Urbanization, education, and the politics of space on the Tibetan Plateau

Yeh, Emily T.; Makley, Charlene

doi:10.1080/14672715.2018.1555484

Cited by 24 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Much of the Anglophone literature on the PRC's urban minorities already does this. We can see this, for example, in the growing literature on urbanization in Tibet (Yeh and Makley, 2019), which largely focuses on the harmful impact of state-led urbanization on Tibetans. Urbanization in Tibet is seen as a primary means of state-building (Rohlf, 2016) and the main technique for modernizing and integrating Tibetan areas (Fischer, 2013).…”

Section: Discussion: Setting a New Agenda For Researching The Prc's U...mentioning

confidence: 96%

Urbanizing Minority Minzu in the PRC: Insights from the Literature on Settler Colonialism

Wang

Roche

2021

Modern China

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This article provides a synthesis and critical review of the literature on urban minority minzu 民族 in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The vast majority of the Chinese-language literature on minorities in cities adopts a state-centric view through the lens of stability and integration, focusing on how minorities can adapt to urban life for the purpose of creating a “harmonized” society. This statist narrative not only denies the subjectivity of minorities in the city but also constrains the understandings of the dynamics of urban indigeneity. In this article, we draw on the literature of urban Indigenous peoples in settler colonial contexts to suggest new ways of examining the urban experience of minority minzu in the PRC. We suggest that this literature provides useful insights that help center the subjectivities and agency of Indigenous people in the PRC’s cities. Literature on urban minorities in the PRC can be expanded by engaging with the Indigenous urbanization literature to include coverage of three topics: representation (how minority people are shown as belonging to the city), mobilization (the use of urban space by minority people to pursue social, cultural, and political projects), and mobility (movement and interconnectedness between rural homelands and the city).

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Section: Discussion: Setting a New Agenda For Researching The Prc's U...mentioning

confidence: 96%

Urbanizing Minority Minzu in the PRC: Insights from the Literature on Settler Colonialism

Wang

Roche

2021

Modern China

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“…The broad goal of this longitudinal research was to examine how a host of economic and cultural changes were affecting young Amdo children's social and linguistic development. Amdo communities are facing urbanization on an unprecedented scale, the recent introduction of Mandarin as a lingua franca, and restrictions on traditional livelihood strategies (Yeh and Makley, 2019 ). In this context, Amdo parents expressed considerable anxiety about the loss of peer group play as the primary setting of young children's socialization, and noted pressure to socialize their children through mainstream schooling and structured extracurricular activities.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narrative Elicitation as Ethnography: Methodological Insights From the Examination of Children's Perspective Marking in Amdo Tibetan

Ward

2021

Front. Psychol.

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This paper employs a case study with Amdo Tibetan children to demonstrate the benefits of narrative elicitation for ethnographic language socialization research in under-studied languages. Primarily by examining spontaneous verbal interaction, existing language socialization research has demonstrated how salient grammatical resources shape children's understanding of cultural belief systems pertaining to sociality and the appropriate display of emotion. However, spontaneous data do not always capture children's full linguistic repertoires and competencies, and may therefore present a partial picture of their mastery over particular grammatical systems. One such area that remains to be studied is how children use interactional cues to build their emerging knowledge of grammatical perspective marking in Tibetan languages. This paper integrates narrative elicitation with ethnographic methods from language socialization to examine how Amdo Tibetan children mark perspective using evidentiality, the grammatically-obligatory encoding of knowledge source, an area not frequently documented in language socialization studies. Language socialization research involved 15-months of participant observation, audio-video recording, and analysis of spontaneous interactions with children aged 1–4. This ethnographic research found that adults' narratives highlighted local theories about the importance of compassion (Tib. snying rje) by using grammatical evidentiality to emphasize characters' direct experiences in the story-world. However, grammatical evidentiality was under-represented in children's spontaneous talk. To provide further insight into children's mastery of evidentiality in this culturally salient communicative genre, I conducted narrative elicitation tasks with seven Amdo Tibetan children, aged 2–7. By framing narrative elicitation tasks as forums for social interaction in family homes, I adapted a method traditionally used in experimentation to complement the study of naturalistic interaction. Interaction analysis of the elicited narratives found that family members positioned young children as novice narrators, leading to dialogic rather than monologic narratives. Young children co-constructed shared perspectives on narrated events, and used evidentiality in conventionalized ways by mirroring the grammatical forms of adults' previous utterances. By adapting narrative elicitation tasks to language socialization's ethnographic methods, this paper models how qualitative researchers can locate patterns in children's experiences of language across complementary settings of data collection, an endeavor that is particularly important to research with child speakers of under-documented languages.

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“…Also significant are the strong ties that the vast majority of Tibetans living in the PRC still retain with rural homelands (Tib: phayul , literally “fatherland”). Historically, very few Tibetans lived in urban centres and significant migration to urban areas has only occurred over the past two decades (Yeh, 2013; Yeh & Makley, 2018). Tibetan labour migrants are largely seasonal migrants who return to their fields during the busy agricultural season, or leave part of the household to tend livestock on pastures (Zhaxi, 2020).…”

Section: Geographies Of Entrepreneurship In the Global Southmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Urbanisation is contemporary China’s engine of economic growth, and is understood as development itself. Educational opportunities, medical care, and sites of employment are concentrated in cities, and policies such as “ecological migration,” rangeland destocking, and school consolidation have moved rural pastoralists to urban settlements (Grant, 2018; Washul, 2018; Yeh & Makley, 2018). While the older generation of rural residents has begun to migrate seasonally for labour as needs for cash increase, those younger than about 35 are additionally motivated by desires for freedom, personal autonomy, and the search for a modern identity (Zhaxi, 2020).…”

Section: Revalorising the Rural Phayul Through Entrepreneurshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

The cultural politics of new Tibetan entrepreneurship in contemporary China: Valorisation and the question of neoliberalism

Yeh

2021

Trans Inst British Geog

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Over the past decade, new forms of Tibetan entrepreneurship have emerged and proliferated in China, at the intersection of a national push for entrepreneurship in response to a slowing economy, the closure of non‐governmental organisations in Tibetan areas, declining state‐sector employment, and state concerns about stability. This paper explores the rise of these new Tibetan entrepreneurs in relation to two inter‐related concerns. First, it contributes to geographers’ calls for comparative studies of culturally specific meanings of entrepreneurship across the Global South. It explores the cultural politics of Tibetan entrepreneurship – active debates about what it means to be a proper Tibetan, in terms of religious commitments and cultural pride, in relation to money‐making activities. Second, it analyses these in relation to critiques of neoliberal subjectivities associated with entrepreneurship. One of the key themes of Tibetan entrepreneurship is the effort to create economic value in the service of cultural value and a sense of self‐worth for Tibetans living in rural areas. Thus, elements of the neoliberal self are sutured together with a sense of responsibility to Tibetan communities and historically sedimented idioms to form an entrepreneurial subjectivity that is broadly oriented to the project of revalorising Tibetan places and people.

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Urbanization, education, and the politics of space on the Tibetan Plateau

Cited by 24 publications

References 20 publications

Urbanizing Minority Minzu in the PRC: Insights from the Literature on Settler Colonialism

Urbanizing Minority Minzu in the PRC: Insights from the Literature on Settler Colonialism

Narrative Elicitation as Ethnography: Methodological Insights From the Examination of Children's Perspective Marking in Amdo Tibetan

The cultural politics of new Tibetan entrepreneurship in contemporary China: Valorisation and the question of neoliberalism

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