I've been a bit snowed under recently and have been unable to finish any of the longer posts I've started writing. So here's a brief post, written without much of the reflection or extra work that accompanies my longer offerings:
Today, on the way home from the from work, I was looking at recent posts on the popular messaging application WeChat, and saw a post by famous Tibetan comedian-poet-intellectual Sman bla skyabs. Since his retirement from performance, he has mostly devoted his creative attention to writing song lyrics. Apparently after receiving some criticism over one rdung len song's lyrics, he took to WeChat to defend it. Without going into all the details (as that would necessitate a much longer post, I was intrigued in particular by his discussion specifically about mdo dbus khams rong bzhi. I had never heard the phrase before, and judging by Sman bla skyabs's defense of its use, I gather that he was criticized for this innovative wording. The grammar makes enough sense. Tibetan speakers commonly list a number of terms and then, at the end, provides the number of terms (a b c, the three). For example, the traditional phrase mdo dbus khams gsum might literally be translated as "A mdo, Dbus gtsang, and Khams, the three." The phrase refers to all three traditionally defined Tibetan regions: A mdo (comprised of parts of Qinghai, Sichuan, and Gansu Provinces), Dbus gtsang (parts of the Tibet Autonomous Region) and Khams (parts of Western Sichuan, Qinghai, the TAR, and Yunnan). In his song lyrics, Sman bla skyabs chose to eschew the traditional phrasing for a novel one (though still based on this traditional formula): Mdo dbus khams rong bzhi, "A mdo, Dbus gtsang, Khams, and [rgyal] rong, the four." The final term, rong, refers to Rgyal rong, a region in present-day Sichuan's Aba (Rnga ba) Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture. Long marginal to both Han China and the rest of Tibet, Rgyal rong comprises a geographic and cultural borderland region. Some Tibetans suggest that people from Rgyal rong are not true Tibetans. Others insist that the Rgyal rong language is a very archaic form of Tibetan. Despite this marginal status, when identifying the different ethnic minority groups in China, the people of Rgyal rong were classified as Tibetans. Seen in this light, Sman bla skyabs's phrasing is significant. Instead of bowing to tradition, he chose to discursively incorporate Rgyal rong within the Tibetan cultural sphere. Though Sman bla skyabs may have been criticized for this phrasing, he insisted that his goal was to encourage Tibetans of all regions to thun sgril 'united'. This is an extension of a larger Tibetan cultural concern with ethnic unity. It remains to be seen, however, if the explicit inclusion of Rgyal rong within the Tibetan cultural world is a one-off or the beginning of a new movement.
1 Comment
|
About TimAs you can see elsewhere on this webpage, I conduct research on ethnic minorities in western China. This blog offers semi-academic musings on the minutiae of daily life out here--the sort of information otherwise destined for footnotes. Categories |