Revue D'etudes Tibétaines Est Publiée Par L'umr 8155 Du CNRS (CRCAO), Paris, Dirigée Par Sylvie Hureau
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Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines The Power of Wealth Economy and Social Status in Pre-Modern Tibetan Communities Edited by Lucia Galli & Kalsang Norbu Gurung numéro cinquante-sept — Janvier 2021 Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines numéro cinquante-sept — Janvier 2021 ISSN 1768-2959 Directeur : Jean-Luc Achard. Comité de rédaction : Alice Travers, Charles Ramble, Jean-Luc Achard. Comité de lecture : Ester Bianchi (Università degli Studi di Perugia), Fabienne Jagou (EFEO), Rob Mayer (Oriental Institute, University of Oxford), Fernand Meyer (CNRS-EPHE), Françoise Pommaret (CNRS), Ramon Prats (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona), Charles Ramble (EPHE, CNRS), Françoise Robin (INALCO), Alice Travers (CNRS), Jean-Luc Achard (CNRS). Périodicité La périodicité de la Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines est généralement bi-annuelle, les mois de parution étant, sauf indication contraire, Octobre et Avril. Les contributions doivent parvenir au moins six (6) mois à l’avance. Les dates de proposition d’articles au comité de lecture sont Novembre pour une parution en Avril, et Mai pour une parution en Octobre. Participation La participation est ouverte aux membres statutaires des équipes CNRS, à leurs membres associés, aux doctorants et aux chercheurs non-affiliés. Les articles et autres contributions sont proposés aux membres du comité de lecture et sont soumis à l’approbation des membres du comité de rédaction. Les articles et autres contributions doivent être inédits ou leur réédition doit être justifiée et soumise à l’approbation des membres du comité de lecture. Les documents doivent parvenir sous la forme de fichiers Word, envoyés à l’adresse du directeur ([email protected]). Comptes-rendus Contacter le directeur de publication, à l’adresse électronique suivante : [email protected] Langues Les langues acceptées dans la revue sont le français, l’anglais, l’allemand, l’italien, l’espagnol, le tibétain et le chinois. La Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines est publiée par l'UMR 8155 du CNRS (CRCAO), Paris, dirigée par Sylvie Hureau. Hébergement: http://www.digitalhimalaya.com/collections/journals/ret/ v Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines numéro cinquante-sept — Janvier 2021 The Power of Wealth Economy and Social Status in Pre-Modern Tibetan Communities Edited by Lucia Galli & Kalsang Norbu Gurung Lucia Galli & Kalsang Norbu Gurung Introduction pp. 5-19 Peter Schwieger Lenders and Borrowers in Tibetan Society pp. 20-32 John Bray Debt, Dependency and the Moravian Mission in Kinnaur, 1865–1924 pp. 33-65 Kensaku Okawa Latent Modernisation in Traditional Tibet: An Essay on the Evolution of Land Lease Systems in Tibetan Rural Society pp. 66-83 Lobsang Yongdan Timepieces as Gifts: Exploring European Clocks and Watches in Tibet pp. 84-97 Teresa Raffelsberger Economic Resources to Stabilise Power in Ladakh During the rNam rgyal Dynasty (16th‒19th Centuries) pp. 98-129 Lucia Galli Building Trust Within and Without. The Role of Costly Signalling, Ethnic Kinship, and Non-Sectarianism in the Socio-Economic Affirmation of 20th- century Khams pa Trading Firms pp. 130-161 Berthe Jansen From Sacred Commodity to Religio-Economic Conundrum: Tracing the Tibetan Term dKor pp. 162-192 4 Table des Matières Kalsang Norbu Gurung Measuring Income Inequality in Tibetan Society: Understanding the Different Amounts of Offerings and the Status of Tibetan Officials pp. 193-215 Peter Schwieger Rule and Labour in Tibet: Constructing the Red Palace of the Potala pp. 216-240 Charles Ramble Crime, Punishment and Socio-Economic Status in Mustang (Nepal) in the Early 19th Century pp. 241-257 v Introduction Lucia Galli and Kalsang Norbu Gurung his volume is the second in a series of thematic collections produced within the framework of Social Status in the Tibetan T World (TibStat), a research project funded by the French Na- tional Research Agency (ANR) and the German Research Council (DFG).1 With the concept of status as it was construed, maintained, and propagated within Tibetan societies still at the core of their inter- est, the contributions of this special issue of Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines investigate the impact of economic factors on the indigenous social dy- namics, extending their examination to issues of group domination, economic inequality, social resistance and change. The unequal distribution of wealth and power, and consequently, the relative status of one individual to another, have been the subject of Western scholarly analysis for centuries, yet when it comes to Ti- betan Studies, works offering any in-depth scrutiny on the matter are startlingly few and far between.2 Still, relations of status represent a major factor in any inter-personal behaviour, since the possibility to access the relatively restricted number of highly esteemed social 1 The first volume of the series, “Reflections on Social Status in the Tibetan World”, was published in Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, issue 49, see Galli and Schwieger (2019). TibStat was meant as an ideal continuation of the previous ANR/DFG research project “Social History of Tibetan Societies, 17th–20th Centuries” (SHTS), the results of which were presented into three thematic collective volumes (Ramble, Schwieger and Travers 2013, Bischoff and Mullard 2017, Bischoff and Travers 2018) and into four monographs (Ramble 2008, 2015, 2019, (forthcoming)). The contribu- tions contained in this volume were originally presented in Panel 51 (“The Rela- tionship Between Economic and Social Status in the Tibetan World until the mid- 20th Century”) at the 15th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Stud- ies, Paris 2019. 2 Despite the amount of Western scholarship dedicated to the intricacies of Tibetan social structure, the number of works actually centring on the interplay of social and economic status are surprisingly limited and often the outcome of a few schol- ars’ taking on the matter of landownership and the correlated issue of serfdom, as it is the case for the earliest studies by Carrasco (1959), Goldstein (1971, 1986, 1988), Miller (1987, 1988) and the most recent ones by Bischoff (2013, 2017). For a more general overview of economy and trade in Tibet, see, in particular, van Spengen (2000) and Harris (2013). On the value of gift-giving in Tibetan societies, see Bis- choff and Travers (2018). Galli Lucia and Gurung Kalsang Norbu, “Introduction”, Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, no. 57, Janvier 2021, pp. 5-19. 6 Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines positions is clearly affected by one’s own position within the group hierarchy. Although the human tendency to control and manage resources to ensure social standing is a primordial need, reproduced and shared in different contexts, times, and forms—from myths, religious and liter- ary texts to philosophical and political discussions—the debate perti- nent here mainly originated in 18th-century Europe, when the positiv- ist tendency to apply reason and progress to any field of learning, in- cluding historical affairs, enforced the assumption that status inequal- ities depended exclusively on power obtained through and expressed in economic prerogatives. Rooted in the rationalism of the Enlighten- ment, these concepts further developed into 19th-century ideas of ine- quality and oppression formulated as functions of economic relations. Social interactions then began to be defined in terms of predominance and control: the legacy of Karl Marx’s theory of class and domination, broadly construed as the control wielded by one group over the pro- duction and reproduction of another, proved to be long-lasting and far-reaching. Arguing against Marx’s materialistic interpretation of history and his conviction that “[t]he mode of production of material life determines the general character of the social, political, and intel- lectual processes of life”,3 Max Weber proposed a more nuanced con- cept of social relations, thereby denying economic factors that univer- sal and dominant power ascribed to them by the Marxist matrix.4 Ideas and values shaping people’s life, as well as any legitimising process of inequality, were, in other words, to be understood as a product of a particular time and setting, where different aspects—economic, social, and religious—co-occurred.5 Among the two competing approaches to social knowledge that were monopolising Western scholarly debate at the end of the 19th century—the idiographic method and its focus on particular scientific facts and processes versus the nomothetic one and its research for general laws of society—Weber came down squarely on the side of the latter, although his understanding of Carl Menger’s 3 Marx (1904, 10). 4 Weber ([1905] 1930, [1921] 1968). 5 Wolf (1999, 41). Openly critical of Marx’s historical materialism and economic de- terminism, Weber built upon the theory presented in Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first trans- lated into English in 1930) in 1905 to elaborate an economic sociology wherein in- equality is defined in terms of difference in life chances rather than exploitation. His main work, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie (Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, first translated into Eng- lish in 1968), published posthumously in 1921, made a profound impression on the field of social science, due to its systematic examination of social structures and their inner laws and tendencies and its critical stance towards Marxism and social- ist thought. For an in-depth analysis of Weber’s magnus opus, see, among others, Camic, Gorski and