Free in the mountains or home in the vineyard: Institutional changes in agriculture and negotiating between contract farm labour and valuable fungi collection in Tibet

Abstract

This paper evaluates how Tibetan farming communities choose between two methods of livelihood production: working as labourers on vineyard land they have leased to a French winery or collecting valuable fungi. I argue new transnational land and labour management, as part of institutional rearrangements in land tenure, are leading to significant changes with mixed benefits for rural farming communities. These communities respond by seasonally seeking freedom from capitalist labour and returning to communal forms of income production based around community land tenure and common-pool resources. Although villagers have become contracted labour, they choose to escape this new agricultural work in the mountains, collecting fungi together as a community. The common-pool land on which fungi are collected is also managed for access in a specific way by and for the community. Contrary to agricultural labour for the winery, fungi collection creates a chance for people to interact once again more as a cohesive community as they once did in their fields by collecting a commodity from land controlled by the community. The disembedding of one section of the economy has thus in a way reinforced the embeddedness of social relations in another as a coping mechanism for the former.

Beyond sustainable livelihoods: A diverse economies approach to rural peasant livelihoods in China's Qinghai Province

“…8 The businesspeople are predominantly men, and the majority of whom are rural peasants from all over Qinghai. 9 The collection lease system in Qinghai province is completely different from community managed collection system in Tibetan related areas of Yunnan province (see Stewart, 2014;Galipeau, 2021).…”

“…9 9 The collection lease system in Qinghai province is completely different from community managed collection system in Tibetan related areas of Yunnan province (see Stewart, 2014; Galipeau, 2021). …”