ethnicity and relatedness to those with religious and ecological dimensions.
Book review of Sarah Jacoby's Love and Liberation. Journal of the History of Sexuality 25 (3), 2016.
On a rainy July day in 1995, my husband and I joined a Tibetan village family we knew in the famo... more On a rainy July day in 1995, my husband and I joined a Tibetan village family we knew in the famous Buddhist monastery town of Labrang (now southwest Gansu Province, China) for a picnic in their tent pitched high on a peak above the Sang (ch. Daxia) River valley. 1 The white tents dotting the hillsides in the summer were an important index of Tibetanness in this multiethnic and rapidly urbanizing frontier town. Tibetans were increasingly outnumbered by Han and Muslim Chinese (ch. Hui) residents who served as local cadres or engaged in commerce generated in part by the burgeoning tourism industry centered on the revitalizing monastery. 2 This was the time of year, the much-awaited shinglong season, when the Tibetan villages surrounding the monastery celebrated household and community harmony and prosperity in communal offering rites to village deities at their abodes in the mountains, followed by all-day picnicking, songfests, and games. But during positions 10:3 © 2002 by Duke University Press positions 10:3 Winter 2002 male-female sex-gender polarity, perhaps epitomizes this more than other Buddhist cultures.
Conflict and Social Order in Tibet and Inner Asia, 2008
Drawing on fieldwork between 2007–2013 in Amdo Tibetan regions in northwestern China, this articl... more Drawing on fieldwork between 2007–2013 in Amdo Tibetan regions in northwestern China, this article considers the unprecedented spate of self-immolation-by-fire protests among Tibetans in light of the military crackdown on Tibetan unrest beginning in 2008. The author takes a performative approach to Tibetan self-immolation protest as a new and deeply contested genre of mass media in the context of severe state repression. The author argues that such an approach accounts for the always unresolved yet socially and politically constitutive meaning and efficacy of dead bodies in a necropolitics particular to modern Sino-Tibetan relations.
Taking inspiration from linguistic anthropological approaches to the work of the Russian philosop... more Taking inspiration from linguistic anthropological approaches to the work of the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), this article uses a Bakhtinian perspective on voice as contested presence to analyze the post-Mao revival of mountain deity possession practices among Tibetans in China’s northwestern province of Qinghai. I respond to recent work that suggests that state-led development processes have intensified grassroots contests over the moral sources of authority and legitimacy in China, by contrasting the ambivalent voices of an urbanizing village’s Tibetan Party secretary with those of the village’s deity medium, during a mid-2000s village conflict. The conflict underscored a crisis of authority or moral “presence” among Tibetans under intensifying central state-led development pressures that for many carried forward the disenfranchisement of Tibetans that started in the 1950s.
was a watershed moment for the country and its ruling Chinese Communist Party. In this article, t... more was a watershed moment for the country and its ruling Chinese Communist Party. In this article, the author draws on her fieldwork experience as one of the few foreigners living in rural Tibetan regions during the Tibetan unrest in spring 2008 to consider the implications of the Olympic year from the margins of the state. Taking inspiration from recent anthropological debates about the nature of humanitarianism and sovereignty in neo-liberal and post-socialist states, the author considers the Tibetan unrest and the Sichuan earthquake that occurred just three weeks later on 12 May as particularly emblematic disastrous events linked by a new biopolitics of "charity" or "compassion" (Ch. aixin) in the context of state-led disaster relief. To get at the contested nature of morality and sovereignty in practice, the author focuses on nationally televised post-quake death rituals in which statist abstract compassion for lost Chinese citizens confronted the universalized compassion of embattled Tibetan Buddhist monastic communities.
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Papers by Charlene Makley
When it comes to the political, the act of redaction, erasure, blacking out, sits in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderless access, and frictionless communication. But there ought to be more than this brute juxtaposition of truth and secrecy?
Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State brings together a collection of essays, poems, artwork, and memes, a bricolage of media that conveys the experience of living in state-inflected worlds in flux. In critically and poetically engaging with redaction in politically charged contexts (from the United States and Denmark to Russia, China, and North Korea), the volume examines up close and turns loose this disquieting mark of state power. The work aims to trouble the liberal imaginaries that figure the political as a left–right spectrum, as populism and nationalism versus global and transnational cosmopolitanism, as east versus west, authoritarianism versus democracy, good versus evil, or the state versus the people, these age-old coordinates that no longer make sense. Because we know from the upheavals of the past decade that these relations are being reconfigured in novel, recursive, and unrecognizable ways, the consequences of which are perplexing and ever evolving.
This book takes up redaction as a vital form in this new political reality. Contributors both critically engage with statist redaction practices and explore its alluring and ambivalent forms, as an experimental practice that can open up new dialogic possibilities in navigating and conveying the stakes of political encounters.
Faith and Empire: Art and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism edited by Karl Debreczeny. New York: Rubin Museum of Art, 2019. Pp. 271. Open-access e-book available at https://rubinmuseum.org/page/rubin-museum-publications.
Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Karmapa and the Invention of a Tradition by Ruth Gamble. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xv + 322. $130.00 hardcover, $129.99 e-book.
Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and the Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet by Max Oidtmann. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. xvii + 330. $75.00 cloth, $27.99 e-book.
Here is the link to the whole collection: https://criticalasianstudies.net/news/2018/12/8/education-urbanization-and-the-politics-of-space-on-the-tibetan-plateau
The first 50 downloads of our introduction are free! (see link above).
This article provides an introduction to a special collection of five articles showcasing the work of rising scholars in the geography and anthropology of Tibetan regions in China (Eveline Washul, Andrew Grant, Tsering Bum, Huatse Gyal and Duojie Zhaxi, published in Critical Asian Studies 50: 4 and Critical Asian Studies 51: 1). It contextualizes the authors’ contributions in the recent promotion of planned urbanization in Tibetan regions as the key to achieving the “Chinese Dream” under President Xi Jinping. The paper calls attention to these authors’ focus on Tibetan experiences of new urbanization policies and practices, as well as their less-appreciated entanglement with shifting education priorities. Providing brief summaries of each author’s case study and arguments, it points to the ways in which all five articles address the relationship between space and subjectivity, as well as the issue of constrained agency (versus simple notions of “choice”), in statist urbanization processes.
KEYWORDS: China, Tibet, urbanization, education, development
When it comes to the political, the act of redaction, erasure, blacking out, sits in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderless access, and frictionless communication. But there ought to be more than this brute juxtaposition of truth and secrecy?
Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State brings together a collection of essays, poems, artwork, and memes, a bricolage of media that conveys the experience of living in state-inflected worlds in flux. In critically and poetically engaging with redaction in politically charged contexts (from the United States and Denmark to Russia, China, and North Korea), the volume examines up close and turns loose this disquieting mark of state power. The work aims to trouble the liberal imaginaries that figure the political as a left–right spectrum, as populism and nationalism versus global and transnational cosmopolitanism, as east versus west, authoritarianism versus democracy, good versus evil, or the state versus the people, these age-old coordinates that no longer make sense. Because we know from the upheavals of the past decade that these relations are being reconfigured in novel, recursive, and unrecognizable ways, the consequences of which are perplexing and ever evolving.
This book takes up redaction as a vital form in this new political reality. Contributors both critically engage with statist redaction practices and explore its alluring and ambivalent forms, as an experimental practice that can open up new dialogic possibilities in navigating and conveying the stakes of political encounters.
Faith and Empire: Art and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism edited by Karl Debreczeny. New York: Rubin Museum of Art, 2019. Pp. 271. Open-access e-book available at https://rubinmuseum.org/page/rubin-museum-publications.
Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Karmapa and the Invention of a Tradition by Ruth Gamble. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xv + 322. $130.00 hardcover, $129.99 e-book.
Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and the Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet by Max Oidtmann. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. xvii + 330. $75.00 cloth, $27.99 e-book.
Here is the link to the whole collection: https://criticalasianstudies.net/news/2018/12/8/education-urbanization-and-the-politics-of-space-on-the-tibetan-plateau
The first 50 downloads of our introduction are free! (see link above).
This article provides an introduction to a special collection of five articles showcasing the work of rising scholars in the geography and anthropology of Tibetan regions in China (Eveline Washul, Andrew Grant, Tsering Bum, Huatse Gyal and Duojie Zhaxi, published in Critical Asian Studies 50: 4 and Critical Asian Studies 51: 1). It contextualizes the authors’ contributions in the recent promotion of planned urbanization in Tibetan regions as the key to achieving the “Chinese Dream” under President Xi Jinping. The paper calls attention to these authors’ focus on Tibetan experiences of new urbanization policies and practices, as well as their less-appreciated entanglement with shifting education priorities. Providing brief summaries of each author’s case study and arguments, it points to the ways in which all five articles address the relationship between space and subjectivity, as well as the issue of constrained agency (versus simple notions of “choice”), in statist urbanization processes.
KEYWORDS: China, Tibet, urbanization, education, development
In The Battle for Fortune: State-led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans in China (Cornell University Press, 2018), Charlene Makley, Professor of anthropology at Reed College, intermixes these tensions while also exploring her own experience attempting to conduct fieldwork immediately before and after a series of demonstrations rocked Tibet in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Using a form of multi-sited, ‘dialogic ethnography’ from linguistic anthropology, Charlene Makley considers Tibetans’ encounters with development projects as a historically situated interpretive politics, in which people negotiate the presence or absence of moral and authoritative persons and their associated jurisdictions and powers. Because most Tibetans view the active presence of deities and other invisible and autochthonous beings as the ground of power, causation, and fertile or fortunate landscapes, Makley also takes divine beings as some of the important interlocutors for Tibetans. The Battle for Fortune, therefore challenges readers to grasp the unique reality of Tibetans’ values and fears in the face of their marginalization in China.
http://culanth.org/fieldsights/872-charlene-makley-on-tibetan-self-immolation-protests
Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State brings together essays, poems, artwork, and memes – a bricolage of media that conveys the experience of living in state-inflected worlds in flux. Critically and poetically engaging with redaction in politically charged contexts (from the United States and Denmark to Russia, China, and North Korea), the volume closely examines and turns loose this disquieting mark of state power, aiming to trouble the liberal imaginaries that configure the political as a left–right spectrum, as populism and nationalism versus global and transnational cosmopolitanism, as east versus west, authoritarianism versus democracy, good versus evil, or the state versus the people – age-old coordinates that no longer make sense. Because we know from the upheavals of the past decade that these relations are being reconfigured in novel, recursive, and unrecognizable ways, the consequences of which are perplexing and ever evolving.
This book takes up redaction as a vital form in this new political reality. Contributors both critically engage with statist redaction practices and also explore its alluring and ambivalent forms, as experimental practices that open up new dialogic possibilities in navigating and conveying the stakes of political encounters.
In a deeply ethnographic appraisal, based on years of in situ research, The Battle for Fortune looks at the rising stakes of Tibetans’ encounters with Chinese state-led development projects from 2000-2013, during the tumultuous period leading up to and beyond the widespread Tibetan unrest, the massive Sichuan earthquake, and the great spectacle of the Beijing Olympics (2007-8). The book builds upon anthropology’s qualitative approach to personhood, power and space to rethink the premises and consequences of economic development campaigns in China's multiethnic northwestern province of Qinghai.
Charlene Makley considers Tibetans’ encounters with development projects as first and foremost a historically situated interpretive politics, in which people negotiate the presence or absence of moral and authoritative persons and their associated jurisdictions and powers. Because most Tibetans believe the active presence of deities and other invisible beings has been the ground of power, causation, and fertile or fortunate landscapes, Makley also takes divine beings seriously, refusing to relegate them to a separate, less consequential, "religious" or "premodern" world. The Battle for Fortune therefore challenges readers to grasp the unique reality of Tibetans’ values and fears in the face of their marginalization in China. Makley uses this approach to encourage a more multidimensional and dynamic understanding of state-local relations than mainstream accounts of development and unrest that portray Tibet and China as a kind of yin-and-yang pair for models of statehood and development in a new global order.