I was asked today to help someone cheat on an entrance exam. The fact that I didn't want to took the asker not only by surprise but was taken very personally, to the extent that all communication with the person has ceased. Now, I'm all for cultural relativism in certain situations, but I don't think that this is one of them. As an educator, I am more than happy to volunteer my time with people who want help preparing for a test. That's no problem. But being asked to help someone cheat, with them sending me messages on their phone (how they got a phone into the test without hiding it in their body cavities eludes me), images--that's right IMAGES--of the test and asking me to send answers back in response railed against every last one of my scholarly sensibilities. Anyway, where were the proctors, as the person took out their camera phone and took a photo of the test paper?
My friend used an "everyone is doing it" argument to try and persuade me. This particulary tack ceased to be a particularly compelling one for me since I was about 6 years old, and mom made it clear to me that jumping off a bridge because everyone else was doing it was not an acceptable course of action. But out here, the "everyone else is doing it" tactic is inflected with an us-vs-them mentality that says "the powers that be are not only taking everything, but also very corrupt, so I'm going to help my people get a piece of that pie." I had never quite experienced this situation and it plunged me into something of a moral dilemma. I might--though I'm squeamish even about that--bend rules for family, but I'm still not sure if I'm doing anybody a service by helping them cheat on an exam. They're supposed to be passing exams on skill, proving ability, earning promotions, etc. By cheating, they participate in a culture of corruption that I, personally, can stand. It was argued to me that the exams were silly, mandated by outside presences, and arbitrary. To this, I personally look to my own experience of having to take a French examination for my candidacy exam. To me, it seems that a person should just soldier on with their work. If you've got a job to do, instead of cheating on said job, just do it. This is, admittedly, a distinctly non-twenty-first century China view, but I think a little bit of a sense of personal honor would go a long way. I'd have been happy to help with exam prep, but actually taking the exam (as if I have nothing better to do) is another matter. There's another level for this: I don't like being used. I have occasionally been chided for doing too many things for free, but I only really do things for free if a) if I feel strongly about the thing I'm doing or b) I feel like that person isn't using me. Since my wedding, I have been asked to do many things for free that I don't really appreciate, and I have generally acquiesced in the name of family. Today, one of the same people who has suggested I should not give my time away, not only allowed herself to be used by a hometown former high school classmate (I was literally asked to do this for an acquaintance's former high school classmate's husband), who had not contacted her for years. Her thought was that if she didn't help, she would get a bad reputation in her hometown. This seems just silly. Asking someone to be their own person does not seem grounds for a bad reputation. Afterwards, I asserted that I never even wanted to be asked again. My friend was extremely angry. It seemed that I had broken some barrier, that I had betrayed not only the person, but the person's family, and perhaps the entire ethnic situation in Western China. To me though, it still seems an issue of a teacher doing a teacher's job. If you give a man a fish, you'll feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you'll feed him for his life.
0 Comments
To my few readers, I have uploaded my master's thesis onto the publcations page of this site. Check it out at your leisure...
I was recently at a dinner with several T friends. All are reasonably educated, urban-based professionals. Some had college degrees, others had none, but all are intensely interested in culture. There is something centripetal about being T among urban T people (many of whom grew up in the country-side). Conversations frequently revert to the same topics of culture, history, language, and religion. There is, in particular, a sort of anticipatory nostalgia at play here in which people expect the loss of culture, see it all around them, and long for pasts that are still, in some ways present. Today, I'll give a few thoughts specifically on the topic of history.
At some point early in the dinner, the topic of history came up, and it continued to dominate discussion for nearly half of the evening. The group spent a great deal of time discussing, and attempting to prove the T origin of communities in Gansu and Qinghai (and even in regions far further West). Some of the arguments were a bit far-fetched (well, they have a monastery there, so it must be a T place). Others relied directly on relating communities of A mdo with historical personages and events (e.g. Srong btsan sgam po sent soldiers to the borders and they built their communities there). Forget, for a second, that the former argument and the latter argument are treated as linked, even though they are almost certainly not. Most of the monastic institutions in Amdo were built during/after the later spread of Buddhism (T: phyi dar, this period is generally said to begin a few centuries after the end of the fall of the T empire) rather than the earlier (T: snga dar, this period refers to the initial spread of outside religions during the imperial period)--and to me it would seem to be necessary for the two to be linked for the argument to hold up. A third argument was etymological, suggesting that certain toponyms are originally T, and thus prove T origins (for example, the Chinese Dunhuang 敦煌, was supposed to originally have been stong khung '1000 caves'). All of these arguments were interesting, because they were ways of trying to utilize various reasonably "safe" discourses (the first being religious, the second historical, the third linguistic) to legitimate the lasting importance of their ethnic group. Henry Glassie talks about the importance of history in the evening ceilis in Northern Ireland. In these situations, things are asserted to be true, and that the truthfulness of these stories is paramount. A lie is a horrible sin in the community. Here in Western China, I'm finding that history is similarly important to the sustaining of community in Western China. I have often railed with frustration about the obsession with history and origins in T scholarship, indeed, local scholars often show themselves to be less interested with what's happening in the world around them than they are to discussing putative origins that are difficult (if not impossible to verify) other than by having enough people saying that they are the origins. But I'm beginning to think that this primordialism plays a crucial role to both identity management and doing so within a discourse that re-appropriates discourses that are already considered legitimate in the public sphere. And it is a trend that is not limited only to the academic sphere, but, as this evening made clear, penetrates and dominates among many sectors of the urban T population. I welcome all respectful feedback, criticism, and debate. These ideas are not a completed or finished product, but rather musings based on observations. I feel like there is truth to these, but I haven't fully figured out yet the best Congratulations to my friend, Khashem Gyal, whose new documentary Dpa' bo'i lung ba (Valley of Heroes) just debuted tonight.
Visually stunning and full of meaning, the film documents the current situation of language use and revitalization in Hualong County, Haidong Region, Qinghai Province. I'm proud of and happy for you, my friend. In a conversation the other day, a friend said that certain local populations whose name begins with a T, consider life to begin at conception. This was explained by two separate notions:
1) That members of this group say a child is one year old at birth, because of the nine months spent in the womb, and 2) Abortions and miscarriages are viewed as killing living beings. An acquaintance told me of a relative who even did a ritual to prevent future pregnancies after miscarriages. But abortions continue. This is an interesting phenomenon, in which religion and policy meet head on. At the same time, however, there are so many equal living beings that people participate (even indirectly) in killing over the course of their lives (ants, cockroaches, cattle, eating chicken eggs, etc.) that there's sin everywhere, and it makes me wonder, if for some, it's somewhat acceptable to, for example, save a living being a life of extreme hardship by being born to a girl who is in no way ready to be a mother. Interesting stuff. Taboos fascinate me, but I have thus far found it difficult to integrate most of them into my own scholarly work. As a result, I'll just put a few of the more interesting ones down here:
*Don't wear two hats, only ghosts wear two hats at the same time *Don't whistle at night because it causes ghosts. In fact, it's better to whistle as little as possible. *Don't look quickly over your shoulder at night, because there are lamps on your shoulders that protect you and that will go out if you do that. *Women shouldn't sleep on the mountain side while herding, because the mountain deity might impregnate them. Other more general taboos: *Keep your feet only where feet are supposed to be. On the ground, not near someone's head. *When you point towards an image of a deity, do so with you hand open and your palm pointed up (this is less a taboo, and more just something you should always do). *Don't sit on anything that should eventually go on top of you (I'm thinking blankets specifically, I think I've mentioned this earlier). I'll list more taboos when I have the time or when they come to mind. It should be noted that all of these are, to my knowledge, specific only to Yu shu (Yul shul) Prefecture. The second category is, I believe, more general, but I have no information about the former group being taboos outside of said location. There seems to be a desire to portray nomads as poor, dirty, and uneducated. It permeates policy, development narratives, and even academic work as NGOs gear their development work often towards helping nomads who they see as the poorest of the lot, and academics often trying to make their ways ever further out of the towns to the nomadic areas which are seen as simultaneously primordial and pure. It is perhaps the (academically contested) notion of primordiality (a handful of scholars have advanced the theory that pastoralism was a secondary development on the plateau AFTER that of farming) that leads to this, as local folks even repeat the view that Nomads are the essence of the ethnic group. But I believe that it is worth pointing out that nomads tend to be very wealthy by local terms. Questions of dirtiness need also to be re-examined as does that of education.
First up, poor: Nomads maybe traditionally didn't have much money in absolute terms, but they are and remain some of the wealthiest on the plateau. Robert Ekvall first mentioned this quite some time ago, when he noticed that ... Ekvall also mentioned that these are not static categories, and that a wealth farmer might later become a nomad, but these things seem to have been conveniently forgotten as people view nomads (the better and less laden term would be transhumance pastoralists) as a sort of organic and immanent category. Herders have access to meat, which is hard to come by in farming areas, and lack of money or material belongings does not change this. More recently, the booming Caterpillar fungus trade, which in Yushu prefecture (Gruschke estimates) exceeds the annual budget of the entire prefectural government, further boosts the coffers of local nomads. Many farmers have bitterly spoken to me of the fact that nomads are rich and sinful (because they are involved in a trade that will ultimately lead to the death of many sentient beings), and it seems important that even as photo albums are published, the plight of the nomad is described, and we bring our (dare I say colonialist) assumptions to nomadic peoples, they are in fact wealthy. In fact, even in urban environments like Xining, many people assume that T people are wealthier than others. Secondly, dirtiness: Perhaps in strictly hygienic terms, nomads are dirty. Maybe they don't shower as much as we do, or wash their hands, but that's because there's an entirely different system in place for understanding cleanliness. Cleanliness is, first and foremost, religious cleanliness and purity. Thus, while washing one's hands (and only the palms rather than the backside as well) is perhaps surprising to us, it represents something less important locally than making daily fumigation offerings or other form of ritual purification. Finally, education: It's easy to suggest nomads are backwards on the grounds of education. Living further away from urban centers, many nomads children find adequate schooling hard to come by, and families sometimes don't think much of sending their child away to school when it doesn't necessarily seem to be useful. Nomads are, however, very well educated in other things. Their knowledge of animals and the environments they inhabit are far more detailed than most of ours, and their ability to articulate it often surprises people who expect much less. In honor of the Carleton Ultimate Team's alumni weekend, I'll throw in a quote from Pooh: I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'. My apologies for the recent hiatus. Things have been busy and, while I have written several drafts, I have yet to complete a new and meaningful post that satisfies me.
In the meanwhile, here's an idiom I stumbled across: གཏམ་ཀུ་རེ་མེད་ན་བཤད་སྲོལ་མེད། ཟས་མཆོད་ཀ་མེད་ན་ཟ་སྲོལ་མེད། This maybe loosely translated as follows: There's no way to have a conversation without making jokes. There's no way to eat a meal without making offerings. I have recently seen this particular idiom used for both its first half (to justify the need for a comedic dialogue) and for its second (to suggest the need for making offerings). This usage makes it a little unique since, to my knowledge, most idioms are generally limited to a single definition and definition. |
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 |