art/sci fall/winter 2009 Tibet

Voices from Tibet

Anthropologist Melvyn Goldstein Elected to the National Academy of Sciences

In the summer of 1985, Melvyn C. Goldstein, the John Reynolds Harkness Professor of Anthropology, was crossing northern Tibet in a borrowed jeep. It was his first journey to the Changtang, a vast plateau as high and forbidding as any human habitation on earth. At an elevation of 15,000-18,000 feet, and with winter temperatures reaching minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit, the Changtang has grasslands but no trees or shrubs; its growing season is too short to sustain agriculture of any kind. But for centuries, nomadic herders have thrived there, consuming most of what their livestock produce and trading the rest for tea and grain, ironware and other necessities.

At the time of his visit, Goldstein had been studying Tibet for more than two decades. While still in graduate school, he had started to compile the first Tibetan-English dictionary devoted to modern Tibetan, not to the classical language in which Tibet's sacred texts were written. In his early fieldwork, he had spent two years in a refugee camp in India, interviewing Tibetans who had fled their homeland with the Dalai Lama in 1959, after a failed revolt against Chinese rule. Since joining the Case Western Reserve University faculty, he had published articles on kinship, marriage and fertility in rural Tibet and assembled a collection of the politically satiric "street songs" of Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.

Yet until the summer he traveled to the Changtang, Goldstein had never actually been to Tibet. The country had been closed to foreigners since China incorporated it in 1951. And like his fellow scholars in the field of Tibetan studies, Goldstein had not, until then, focused on developments in contemporary Tibet. Instead, he had sought to reconstruct the traditional social system that China had destroyed but that the Tibetan exiles still remembered. In the years immediately following the Dalai Lama's flight, the Rockefeller Foundation had created seven research centers around the world in order to train scholars for this purpose. One of those centers was at the University of Washington, where Goldstein completed his doctorate in 1968 after receiving his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Michigan.

Back then, Goldstein says, most people assumed that "Tibetan culture was finished," that "China had ended everything of value." That assumption seemed even more warranted after the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, when traditional beliefs and practices were brutally suppressed throughout China. Goldstein and his colleagues shared the prevailing view of Tibet's fate, and this view provided the impetus for their research.

"We were engaged in salvage work," he explains. "We were interested in trying to preserve knowledge of Tibet for the history of the world."

In the early 1980s, however, when China expanded its contacts with the West and began to pursue economic modernization, Goldstein saw an opportunity to gain access to Tibet. Through a cultural exchange program between China and the United States, he obtained permission to visit Lhasa under the auspices of the Tibet Academy of Social Sciences. After he had spent two months conducting research on linguistic change, the academy offered him a jeep to go anywhere in Tibet he wanted. Goldstein immediately asked to travel across the Changtang.

He was astonished at what he found: encampments of nomads in traditional dress, tending their sheep, goats and yaks on the remote highlands, their way of life apparently intact. The harsh measures imposed during the Cultural Revolution — abolishing private ownership of livestock, forcing the nomads to work for communes — had been reversed, and restrictions on private religious practice had been lifted. Goldstein noticed prayer flags flying from the nomads' black, yak-hair tents. "We thought that was all gone," he says. "But it was still alive. So when I got back to Lhasa, I said to my hosts, 'We should do a joint study of this.' And the Tibet Academy, which until then had never collaborated in research with any foreign scholar, said, 'That's a great idea.' So that's when we started to prepare a detailed agreement."

Goldstein recalls that the negotiations, all held in Tibetan, were tough. "For example, the academy thought that our fieldnotes and research data should be left in Tibet. When I demurred, they assured me it was no problem because if I needed anything, I could contact them and they would send it to me in Cleveland." Goldstein insisted that his university's president would never allow him to sign such an agreement; he had to be able to take the data home with him. After much discussion, the academy consented. In turn, Case Western Reserve agreed to bring Tibetan researchers to the university for further training. As a result, CWRU became "the first university in the world to sign a collaborative agreement for anthropological research in Tibet."

Goldstein's initiative had a profound impact on the field, according to Robert J. Barnett, director of modern Tibetan studies at Columbia University.

"He was among the very first people in the West to realize, and to act on the realization, that China had changed after 1978, and that scholars could start trying to go to do research within Tibet instead of just among exiles, where he'd worked for many years," Barnett says.

"But, more importantly, he was someone who realized that some aspects of Tibetan culture had survived the atrocities, the catastrophes, of the 1960s and the 1970s. Whereas most people had a view that Tibet no longer was there, that it was just a clone of Chinese society, Professor Goldstein looked at the reality on the ground. He went there and saw that many things had survived, in terms of culture and identity, and he tried to describe what he found there. This was a revelation of immense importance, and many of us have tried to emulate it in succeeding years."

There is no question, Barnett adds, "that Professor Goldstein is the outstanding person in the field of modern Tibetan studies. He is the most productive of anybody in this field, beyond almost anybody else's imagination, in terms of the amount he's been able to do and the quality he has been able to achieve. You could even say that, largely, he created or shaped this field himself."

A Rare Honor

This past spring, in recognition of his "distinguished and continuing achievements in original research," Goldstein was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. This is an honor so rare that he shares it with only one other faculty member in the college: Cynthia M. Beall, the Sarah Idell Pyle Professor of Anthropology. Beall has collaborated with Goldstein in his studies of Tibetan nomads and villagers, and they co-direct the university's Center for Research on Tibet.

The first phase of their in-depth ethnographic study of the Changtang nomads took place in 1986-1988, when they spent a total of 10 months living in a nomad community about 200 miles due west of Lhasa. Located in a district called Pala, the community consisted of 57 households, distributed among 10 home-base encampments and spread across several hundred square miles. Having persuaded the Tibet Academy to let them conduct fieldwork in all seasons, Goldstein and Beall were able to observe the nomads' entire annual cycle: sheep shearing in the late summer, hay-cutting in the fall, the winter slaughter of selected livestock, and the 50-day trek in the spring to collect salt from a distant lake bed.

Some of their research was purely quantitative — calculating milk and wool production, weighing the nomads' food intake in different seasons, conducting household surveys. But many of their most striking findings and insights emerged from what anthropologists call "participant observation." Goldstein and Beall lived in tents beside the nomads, went along on hunting and herding trips and collected life histories through extensive interviews. The nomads, Goldstein says, "were always extremely gracious and welcoming — in part because that is the way their culture is, and in part because we showed that we valued their culture by speaking their language, eating their food and acting in accordance with their norms and traditions."

To Goldstein and Beall, the nomads' lives seemed full of hardships. They photographed women bent over at the waist, milking long lines of sheep and goats — a task performed twice daily in the summer, when dairy production is at its peak. Traveling with the men in cold, rain and hail, they watched them "repeatedly load and unload the rambunctious yak, wearing no gloves, yet tying and untying knots in sub-zero temperatures." Goldstein points out that because the herds subsist entirely on natural vegetation, they must be taken out to graze every day of the year, regardless of the weather.

Yet the nomads insisted that, compared with farmers, they led an easy life, since their livestock provided for all their needs. And though they had a sophisticated system for managing animals and pasture — making careful judgments about when and how far to travel with their herds-they typically described their role humbly, saying that "the grass grows by itself and the animals breed by themselves."

Many scenes the anthropologists witnessed — boys guiding herds with slingshots, elders counting their rosaries and reciting Buddhist prayers — were identical to scenes that Western explorers could have observed in Tibet 70 or 100 years before. To Goldstein and Beall, the survival of this way of life was an "unexpected, but heartening, victory for all of humanity." Yet they also emphasized that the nomads were not immune to historical change. In their 1990 book Nomads of Western Tibet, they described how the inhabitants of the Pala district experienced the transition from the traditional society to Chinese rule. They collected accounts of the deprivations the nomads had suffered during the Cultural Revolution, and they examined the impact of China's decision to end communes and return the nomads to a household-based economic system.

Today, their taped interviews from the mid-1980s and 1990s are part of the Tibet Oral History Archive, an immense repository currently housed in the Center for Research on Tibet. Fully half of the archive — nearly 1,000 hours — consists of recordings in which ordinary Tibetans speak about their lives. Roughly another quarter contains interviews with former Tibetan government officials, as well as a subset of interviews with Chinese military and civil officials who worked in Tibet. Finally, the archive preserves Goldstein's interviews with Buddhist monks who once lived in Drepung, formerly Tibet's largest monastery. During the traditional period, Drepung was home to 10,000 monks, and Goldstein's work provides the only firsthand account of the lives they led in the era of "mass monasticism."

With support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the center is now digitizing the archive and producing roughly 30,000 pages of transcripts in English. These materials will eventually enter the permanent collection of the Asia Division of the Library of Congress, which will make them available to scholars and students on its website starting next year.

Beyond Stereotypes

The archive is a key source for a massive history of modern Tibet that Goldstein began publishing with the University of California Press two decades ago. The first volume opens in 1913, when the Tibetans, after centuries of loose subordination to China, expelled Chinese troops from their territory and attained de facto independence. Goldstein examines conflicting views in that period about Tibet's place in the world and the desirability of modernization. In particular, he describes the contention over whether to create a modern army — a step that the government never took, leaving the country vulnerable when China's new Communist rulers lay claim to Tibet in 1950. The second volume, covering the period 1950-1955, reconstructs the negotiations leading to the 17-Point Agreement, which compelled the Dalai Lama to accept Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, and documents the early years of Chinese control.

In these books, Goldstein says, his goal was to move "beyond stereotypes," to show that neither the Tibetans nor the Chinese are "homogeneous entities." For instance, he traces a long contest between hardliners and moderates in China's Communist Party over how much cultural autonomy and religious freedom to allow within Tibet. In tracing the course of Sino-Tibetan relations, Goldstein says, historians must "unravel the internal debates, disagreements and conflicts, interpreting how these interacted to drive goals and strategies on both sides-just as we would do for American or European history."

The political strife over the fate of Tibet complicates this task. In his 1995 book The Snow Lion and the Dragon, Goldstein observed that the conflict between Tibet and China is a struggle to control not only territory, but also "the representations of history and current events." And the vigorous debates sparked by his work have validated his perception of history as a "battlefield." Goldstein's books, as Barnett points out, "undermine some of the Chinese government's claims about the history of Tibet." But they also counter some of the claims made by the Tibetan exile community and its foreign supporters. Acknowledging this, Goldstein says, "This is the way scholarship should be — rigorous and nonpolitical."

Amazing Changes

When Goldstein embarks on a new project, he doesn't relinquish his earlier ones; instead, he adds it to the mix. He is still an active lexicographer: The latest edition of his Tibetan-English dictionary runs to 1,200 pages, and he hopes to undertake an even more extensive edition in the near future. He is finishing the third, 1,000-page volume of A History of Modern Tibet, covering the years 1955-1959. And he continues his anthropological fieldwork in rural Tibet.

With support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the National Science Foundation, Goldstein has conducted the first independent research assessing how Chinese political and development policies, and modernization in general, are affecting rural villagers, who make up 80 percent of the Tibetan population. His colleagues on this project include Beall, Washington University anthropologist Geoff Childs and three former graduate students from Tibet who attended CWRU and are now working at the Tibet Academy in Lhasa.

Summarizing the conclusions from their fieldwork in 1997-2007, Goldstein says, "Although there are many political and religious problems in Tibet, the standard of living for rural farmers has improved significantly, and they are not in danger of losing their culture."

Meanwhile, his research on farm communities hasn't kept Goldstein from following up on his initial study of the Pala nomads. During the past 23 years, he has recorded and analyzed the "amazing changes" these nomads have experienced. "In 1995," he notes, "just a few nomad families had acquired bicycles and small houses. A mere decade later, almost half of the families were driving motorcycles, trucks or tractors and had solar electricity. And the changes are still racing ahead."

On a visit this past summer, Goldstein found that many of the nomads had just begun to use cell phones. He recalls his surprise and amusement when a young man he had known as a boy in 1986 politely asked if it was okay to take his picture. This was a courtesy Goldstein had always extended to the nomads before taking their pictures. "When I said, 'Of course,' the young man whipped out his mobile phone and shot a few photos," Goldstein recalls. "I don't know what he's going to do with them."

Developments in transportation and communication have ripple effects, Goldstein says. Parents, for instance, are increasingly willing to send their children to the district's boarding school now that it is easier to call or visit. Traders from other parts of Tibet, traveling on new roads and bridges across the Changtang, are linking the nomads to global markets. In Goldstein and Beall's next book about the Pala nomads, which they hope to finish in the coming year, they will analyze such changes and document them through hundreds of photographs reflecting the earlier period and the present.

Goldstein acknowledges that the rapid pace of change poses challenges to the nomad community. Some less affluent households have gone into debt to buy their motorcycles and cell phones. And as exporters of wool, cashmere and skins, the nomads are now vulnerable to drops in global commodity prices.

Still, Goldstein's latest visit to the Changtang left him hopeful. "Even as the nomads accept new technologies and customs, they are not abandoning their core identity," he says. "They are still proud of their way of life. They all speak their language, they all herd animals, and they all perform individual and community religious and social rites." Goldstein has preserved the nomads' stories of how they survived the Cultural Revolution. Now, he believes, they will also survive "the onslaught of economic development and modernization."

Selected Writings

On the Cultural Revolution in Tibet: The Nyemo Incident of 1969. Melvyn C. Goldstein, Ben Jiao and Tanzen Lhundrup. 2009.

A History of Modern Tibet, Volume Two, 1951-1955: The Calm Before the Storm. Melvyn C. Goldstein. 2007.

A Tibetan Revolutionary: The Political Life of Bapa Phüntso Wangye. Melvyn C. Goldstein, Dawei Sherap and William Siebenschuh. 2004.

The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet and the Dalai Lama. Melvyn C. Goldstein. 1997.The Struggle for Modern Tibet: The Autobiography of Tashi Tsering. Melvyn C. Goldstein, William Siebenschuh and Tashi Tsering. 1997.

Nomads of Western Tibet: The Survival of a Way of Life. Melvyn C. Goldstein and Cynthia M. Beall. 1990.

A History of Modern Tibet, 1913-1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State. Melvyn C. Goldstein. 1989.