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Violence and Opposition Among the Nomads of Amdo: Expectations of Leadership and Religious Authority

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Violence and Opposition Among the Nomads of Amdo: Expectations of Leadership and Religious Authority VIOLENCE AND OPPOSITION AMONG THE NOMADS OF AMDO: EXPECTATIONS OF LEADERSHIP AND RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY FERNANDA PIRIE In his historical analysis of the polities of Tibet, Carrasco (1959: 221) describes the grasslands of Amdo as Tibet’s “land of insolence”: These remote pastoral areas have been more loosely integrated into the political structures of the various states than the agricultural centres. (...) Feuding and arbitration, that is, direct action of the people concerned, are instead the main legal mechanisms. When trade routes go through these areas, the danger of robbers is ever present. The authority of Tibetan or Chinese state officials is at times enforced, usually through local chiefs, but at other times these areas relapse into complete independence. In the years before the Chinese occupation of the 1950s the state was practically absent on this part of the Tibetan plateau. As Carrasco says elsewhere (1959: 157–58), feuding was continuous among these tribes and Namkhai Norbu (1997: 3), who travelled through the area in 1951, recorded a song in which the Tibetan pastoralists glorified their practices of rebellion—against Tibet, the Buddhist establish- ment, China, the Mongols. The image of lawlessness and insolence has a certain romantic appeal, as Coon (1951: 295) recognised when applying the term to the Middle East.1 By contrast, several anthropologists working in comparably decentralized societies at around the same time described patterns of retaliation in quasi-law-like terms. Evans- 1 Carrasco’s description was based, to some extent, on the accounts of explorers and missionaries, who may have been keen to impress their readers with tales of adventures among uncivilized nomads (Rockhill 1891; d’Ollone 1912; Tafel 1914; Ma Ho-t’ien 1947; Rock 1956) but it is also supported by local sources (Gelek 1998: 47–49). 218 FERNANDA PIRIE Pritchard (1940), to take a classic example, describes retaliation among the Nuer of southern Sudan as a structural movement between segmentary groups (1940: 158) and a blood feud as a ‘tribal institution’ which occurs after a breach of law (1940: 150). He also describes established forms of mediation. Similar models have been elaborated in the context of different groups in the Middle East, north Africa and the Mediterranean (Barth 1961; Peters 1967; Gellner 1969; Gluckman 1973; Black-Michaud 1975). The relations among the Amdo nomads referred to by Carrasco could be analysed in a comparable way. The evidence from two writers who lived in Amdo before the 1950s, Robert Ekvall and Matthias Hermanns, is that feuding was an element in the structural relations between tribal groups, which formed a basic segmentary system. This is not, however, a reason to dismiss Carrasco’s description of Amdo as a ‘land of insolence’, nor his assertion that the pastoral areas were “always ready to fight for independence” (1959: 221). Both Ekvall (1964: 1124–25; 1968: 76–77) and Hermanns (1949: 231–32; 1959: 302), also emphasise the autonomy and individuality of the Amdo nomads and the individual and immediate nature of their responses to violence. As Ekvall (1968: 75) put it, the life lead by the Amdo nomads, “places premiums on aggressive personal decision making, quick and drastic response to exigencies, and willingness to take calculated risks.” The Amdo nomad is, “bristlingly independent, impatient of restraint, arrogant and oftimes truculent.” (1964: 1125) This implies a certain attitude towards authority, which is also reflected in a distinction made by Coon between the tame and the insolent in the Middle East. These are the attitudes I explore here, looking beyond the law-like and structural to focus on the role of the individual within contemporary practices of violence. Fieldwork conducted in the early twenty-first century has revealed practices of feuding and mediation among Tibetan tribes continuing even within the Chinese state.2 A precarious form of order is maintained through the interplay of the norms of revenge and those of restraint and conciliation, while individual qualities and the values of bravery, 2 I use the term ‘tribe’, following Khoury and Kostiner (1990) to refer to groups that are distinct, have relatively egalitarian internal relations and leaders who are more like chiefs than heads of a state. For the sake of linguistic simplicity I use the term ‘nomad’ to refer to the pastoralists of Amdo, including those from pastoralist families who have settled in town. .
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