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'.
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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 |