4.1 “Pulling one hair moves the entire body”

Unlike his contemporaries such as Tsering Oser, Tsering Norbu and others who express their national sentiments in the Chinese language (Smyer Yu 2011, 148 – 172), Shogdong’s presence among Tibetans is known through his use of Tibetan language with many of his writings formally published by Tibetan language publishers affiliated with the state. Shogdong is mentioned in Lauren Hartley’s “Inventing Modernity in Amdo” (Hartley 2002) and I first read his work in 2003 while I was doing fieldwork on Tibetan Buddhist revitalizations in Golok and Kham. At the time I was ethnographically situated in a Tibetan monastic environment and theoretically wrapped up in the equation that held that the revitalizations of Tibetan Buddhism were equal to the revitalizations of Tibetan culture, as was expressed in Goldstein and Kapstein’s volume Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet (1998). I had originally trivialized Shogdong as one of the Chinese state’s Tibetan functionaries who tend to debase their own traditional culture. But after teaching graduate seminars to Tibetan students and meeting Tibetan creative writers in Beijing between 2007 and 2011, my monastically-tinted view on Tibetan cultural revitalization soon encountered its own limitation: it obviously originated from my theoretical indoctrination in neoprimordialism, instrumentalism, and constructionism, all of which fundamentally rest the core of their debates on a substantive understanding of culture and identity either as a priori primordiality or as an instrument of some sort used to fulfill sociopolitical interests.

In 2010, my belated attention to Shogdong’s critical standing among Tibetans literally hindered an inclusion of fresh findings in my manuscript as his arrest by the state made it impossible to meet him personally. In retrospect I see that Shogdong’s public importance among Tibetans mostly lies in the “critical mass” engendered by the circulation and debate of his prolific writings. This “critical mass” does not necessarily imply uniformity among his audience; instead, it is a readership that is expressed as a unity of differences and dissent on the grounds of a collective exploration of what a modern Tibet or, more specifically, a modern Tibet imagined by Tibetans, means, in both present and future tenses. Tibet, as a physical place and an imagined future, is a highly temporalized and objectified landscape as well as a state of being with a double personality – at once an actual birthplace of Tibetans and a fragmented, polarized, and displaced mindscape. Both of these states of being are interlocked and sustain one another.

The previous passage of Shogdong’s writing comes from his Contemplation and Reflection published in 2008 by Gansu Minzu Press. Titled “Nine Wacky Things” () and based on his trip to Lhasa, this part of his book is indicative of his cultural and placial orientation toward Lhasa in his imagination of a modern Tibet:

Shogdong’s assessment of Lhasa as “a point where ‘pulling one hair will move the entire body’” suggests the critical importance of Lhasa as the center of Tibetan national belonging. Lhasa is not only a physical location; it is also, as his writing shows, deeply rooted in his mindscape. Shogdong’s physical experience in Lhasa could be a “hair pulling” moment in his personal life: his conflicting thoughts and emotions direct his body in conflicting movements between an ecstasy of homecoming and an agony of guilt. This mindscape-landscape connectivity shows what Timothy Oakes calls the “paradox of modernity” in which “Place, then, can be read as a geographical expression of modernity’s paradox – that tension between progress and loss – a creative yet ambivalent space carved out somewhere between the oppressiveness of the new order and the imprisonments of tradition” (Oakes 1997, 511). In Shogdong’s case, his stream of consciousness moves into the physical place of Tibet but is constantly displaced in his mindscape: he is in place but feels placeless; his elation in Lhasa confirms his sense of regaining a lost paradise but he feels simultaneously estranged from it because of its modern transfiguration and because of the self-assessed loss of his soul. The pulse of self-negation in the midst of his recollection of Tibet’s past and things traditional is markedly polarized.

The pathos of modernity endowed to native peoples worldwide is identical: the native’s reclamation of his or her past is painfully coterminous with the near-omnipresence of the psychically intrusive, bipolarizing force of modernity. What is remembered and recollected is also fragmented, with the invoked collective past unable to stand alone but needing justification and legitimation by modern standards. The rootedness of modernity in the interior of a native turns against him every time he attempts to re-embrace his pre-modernized identity. It overwrites the re-invoked collective memories with an automatic self-correction, a return to the modern mindset, because the past is best kept at a distance, judged, exiled, or reordered and reshaped. The pathos of modernity does not stop here; it moves on to alter the native’s sensorial experience and the very geological-cultural landscape of his birthplace.

Shogdong’s pilgrimage writing bears a consistent pattern of a dual depiction-visualization of the Tibetan landscape en route to Lhasa. His native vision of the landscape is frequently juxtaposed and even overwritten with his modern geological and cartographic vision of the Earth consisting of tectonic plates and places locked into longitudes, latitudes, and altitudes. He writes:

In Huber and Pedersen’s study of Tibetan native meteorological knowledge, they notice that contemporary Tibetans outside China are accustomed to representing their traditional knowledge system in modern scientific terms and that they claim it as a native science (Huber and Pedersen 1997, 578). What stands out in this native representation of their traditional knowledge concerning the Earth is what Huber and Pedersen call the “nature quantified” (Huber and Pedersen 1997, 580) in which both built and natural places are remapped. The qualitative distinctions found in native systems of thought recede into quantitative representations through the use of modern, technologically-advanced tools and vocabulary: thermometer, barometer, and isothermal representation (Huber and Pedersen, 580 – 582), etc.

It is noteworthy to point out that Tibetans outside Tibet and China positively represent their native knowledge system in modern scientific language. In contrast, many Tibetans like Shogdong, who are trained in China’s modern educational system, often not only negatively represent native knowledge systems but also take them apart with the same value judgments their Chinese counterparts bear toward native belief systems and practices. Therein the story of the Earth is deprived of its mythological and spiritual contents. Creation stories are reduced as stories of humankind’s infancy without historical and cultural significance, and gods and spirits are dismissed as products of human superstitions.

Shogdong and many of his peers live in a bifurcated world in which the gravitational relation of homeland and their job-based urban living environment is inversed. Their childhoods were spent in rural areas and townships of Amdo, such as Chapcha (), Chekha (), Shamdu (), and other places known among Tibetans for producing modern educators, cadres, writers, and filmmakers. They attended colleges in Xining, Lanzhou, Chengdu, and Beijing. Upon graduation from college, many of them found careers in these cities as school teachers, professors, government officials, Tibetan language publication editors, and media professionals. Amdo, their homeland, is for many, only two hours away by bus, private vehicle, or airplane and home has become a place of weekend and holiday visits. As they grow more rooted in their urban professional and social spheres, home appears more and more as a background rather than a foreground of their livelihood. Their urbanization and continuing systemic immersion in China’s modern infrastructure and superstructure undoubtedly contribute to the solidification of the paradox of modernity in their mindscape.

The Tibetans with whom I am acquainted in urban China and who are attracted to Shogdong’s writings have not lost their Amdo accent and continue to expand their repertoire of modern neologisms from Chinese, re-animating them with the meanings and contexts of existential, psychological, and spiritual agonies, dilemmas, and marginalities in their bifurcated living environment. The sense of revisiting, remembering, reconstructing or revolutionizing their collective past is resiliently present but, at the same time, their collective mindscape is clearly caught in the paradox of the old and the new, and of backwardness and progressiveness.

However, regardless of the inversed gravitational pull between homeland and urban settlement, and regardless of their positioning in the modern superstructure of China and in the intra-Tibetan discourse, many Tibetan urban dwellers whom I have met continue to be empowered by the landscape of their homeland, albeit often in their mindscapes in the forms of memories, discursive thoughts, and creative expressions. Modernity at its most pathological may have taken deep root in their mindscapes as a miasma that creeps in whenever there are openings, yet leaving the landscape of one’s homeland, or keeping a geographic and an ideological distance from it, does not entail the relinquishment of its potency.

Shogdong’s paradoxical negation of his tradition and empowerment by the landscape of Tibet is a telling example of the potency of place. As discussed in previous chapters, such placial potency in the Tibetan context is embodied in the mindscape of Tibetans. The Tibetan landscape not only includes geological formations but is embedded with humans’ ritualized and intimate relation with gods and spirits, the tracks of memories pertaining to the origin of Tibetan people, and finally the dominion of the immense landscape itself over human existential and spiritual realities. When such a potent landscape becomes an object of Shogdong’s negation, rejection, and dismissal, it speaks back to him when he is physically enveloped in it:

The natural flow of his place-induced narratives reconfirms the paradoxical manifestation of the modernity found in his other writings written in the cities of Xining and Lanzhou. These narratives, intimately enmeshed with his affection for the landscape of Tibet, are the resurfacing of his repressed native cultural upbringing as well as the voice of the landscape of his homeland itself speaking back to and through him.

Place has its own being, whether it is built or natural. Like any other species, humans are “implaced beings to begin with” (Casey 1997, x). Likewise, place is also an implaced being in human mindscape. The implacement of landscape in one’s mindscape is attested to in what Casey refers to as “the memorability of place” (Casey 2000, 200). Shogdong’s pilgrimage experience demonstrates that no memory is devoid of place. His memory signifies a past but this past is grounded in a particular place with all of its aspects of materiality: culture, religion, topography, and geological formation. What is remembered in time is space, not homogenous, undifferentiated space but a specific, situated lifeworld with specific mythological, historical, and spiritual markings. Such a remembered lifeworld embedded in time is the result of the implacement of landscape in mindscape from one’s birth, infancy, adolescence, and adulthood. The identity of a person is inextricably tied with the topography, ecology, and social environment of the place.

The implacement of modern consciousness in Shogdong’s mindscape has apparently created currents of commotions and “mind-quakes” and puts him in the paradox of modernity as he moves between urban China and the landscape of Tibet. However, when he places himself in the embrace of geographic and geological Tibet, he, admittedly or not, seems to submit himself to his native eco-sublimity in which he at once finds both the insignificance of humankind and the potential of humanity that could match the greatness of the Earth. He narrates:

These currents that express his eco-sublime feeling toward his homeland contradict his appraisal of Tibet’s traditional cultural landscape as a place of “backwardness.” It is not irrelevant that his appraisals have been formulated in the landscape of urban China. What he has absorbed from the urban political and cultural landscape of China is undoubtedly an integral part of his paradoxical mode of being. In the manner that the landscape of his homeland is implaced in his mindscape, the landscape of modern China is also implaced in it. It is not the landscape of Tibet in both cultural and geological terms that contradicts and transposes his place-based nativeness, but rather the modern landscape of contemporary China subjects his translocal and transnational mode of being to paradoxical conflict, commotion, emotion, and contemplation in his mindscape.

4.2 Forgetting as Remembering

Many of my Tibetan students and friends in Beijing see Shogdong as a radical modernist. In my ethnographic work with a few of Shogdong’s college peers from Northwestern Minzu University who are now writers and scholars in Beijing, I find they still retain such an image of their college classmate though some of them have begun to change their viewpoints after reading his newer publications. When I proposed interview sessions with three of Shogdong’s college classmates in late 2010, two of them dismissed his publications as “unworthy” because of his anti-traditional writings. I suspected that they had not yet read Shogdong’s more recent writings, but one writer sat down with me for an evening meal near the university. He warned me not to look upon Shogdong as only an anti-traditionalist, emphasizing that Shogdong, unlike other urban Tibetans who are not literate in Tibetan, had his full upbringing in Amdo until he went to college in Lanzhou.

From my writer friend’s view, Shogdong is an inextricable part of the contemporary Tibetan ethnic revival except that his approach is non-traditionally advocating a modern newness for Tibetans to redefine their identity, nationhood, and social presence in the boundary of China. This future-oriented ethnic revival is identical to the early period of modern China during which Chinese cultural elites were determined to construct a new China by abolishing what they perceived as “old China.” In this mental and physical transition from the old to the new, native intellectuals were the vanguards of a revolution sending shock-waves to their entire nation as they smashed temples and burned books (van der Veer 2011, 272). In this regard, what is comparable between the contemporary Tibetan case and the historical Chinese case is the role of native intellectuals as “the new priesthood of the nation” (Smith 1986, 157). In my earlier work on Tibetan intellectuals situated in this modern “priesthood,” I mostly emphasized their role in reorienting younger generations of Tibetans to re-embrace their Buddhist past through the traceable tracks of Tibet’s Buddhist theocratic history (Smyer Yu 2006 and 2011).

Shogdong does not have the same “priesthood” status as Tsering Oser, Tsewang Norbu, and the late Yidam Tserang. He is not a charismatic leader followed by a crowd of Tibetans who share the same views; instead, his role has engendered an intra-Tibetan discourse on tradition and modernity through the circulation of his writings in books, journal articles, and online publications. He rather draws critical attention from charismatic public Tibetan figures. Tsawa Daneg, a contemporary Tibetan poet, published an essay on a Tibetan-language website in China, entitled “Eradicating Shogdong’s Thought” (Tsawa Daneg 2009). This title is coined from one of Shogdong’s chapters called “Eradicating the Old Habit.” As a pro-traditionalist, Tsawa Daneg cites numerous well-known lamas who are critical of Shogdong, including for instance, Dozhi Rinpoche, who remarked, “Today we have some young people who package the cruel movements of the Cultural Revolution in the clothes of science and promote them… These profligates import the garbage of Russians like treasures” (Tsawa Daneg 2009). To emphasize his critical point, Tsawa Daneg posts the rhetorical questions of Miwa Dentsen Gyaltso Rinpoche and Khenpo Tsechem Lodro from Larungar Buddhist Academy: “How could you count the elementary knowledge you copied from our little recitation book as our old habit?…Isn’t it ridiculous how someone [implying Shogdong] tells us what this world is about when he has never traveled outside the Sun-Moon Mountain Pass [ nieda rewo] and beyond the bounds of Silang [Xining]?” (Tsawa Daneg 2009).

Shogdong’s publications draw criticism from leading figures in the current Tibetan cultural revitalizations. Many of my Tibetan students, on one hand, admire Shogdong’s fearless spirit, but they also think he over-idealizes modern political practices from the West. One of the most common criticisms is that Shogdong has only lived in his home region, namely Xining and Lanzhou, and thus the geographic radius of his living environment limits his actual experience of modern politics and lifestyles elsewhere. However, this geographic limitation does not confine Shogdong’s iconoclastic expressions toward his own cultural and religious heritage. Unlike his Buddhist-leaning contemporaries such as Tsering Oser, who direct their public contentions to the state, Shogdong rather makes his an anti-traditional stance, saying that it is the Tibetan traditional mode of being that has hampered Tibetans’ progress toward a true, strong, modern Tibetan nation. Shogdong makes it clear that he wants his tradition to take the blame for contemporary Tibetan “backwardness” and suffering:

Begcheg ( habit), initially a Buddhist term, refers to reflexive behaviors or habits that have become second nature for a person. In Tibetan Buddhist philosophical and doctrinal discussions of human social behaviors and acts of the mind, begcheg signifies a set of habitual behaviors which take shape with the external environment and the internal, karmic propensity of the person. When it is materialized as one’s tangible personal habit, it reflexively expresses itself through one’s bodily act, speech, and volition. Shogdong’s use of begcheg, in my reading, mostly refers to the external, material culture of traditional Tibet but in a highly temporalized and objectified fashion when he adds the adjective “old” to it and juxtaposes it with the neologism “new habit” (). When it comes down to what he means by “new habit,” Shogdong does not offer a clear definition or description in his texts except to connect it with “freedom” ( rang-wang), “equality” ( dra-nyam), “humanistic culture” ( michu regne), and other newly introduced terms. This is opposed to his numerous expressive critiques of the “old habit” where he gives his reader a clear delineation of what he means by the term:

In his juxtaposition and dichotomization of old versus new habit, it is discernible that Tibet, in Shogdong’s mindscape, exists not in the present but in the past and the future. The present is what he perceives and experiences as “backwardness,” “suffocation,” and “being shackled to the past.” Pathologically speaking, his way of coping with the present is clearly shown in his temporally reassigning the present difficulties of Tibetans to a past that is alleged as the fundamental cause of those difficulties. From there he goes deep into this past in an attempt to put an end to it, as a diagnostic move and a healing act. It appears that all his mental and spiritual energies converge on the “old habit” of Tibetans, a construct of his own making, as the sole target of his blame. The building blocks of such a construct are funneled through his radical modernism. His intent to erase and forget the past is a process of intensely remembering the past while inversing it by bringing it to the present for critique and public display of the wrongs of which it is accused.

As a matter of fact, the presence of the “old habit” is seen everywhere in Tibet. Shogdong’s determination to make it disappear is resolute but is also unimaginable to observers. In my fieldwork in Shogdong’s home area in Amdo, I see the practices of the “old habits” of common Tibetans routinely: circumambulating stupas, offering incense and butter to monasteries, and inviting monks or yogis to perform offering rituals for mountain deities. However, looking at these religious practices through the lens of his radical modernism, Shogdong refers to them as practices of what he calls “deity culture” (), a term he created in juxtaposition to “humanistic culture” (), which he also coined. In his view, the former is “the way of gods and spirits” while the latter “the way of people” (Shodgong 2001, 10 – 11). He lumps all Tibetan religious and traditional cultural practices together as the deposit of what he perceives as “backwardness” and “decline.” He narrates his experience in Lhasa among pilgrims:

The alleged weakness of Tibetans, in Shogdong’s eyes, inherently lies in their religious practices which are seen as acts of ignorance. In his modernist vision, he describes devotional acts such as prostrating as “trees being felled from their roots” (Shogdong 2001, 103). To continue on he then connects prostration with the servileness and submissiveness of Tibetans to hierarchy, inequality, and self-enslavement. In his book The Call of Reason he designates a chapter to prostration with his modernist value judgment reflected in its title – “Prostration is a Slave Mentality.” Shogdong alleges the existence of this slave mentality because, according to him, Tibetans are accustomed to submitting themselves to supernatural beings and worldly powers. From his modernist view, these devotional acts become acts of ignorance and baseness. He writes, “We are slaves. We want to be slaves and we have the slave mentality inside of us. It is because for a long time we haven’t had a consciousness of equality (), freedom (), self-power (), respect (), and autonomy ()…What is more important is that we have performed for generations all kinds of Dharma ceremonies that inculcated our slave mentality. We came to the world with this slave mentality” (Shogdong 2001, 101).

The pathos of Shogdong’s modernism is identical to many progressive Chinese cultural critics in the late Qing and the Republic eras, such as Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and Lu Xun, when they encountered modern changes. The perceived “slave mentality” of the Chinese was a heated topic of their discourse on modernity. For instance, in Liang Qichao’s “On the Origin of the Weaknesses of China” published in 1901, he pins down slave mentality as the basis of Chinese weaknesses, “A slave does not have the ability of self-governance, neither does he have the consciousness of independence…He takes whatever others look upon as unbearable humiliation and insult as part of his life. This is slave mentality” (Liang 1992, 73). What is also identical between Shogdong’s modernism and his Chinese intellectual counterparts a century ago is that the underlying purpose of the self-debasement of calling one’s people “slaves” is to build a new nation with a new people (Liang 1916, 63). It is the self-constructed old and new modes that commence a course of pathologically-discernible self-victimization, self-debasement, self-temporalization, and self-objectification for the sake of building a modern nation in an indefinite future.

Shogdong’s modernist temporalizing vision of Tibet’s present is so intense that he posits the possibility of a total annihilation of the old habit, as he bemoans, “When looking around and looking back, we see the roots of our decline found in our old habit. In order to let our mind and wisdom receive infinite freedom and growth, we must kill this old habit even though it is as despotic and authoritarian as our parents” (Shogdong 2001, 41). Shogdong’s strident emotions coincide with the trend of ethnic revivals mimicking modern nationalism with the idea of equal rights and legitimate sociopolitical recognition. Anthony Smith notes, “To make any real headway in the modern world, ethnic movements must take their claims in political and economic terms as well as cultural ones” (Smith 1981, 20).

Clearly modern nationalism has enlivened the public visibility of ethnic revivals worldwide, including that of Tibet. Ethnic revivals frequently come into the global and local public spheres with well-defined political objectives and political platforms for self-representation based on consciously constructed ethnic histories and imagined futures. Ethnicity, in the framework of modern nationalism, is expressed publically with the narratives of its primordiality not only to its members, but to non-members as well, in a politically organized fashion. Furthermore, the primordial claim can also be replaced with the totally new, imagined future identity based on modern conceptions of freedom, equality and democracy as shown in Shogdong’s case and his Chinese intellectual counterparts’ discourse of nationalism a century ago. In this regard, an ethnic revival is a beginning stage for the intended establishment of modern autonomy that is not necessarily based on its past. Oftentimes, the past is looked upon as a hindrance to the intended modernity of an ethnic identity.

Obviously there are two parallel developments involved in the Tibetan ethnic revival. One is commonly recognized as the predominant trend, that is, the reclamation of Tibet’s traditional, particularly Buddhist, past. Another appears on the margin of the dominant trend and rather desires to have a complete severance with the traditional past by constructing a Tibetan identity aligned with modern conceptions of nationhood. Both developments hinge their discourses and debates on how the past should be remembered. On the first side, the past is remembered as the continuation and preservation of Tibetan culture as a unique civilization. The Buddhist-oriented revival thus positively re-embraces Tibet’s Buddhist history based on the Lhasa- and Dalai Lama-centered history. This trend is conspicuously shown in its uncompromising demand for the larger autonomy of Tibet in China and by claiming Tibet’s primordiality. This trend is well documented in China as well as by international scholars. On the other side, the radical modernist case exemplified by Shogdong is lesser known but becoming more visible. For those who think like him, the past is remembered so as to be forgotten in order for modern empowerments to be granted to future Tibetan citizens. As Hartley notes, this radical Tibetan modernism seems to align its ideology with the Chinese experience of modernity (Hartley 2002, 1). It is true that many of Shogdong’s writings were published in state-run venues such as Gansu People’s Press and his anti-traditionalist view was publicly acknowledged by the state (Hartley 2002, 11). To both urban Tibetans and Chinese statesmen, Shogdong is seen as a Tibetan version of Lu Xun, a radical writer of modern China’s Republic era known for his satirical depiction of traditional China as a “cannibalistic society” (Lu Xun 2009, 7– 18).

I addressed the Buddhist-oriented Tibetan ethnic revival elsewhere (Smyer Yu 2006 and 2011) in terms of how memories are re-invoked toward a unified understanding of Tibetan civilizational identity. Shogdong’s case also involves recalling Tibet’s collective memories but with the intention to ultimately erase them because of their lack of mechanisms to address Tibetans’ felt inequality in China. In this respect, ethnic solidarity can also be grounded in the common sociopolitical experience of its members in relation to their social marginality. This grounding oftentimes results from native cultural elites’ discernment that their traditional cultural and governing system is absent of means for ensuring social equality and tolerance, if not appreciation, of ethnic and cultural differences. Shogdong’s envisioned modern Tibet requires an invention of a new tradition or a new Tibetan ethnogenesis based on modern principles and values of equality.

Resembling his Chinese intellectual counterparts, Shogdong is initiating a collective forgetting and erasure of Tibet’s past. His writings reveal a pattern of forgetting-through-recalling the past. His intentional forgetting is visibly dependent upon remembering details of Tibetan cultural practices, particularly those religious ones that he deems expressions of ignorance. Ultimately it is a reflexive remembering process but it appears as a deliberate forgetting process. Whatever is identified as ignorant and backward has to be re-surfaced in order to be the objects of his erasure. His chapter “Tossing the [Old] Habit into the Abyss” ( Shogdong 2001, 25 – 41) exemplifies the linkage of his modern disembedding intent toward his own culture and his reflexive memories that are recalled merely so they can be discredited. He writes:

The sequence of Shogdong’s forgetting and remembering shows this pattern: reflexive recollecting ⇒ public discrediting/ridiculing ⇒ collective remembering. The recollecting pattern appears as what Paul Ricoeur refers to as the “habit-memory” nexus (Ricoeur 2004, 435), which is “a moving point” or a “reflexive movement” (Ricoeur 2004, 436) of memory, linking body, place, and mind. In such a nexus the past, the present, and the future are simultaneously present. The weight of this reflexive, memorial movement is the place-based habit. Habit is in this sense identical to the Tibetan lexical meaning of habit mostly as a product of one’s lived environment. Like Ricoeur, I favor Bourdieu’s habitus – the disposition of the individual consciousness that is inherently collective because it is environed in its native, physical but humanized place with a set of specific social and cultural meanings (Ricoeur 2004, 441). The reflexivity of habit-memory thus is trans-temporal and trans-spatial in the mindscape of the individual as a transpersonal flow of a collective memory. Because of its reflexivity and, often, unconscious state, it surfaces but is not surficial in nature as it is deeply rooted in the mindscape and like second nature for the individual. In this sense, habit-memory is synonymous with “deep memory” (Ricoeur 2004, 441) that is the perpetual ground for the individual to exercise intentional forgetting, selective remembering, and finally reordering his memory for both personal and social needs. Forgetting and remembering then do not belong to separate domains of the mindscape, but are interlocked into a dialectic relationship. Each simultaneously weakens and strengthens the other, as Ricoeur remarks, “forgetting is experienced as an attack on the reliability of memory…Memory defines itself as a struggle against forgetting” (Ricoeur 2004, 413).

In Shogdong’s radical modernism, forgetting and remembering appear as both a natural temporal recalling of a past and a deliberately disembedding, temporalizing process embedded with the matrix of modern values and practices. However, on a deeper level, his recalled past is consistently lodged in specific placial terms, including “the Himalayas,” “the Snowland,” and “Amdo.” In this regard, what is dated and temporalized is recollected reflexively as place; thus, place survives in time, but is frequently subject to displacement and replacement with fresh layers of encrustation added from the present context of the individual or the group. In spite of the commotions and violence resulting from the new encrustation, place retains itself in the midst of “dis-” and “re-” actions of the mind and body. It is simply because place is lived spatiality (Casey 1997, 5). Lived place is entrusted with memorability from the lived body/mind. Thus, habit-memory is habituated in place but moves with the moving body/mind: “Places inhabited are memorable par excellence” (Ricoeur 2004, 42) and memorable places are the inherent encrusted layers of mindscape likened to geological layers of the earth. A deep mining of it only makes it ever more present.

This is where Shogdong draws attention from his Tibetan peers and younger urban dwellers in China, especially when he discredits the social relevance of traditional Tibetan religious practices. His exclusive attribution of the alleged weaknesses and decline of Tibetan culture is popularly counterattacked by his compatriots who rather see contemporary Tibetan suffering as originating elsewhere. And yet, from the logic of Shogdong’s radical modernism, Tibet is ill-prepared for the fast advancing modern political style of life in terms of the exercise of individual freedom and rights and the protection of collective wellbeing. When he discredits or ridicules Tibet’s past, he mostly draws not sympathy but expressions of an array of collectively experienced pain felt over the last half a century. In this sense, his negative public testimony of Tibetans’ “backwardness” and “ignorance” becomes what Ricoeur calls a “pathology of memory” (2004, 69) in which the work of remembering becomes the work of mourning and melancholia (2004, 71–72) or simply a state of desolate remembering. The wounded self “succumbs to the blows of its own devaluations, its own accusation, its own condemnation, its own abasement” (2004, 73). Such pathological pattern of memory resembles self-victimization, often a symptom of post-traumatic stress syndrome (van der Kolk 1996, 7) but absent of awareness by the suffering patient. In other words, the pathogenic background or the causal links of the illness are transferred to the patient himself: the patient finds the cause of his illness no longer elsewhere but within himself (Freud 1958, 12:152). From there the paradoxical mindscape of modernity emerges in a series of splits that are negatively interdependent: the past is temporalized for the present cause of social action; the present is spatially re-assigned back into the past which is shown to be an undesirable mode of being, and the future appears in the present in both imaginative and illusory visions of aspired-to reality. In this situation, private habit-memory or deep memory becomes a public forum in which “Memory becomes a locus of struggle over the boundary between the individual and the collective or between distinct interest groups in which power becomes the operative factor” (Antze and Lambek 1996, xx).

4.3 Subalternity of radical modernism

Like Hartley, I also think that we cannot fully understand the recent historical context of Shogdong’s thoughts without bringing the late Dondrub Gyal ( ), a widely known modern Tibetan writer, into the picture (Hartley 2002, 7). Many of my Tibetan friends in Beijing think that Shogdong’s modernism is a continuation of Dondrub Gyal’s vision of a modern Tibet. These two modern Tibetan thinkers are almost ten years apart in age, but both received the same state education and were influenced by the same range of Chinese modern thinkers including Lu Xun and Mao Zedong. Thus, to understand the pathological modality of contemporary Tibetan radical modernists, it is indispensable to trace the pathogenic background.

Born in Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Qinghai Province in 1953, Dondrub Gyal was admitted to the Central Institute for Nationalities (Currently Minzu University of China) in Beijing in 1971. There he was fully exposed to the ideological core of Chinese modernity. After graduation, he worked for Qinghai People’s Radio, at his alma mater, and at the Nationality Normal School, his last post, in Chapcha, Qinghai Province. His popularity among young Tibetans began with the 1983 publication of his poem entitled “The Waterfalls of Youth” in Sbrang-char (), a journal in the Tibetan language. This poem was a prophetic call for a Tibetan “new youth” movement for a modern, strong Tibet. The currents of his poeticized emotions and feelings start with the Tibetan landscape and the blue sky. These currents animate both the terrestrial and celestial realms with a gigantic, personified waterfall pouring down a cliff. The poet exclaims, “This is – the torrent of the youth of Snowland” (Dondrub Gyal 1983, 57). This personified waterfall soon commences a dialogue with “us” – Tibetan youths, in which the poet makes a collective vow through the voice of the Tibetan youths:

Dondrub Gyal committed suicide at the age of thirty-two in 1985. Interpretations on the reason for his suicide among his friends and scholars vary but most of them commonly agree that he had lived an unhappy life after his return from Beijing to Qinghai. A few of his contemporaries whom I met in Chapcha, Chengdu, and Beijing told me that Dondrub Gyal suffered from depression during his last two years and the external social pressure to his propositions for radical changes came from pro-traditionalist Tibetans around him as well as suspicions from the Chinese state. Aside from his two unhappy marriages, he lived in isolation in Chapcha. However, his established Tibetan contemporaries in urban China, such as Gesang Yishe and the late poet Yidam Tserang, all spoke highly of his literary creativity and Tibetan national spirit. In the meantime they also witnessed the pathological mode of being toward the end of his life.

In connection with the origins of Shogdong’s radical modernism, it is important to point out that Dondrub Gyal’s exposure to modern thought was limited to what was sanctioned by the Chinese state. In a recent posthumous critique of his writings by a young Tibetan writer under the alias Bongtse () in a Tibetan language journal of Minzu University, Dondrub Gyal’s modernism is discussed in conjunction with the influence of Mao Zedong’s “Against the Party’s Regimented Writing Style” and “The Speech on Literature and Art Symposium in Yan’an” (Bongtse 2010, 93), both of which are anti-traditional in nature calling for a socialist “new literature.” In this critique, Dondrub Gyal’s anti-traditionalism is likened to Mao’s anti-Confucianism. He promoted the “new literature” among Tibetans though it must be recognized that the Chinese state operated all newspapers, broadcasting programs, and magazines. The condition of Dondrub Gyal’s Tibetan “new youth” is to eradicate Tibetan cultural practices deemed “backward.” Recalling my discussion with a Beijing-based Tibetan writer, he regards both Dondrub Gyal and Shogdong as two Tibetan Lu Xuns except that they belong to two different eras, those of Mao and Post-Mao. Both of them desired to “wake up” their compatriots’ consciousness as Lu Xun and his contemporaries in the Republic era attempted, “as if waking them up from a dream-state” (Shogdong 2001, 175). Shogdong adds his own perception of why Tibetans are not “awake.” He sees Tibet’s development as that of a child:

If Shogdong’s radical spirit was influenced by Lu Xun, his evolutionary view on Tibet’s “immature personality” comes from his reading of Western thinkers. In terms of what he means by “qualified human beings,” he admits elsewhere that he is influenced by Rousseau and Locke, both of whom are alleged to have posited the dual-idea of “natural being” and “social being.” The latter has evolved from the former with complex social systems of culture, law, and governance. In a published transcription of interview notes in reference to this dichotomy, Shogdong says, “We [Tibetans] are still natural beings, not social beings” (Shogdong 2001, 176). Obviously the distance between two modes of being is not coeval but is a temporally understood, evolutionary distance between the past and the present. In the political sense, it is in fact an internalized distance of power between the dominant and the dominated in the name of modern social evolutionism.

Unlike Indian subalterns’ experience of power shown in their sharply cleaved relationship with the dominant, I see Tibetan cultural elites’ experience as a series of modern forces of change mixed with subalternity, empowerment, anguish, and aspirations. They are subalterns as the subjects of modern China but speak in the public sphere of the dominant; however, theirs is not free speech in its true sense but must conform to the framework and the linguistic pattern of the dominant. In this sense, they exercise their power and express their aspirations all through the state’s pre-defined framework. Shogdong recently tested the consequence of crossing out of this framework and the result was imprisonment, the globally recognized response of the Chinese state to dissidence.

To answer Spivak’s question, “Do subalterns speak?” (Spivak 1988) in the context of Tibetans in China, my answer is positive. Tibetan subalterns do speak in public but it is rather the voice of the dominant that speaks through them. Tibetan subalterns are at once dominated by the Chinese state and empowered with the modern universalistic discourse of rights, freedom, and democracy. The way they exercise this discourse is perceptibly oriented toward their desired vision of a modern Tibet divorced from its past. Dondrub Gyal and Shogdong both have shown their passion and have felt called to “wake up” their fellow Tibetans. In my view, there is nothing to wake up from; instead, it is rather “insurrection” that Shogdong is attempting to introduce to his compatriots, as he elaborates:

This statement appears to mobilize a collective-consciousness change, but its directionality shows that, instead of turning to the source of inequality and oppression, it rather turns against itself by finding everything wrong with one’s own state of being. Placing this statement in subaltern studies, I see Shogdong’s internal displacement and temporalization of Tibet’s present and past as a subaltern consciousness but it is tightly gripped or possessed by the dominant. This dynamic is also common among Indian subalterns. In Spivak’s assessment, this consciousness, in fact, is not the subaltern’s but rather the oppressor’s (Spivak 1988, 11). It is a reproduction of the dominant consciousness in the subaltern consciousness. This was how Chinese modernity was constructed by its cultural elites: on one hand they expressed anti-Western imperialism but, on the other hand, they absorbed the power-language of the West to re-articulate and re-construct a modern Chinese identity that has little cultural association with China’s past. This aspect of subalternity shows that the subaltern reproduces the social image of the dominant by critically contending with the language of the dominant while yet deeply internalizing it until it becomes unconscious. Unlike their Chinese counterparts a century ago who turned the language of Western modernity against Western imperialism, both Dondrub Gyal and Shogdong turn it against themselves. I share the same sentiment as Spivak that the subaltern consciousness is negative (Spivak 1988, 28). In the Tibetan case, it is a self-negating process.

On the ethnographic level, it is then not surprising to see that the early public presence of both Dondrub Gyal and Shogdong was positively sanctioned by the Chinese state when they launched their attacks on Tibet’s past. Although both of them have deep affection for their homeland, when they negate the relevance of their culture in the modern context, their use of modern neologisms falls into the existing framework of the Chinese state: Old Tibet was full of decadence and oppression and New Tibet is a place of liberation and equality. This ideological structure was set before both writers exercised their modern agency, so the modern vocabulary used by Dondrub Gyal and Shogdong includes neologisms that were the invention of the Chinese state long before they began their invocation of a new youth movement among Tibetans in the 1980s and the late 1990s. Regardless of their insistence on a different modern Tibet with greater autonomy, the same modern translingual practice conflates their vision for self-freedom, equality, and self-governance with China’s New Tibet. Both Tibetan modernists inadvertently facilitated the dominant image of the Chinese state’s socialist modernity.

4.4 Pathogenic force of modernity

As I have discussed thus far, I see Shogdong’s intra-Tibetan, tradition-vs.-modernity debate not as a fight between two groups of Tibetans situated in the paradox of modernity. In fact, both pro-tradition and pro-modernity groups have deep affection for their homeland. If we remove these two prefixes “traditional” and “modern” from Tibet, what is left is Tibet only. This is the actual object/subject of their collective concern and affection. Shogdong’s seemingly future-oriented, anti-traditional modern Tibet, in the pathological sense, can be counted also as a return of the suppressed past inverted through his intentional forgetting: a clear symptom of the pathos of modernity and its altered state of memory. The pathogenic background of Shogdong’s radical modernism is intrinsically linked with China’s modernity and its grand physical modernization project that is taking place nationwide and that includes all ethnic minority regions.

In the medical sense, a pathogen, as a living agent, seeks entries to new hosts for replication and expansion, sometimes until it turns the host into its shell or until its agency replaces that of the host entirely (Pe’ery and Mathews 2007, 170). This is the pandemic pathogenicity of a pathogen. It can be likened to a xenobiotic that disrupts a biota when its accompanying toxin impairs the host; thus the xenobiotic claims the host as its own property. My metaphorical use of pathogen in the medical sense is meant to point out that our own agency is susceptible to paradigmatic changes and agentive shifts without awareness of its having harbored a foreign agent or becoming the ground for a foreign agent to nativize itself in us. This reversal or conflation of the guest and the host can also be shown in dramatic changes occurring in our mindscape due to external epoch-making events around us. Phrases like “paradigm shift,” “consciousness raising,” or simply “revolution” are common verbal expressions resulting from our mental commotions and transformations. Ideas and meanings embedded in these phrases often possess destabilizing, pathological, effects in psychological and psychic senses.

Modern nationalism, on one hand, bestows paradigmatic visions to ethnic revivals worldwide in terms of its universal ideas of liberty, equality, and democracy as Smith points out. On the other hand, it is also pathogenic in nature when a given ethnic group discards its “myth-symbol complex” (Smith 1986, 15 – 16) as the basis of its ethnie, because it is deemed irrelevant to its current collective condition and mode of being. When its cultural elites promote what I call a “foundational shift” from its mytho-historical identity claim to the set of modern values as the “operating system” or as the new basis of their collective identity, they expect empowerment from these newly embraced modern practices of politics and governance due to their experience of obvious sociopolitical marginalization. However, in the Tibetan case, this type of romantically charged modern ethnic revival does not seem to change the marginality of urban Tibetans in China. Shogdong’s advocacy for a politically stronger Tibetan population in terms of autonomy and equality has obviously turned against Tibet itself rather than debating and contending directly with the Chinese state. In this regard, I see the pathogenic dimension of Enlightenment-based modern nationalism when it is nativizing itself in the collective mindscape of urban Tibetans. It is no longer a question of commonly perceived “ethnic revival” or “cultural revitalization” but is a power discourse, one taking place in a subaltern fashion.

In subaltern studies, it is commonly agreed that subalterns are those of low social classes who lack public voices and are “unfamiliar with the terms of the dominant language” (Sahoo 2006, 5). This is also affirmed by subaltern studies luminaries like Guha (1997, xiv). The Indian case of subalterns who are subjected to domination and oppression because of their involuntary exclusion from exercising the language of the powerful (Sahoo 2006, 5) is not reflected in the Tibetan case. Tibetan subalterns, in my ethnographic experience, may come from common nomadic, farming, and village backgrounds, but their later professions and permanent residence in urban China sets them apart from their familial origins in multiple ways such as geographic, cultural, linguistic, or ideological. They often sense social marginalization and cultural stigmatization when they work alongside their Han Chinese colleagues. In the meantime, they are the cultural and political elites of Tibet. They are empowered by their own people back in Tibet and by their Chinese modern education and urban professions. Their urban sojourn began with their familial investment in a hope for a better life upon their return from being educated; however, what they bring home is the pathos of self-temporalization, self-objectification, and even self-victimization as shown in the case of Shogdong and his predecessor Dondrub Gyal.

In my cross-regional fieldwork between Amdo and Beijing over the last five years I see university education as the primary gateway of this modernist pathos. Additionally, during my teaching and research at a university with the largest body of Tibetan students in Beijing, I saw how supportive their parents are to their pursuit of higher education. Many students receive a tuition waiver and living stipend from the university as a form of China’s affirmative action; however, it is expensive to live in Beijing. Students’ families, ranging from government officials, business owners, nomads, and farmers, give what they can to their children. Those who could not afford to buy meals at the university cafeterias brought enough tsamba and dried yak meat to last a semester. Both the familial and state investments in these young Tibetans are predicated on certain hopes and objectives, needless to say. While their careers may be advanced by the state’s material investment in their education, their political consciousness is often gripped by the language of the dominant as found in lecture halls, reading assignments, and campus events. This ethos of the university environment marks Tibetan students as a people from a different “time zone” of the past, where the alleged existence of oppressive, barbaric “serfdom” serves as the history of Tibet. Tibetans are often reminded of being “ex-serfs” in the public space of China. The state’s recent designation of March 28 as “Serf Emancipation Day” is one of many measures sustaining its modern construction of Old and New Tibet in the minds of young university students. This is the origin of the pathos of the subaltern power discourse among Tibetans.

Higher education is the primary pathway traveled by the ideas of a modern Tibetan nationalism and they are embodied in publicly outspoken figures like the late Yidam Tserang, Tserang Dondrub, Tsering Oser, and Tsewang Norbu, all of whom were university trained. Whether they are pro-traditionalists or anti-traditionalists, their nationalist discourses are lodged in the dichotomy of Old and New Tibet, and heritage and modern progress. In this sense, modernity is manifested as a pathogenic force engendering these multiple splits of the Tibetan modern cultural consciousness. Particularly in the case of Shogdong’s radical modernism, I see this pathogenic force as a set of conflicting, contradictory, and dualistic mindsets and practices with pathological implications.

It is worth mentioning that the radical modernism of the Tibetan case bears traces of the Chinese Marxist legacy that also adds complications to scholarly interpretations of the contents of modern Tibet and Tibetan modernism. For instance, in Peter Hansen’s exploration of a Tibetan subaltern study, he raises the question: “Why is there no subaltern studies for Tibet” (Hansen 2003, 8)? In his view, the primary reason for this impasse is “because Tibet is not India and Latin America” (Hansen 2003, 8), implying that the difference is that Tibet was never colonized by Europeans. The absence of European colonialism and the presence of Chinese Marxism in Tibet presents a predicament to scholarly assessments of whether or not Tibetans are in a subaltern state of being (Hansen 2003, 9). Subaltern studies across the board leans theoretically toward the deployment of Marxism as its critical basis and of Maoism as a theory of resistance in positioning the voiceless oppressed against the oppressor. Both Marxism and Maoism could be seen as a “liberation theology” of oppressed subalterns in India and Latin America. This is also how Marxism has been deployed in Tibet by the Chinese state. Perhaps, to both subaltern resistance practitioners and theorists, it is just impossible to see Marxism as an instrument of oppression. It seems, to implement subaltern studies in the case of Tibet, we have to overthrow the Marxist paradigm as the theoretical foundation.

What is clear is that the Chinese Communists introduced “a set of discourses (people, class, strata, etc.) that enabled the articulation of subaltern positions crucial to Tibetan resistance” (Hansen 2003, 17). In the history of China’s socialist Tibet, Shogdong is not the only person who aspires to construct Tibetans’ own modern Tibet. His parents’ generation had an initial encounter with China’s socialist modernity that directly contrasted with traditional Tibetan society. In his autobiography, written in collaboration with Goldstein and Siebenschuh, Tashi Tsering recalls the years from 1951 to 1957 when he was a young monk in Lhasa, “Our old, traditional, essentially static society was suddenly being bombarded with strange terms like ‘socialism,’ ‘capitalism,’ ‘communism,’ and ‘feudalism’” (Goldstein, Siebenschuh, Tashi Tsering 1997, 41). According to him, the purpose of his life then was “…to create a new society that was both modern and just, and yet still distinctively Tibetan” (Goldstein, Siebenschuh, Tashi Tsering 1997, 5).

In Hansen’s historical findings, both Chinese nationalists and Tibetan nationalists in exile share a similar political feature with modern nationalism: while the Chinese state calls its Tibetan subjects “the people,” the 14^th Dalai Lama addresses Tibetans as “my people” (Hansen 2003:10). Claiming and deploying “the people” or “the masses” is a common practice of both ethnic revivals and state nationalism. “The people” then often appear as a nameless mass though they are the fundamental source of empowerment of ethnic elites as well as the statesmen of an established nation-state. Hansen cites Tsering Shakya’s historical finding that the Tibetan term mimang ( the people) was coined by the Chinese Communists (Hansen 2003, 17).

The Chinese Communists brought in a whole range of new vocabulary to facilitate their discourse of socialist modernity. These terms embody a set of ideas, concepts, paradigms, values, and practices that are concentrated with the “liberative” idealism embedded in Marx’s proletarian vision of a new world order. From the Chinese perspective, it was this “liberative” volition of Marxism that completed the socialist revolution in Tibet. The initial “Democratic Reform” of the 1950s and the early 1960s performed in Amdo, Kham, and Ü-Tsang was most certainly a political discourse of China’s Marxist modernity that originated from Europe via Russia. It was materialized in countless class struggle sessions, in the redistribution of land, and the collectivization of the means of production in towns and rural villages of Tibet. It was literally what William Hinton called “fanshen” (), or an overturning of the traditional social order for the sake of constructing a new one (Hinton 1997, vii). This is indisputably part of the culture of Chinese socialist modernity.

On the practical level, the ideas of equality and liberty are universal in nature but are practiced in the framework of the nation-state known for its ideological regimentation and authoritarian governance. The particular deployment of modern universals is limited to its national sovereignty and the national agenda, and thus is not co-terminus with expressions of humanity elsewhere in the world. The Chinese use of Enlightenment-based modern universals in Tibet is intended to “make universal signs speak to particular realities” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993, xxii). The way they were propagated to Tibetans resembled that of European missionaries as agents of modernity in Africa. The Chinese Communists aimed to (re)produce the historical consciousness of new socialist China based on a Marxist vision of a liberated proletarian society. In many ways, the reproduction of this historical consciousness has been China’s “socialist civilizing project” (Harrell 1995, 3) in Tibet, which has woven the liberative context of Marxism into the local Tibetan cultural matrix by establishing the modern bureaucratic system, collectivizing land ownership, and providing young generations with modern vernacular education. Thus, the socialist utopian vision of a society with equality and human flourishing on the distant horizon has become imaginable reality in the mindscape of the Tibetan populace.

However, this future-oriented modernity has consistently put Tibetans in the position of “negation, inversion, deficiency, absence” (Comaroffs 1993, xii). In the twenty-first century, when Tibetan modernists like Shogdong linguistically continue to be confined to using the same neologisms that the Chinese state bestowed on them half a century ago, such as modernity (), backward (), material development (), and science (), the exercise of their discursive power is similarly patterned in the concepts and social realities of these neologisms. In this sense, the power of the modern Chinese state is both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power (Foucault 1982, 213). It represents itself as salvation-oriented and as knowledge of truth (Foucault 1982, 212). This intended social liberation is predicated upon “the abolition of existing networks of human relations” and “the abolition of an ancient definition of human nature” (Pickett 1996, 4). In the context of a multi-ethnic nation-state with the legacy of an imperial past, the empowerment bestowed from modernity to its subjects is not simply shown in its justification of the demolition of the old and construction of the new in the physical sense. In many ways, it is a most invasive and protective mind-work. To prove cultural and social legitimacy, the native “is willing to strip himself naked to study the history of his body, is obliged to dissect the heart of his people” (Fanon 1963, 211). This is the primary manifestation of the pathos of radical modernism.

“Dissecting” one’s heritage is what Shogdong has done since he emerged in the public sphere of Tibetans in China in the late 1990s. He uses verbs like “dissect” (), “eradicate” (), and “throw away” () when he recalls the collective memory of Tibet’s past. The pathological modality of his radical modernism has evolved from the initial internalization of the external pathogenic force of modernity from both China and elsewhere to the current self-pathologizing state of his consciousness. In other words, the pathogenic force of modernity has taken root in his psyche and is expanding its depth and horizon in an iconoclastic fashion. Herein, I think James Hillman’s delineation of pathologizing best captures the pathological consequences of radical Tibetan modernism. “Pathologizing” here means “the psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behavior and to experience and imagine life through this deformed and afflicted perspective” (Hillman 1976, 57). In this pathologizing state, the individual literally wants to “re-ensoul” himself as if his present psyche, as the operating system of his whole being, needs total replacement. Thus, the self-pathologizing mind is clinically identified with these characteristic symptoms: self-negation, self-antagonism, depersonalization, hyper-idealization, and confabulation (Hillman 1976, 24, 44, 56). To the pathologizing individual, Hillman points out, “It is… imperative to be as iconoclastic as possible toward vessels that no longer truly work as containers and have become instead impediments to the pathologizing process” (Hillman 1976, 97). Shogdong’s self-anatomy is militantly expressed in many of his writings. He is committed to achieving the inner freedom of Tibetans by advocating “pointing the gun at oneself in order to kill off all enemies from the Old Habit” (Shogdong 2001, 253). Shogdong feels confident that he at least has inner freedom even if he does not have external freedom (Shogdong 2001, 253).

4.5 Placial antecedence of the Subaltern

When Dondrub Gyal initiates his call for a new youth of Tibet in his poem “The Waterfall of Youth,” the source of the empowerment he wishes to bestow upon his peers and younger generations of Tibet comes from the animated, personified landscape of Tibet rather than the perceived political spirituality of modern universals. Scholarly readings of his literary works confirm such placed-based, poetic empowerment. In Riika Virtauen’s interpretation of the imagery of water in Dondrub Gyal’s literary works, the moving waters of Tibet are identified as the primary thread of his poetic expressions. This literary imagery, in Virtauen’s understanding, expresses “the passage of time” and the “cultural transmission” of Tibet (Virtauen 2011, 135). This temporality of the Tibetan landscape is clearly shown in the images of rivers and lakes in Dondrub Gyal’s writings.

Based on my reading of his writings and ethnographic work in the native places of contemporary Tibetan students and writers whom I know, I prefer to read the image of Tibetan landscape in Dondrub Gyal’s as well as Shogdong’s literary and discursive writings with a placial emphasis rather than a temporal one. My placial emphasis is premised upon the argument, initiated in the second chapter, that landscape and mindscape are mutually rooted in each other. In this inter-dwelling dynamic of landscape and mindscape, place is rooted in memory and, likewise, memory in place.

Pertinent to the increasing number of Tibetans who maintain the life style of bi-local living between urban China and native Tibetan areas, images of their homeland frequently surface when they address their modern ethnic revivals. In my earlier ethnographic work with pro-traditionalist Tibetan intellectuals, I noticed that the invocation of the Tibetan landscape was elemental in the evolutionary path of intra-Tibetan discourses of modernity in China. For instance, the imagery of mountains is the primary poetic theme of the late poet Yidam Tserang (Smyer Yu 2006, 3). Regardless of the different ideological values and sense of national belonging that he places on the same mountains in his early Communist utopian vision of the 1950s and his participation in the Post-Mao Tibetan cultural revitalizations, the mountains stand as they are (Smyer Yu 2006, 4).

Likewise, I also see the strong currents of cultural consciousness in Dondrub Gyal’s writings, but I rather understand it in spatial and placial terms. Although Dondrub Gyal chose to critique Tibetan traditional cultural practices in negative terms, his literary works often show much of his nostalgia, melancholia, sense of loss, and his emotional tie to the landscape of Amdo, his home region. Oftentimes he expresses humbleness and guilt to the landscape of Tibet and its humanized textures. In his short essay “The Narrow Path,” he personifies the path of his childhood as an ancient vessel of his ancestors and Tibetan civilization. His entanglement with it is shown in his affection and blameworthiness, two opposite streams of his emotion. On one hand, he laments, “How ignorant our ancestors were! Why on earth did they choose this wretched earth to build their nests” (Dondrub Gyal 2000, 2)? On the other hand, he is soaked in deep guilt. He writes:

The outpouring of Dondrub Gyal’s inner poesis always occurs in the moving landscape of Tibet as it is personified in the elemental components of the Earth, e. g. water, soil, stone and mountains. The elements of the Earth in Tibet move with his emotional currents and weave the literary texture of his conflicting state of mind when modernism is turned inward to look for whom to blame for the current condition of Tibetans.

Similarly, Shogdong shows his poetic appreciation of the Tibetan landscape while he negatively critiques Tibetan traditional cultural practices. The placial gravity of his voice also directs his readers toward the Tibetan landscape. In fact, Shogdong is even more specific about the cultural and religious elements embedded in the landscape of Tibet. The imagery of the Tibetan landscape in his writing animated with a range of subjects from the Tibetan earth-based pantheon, as he lists, “evil spirits (), flesh eating demons (), hungry ghosts ( ), harmful demons (), walking mummies (), one-legged ghosts () …” (Shogdong 2001, 27). The list is long. He lumps them together as the contents of what he calls “the primitive habit of gods and demons (). When he travels to Lhasa he animates the Tibetan landscape with these place-based beings, Buddhist monasteries, and lamas but with the intention of erasing them entirely from his homeland. However, they are so deeply rooted in the landscape as well as in his mindscape that he feels he carries them as a burden that he must bear. He writes about his thoughts moving along with the landscape on the way to Lhasa:

The desolate moments of Shogdong and Dondrub Gyal are obviously expressed in placial terms as recourse to their native land. Both of these writers are agents of modernity but when they walk in their homeland, dirt, rocks, paths, rivers, and mountains start conversing with them by recalling their ancestors, childhood memories, and the gods and demons who have shared dwelling space with people since the mythological times of Tibet. One of the Tibetan students in my “Religion and Ecology” class affirmed Shogdong’s passionate voice for Tibetans’ own modern Tibet, but he also felt Shogdong was ignorant of the ecologically friendly gods and spirits of Tibet. This student said, “Although in the past, people performed rituals to please our earthly gods for making luck and avoiding misfortune, now these rituals have turned out to be environmentally healthy.” He then pointed out that Shogdong deeply cares about the fate of Tibet but is mostly concerned with the economic and political inequality that many Tibetans experience in China. I would add that antecedent to Shogdong’s political concern is the place of Tibet in both physical and symbolic senses.

In Shogdong’s travel writings, he does not directly attack the Chinese state and the Han majority but his narratives make his voice irrefutably heard in terms of the fate of Tibet in his vision. He writes:

In my pathological reading of Shogdong’s writings, I see place as an inherent part of his thought-world and of the emotional currents of his affection for Tibet. Lived place is not only physical. Its physicality is embedded with history, signs, and symbols that intimately connect its residents with the land. The physical and symbolic order of place is deeply woven into people’s mindscape. In other words, both landscape and mindscape are semantically synonymous as both signify the contents of one’s place-based, lived experience, and memory. The potency of place then is not limited to its material provision to its residents. Oftentimes, such potency rather originates from one’s memory of it, with those memories having taken deep roots in the mindscape. In the case of Tibet, the landscape “provides an ancestral map for human activity” (Tilley 1994, 38). Both landscape and mindscape in this sense are inlaid with tracks of ancestors and spirits. Thus, place is antecedent to one’s personal identity.

Shogdong’s bi-local lifestyle does not change the fact that his implaced memory of his homeland does not recede into the background; instead it continues to dwell in his mindscape. It communicates with him in both conscious and unconscious fashions as I have discussed thus far. The placiality of his memory also moves with his bi-local living between his homeland and urban China. Tibet, in his memory, thus becomes “portable” or “mobile” as it moves with his body between the two places.

The notion of living/lived body in the works of Casey and Tilley best expresses how the body functions as the linkage of landscape and mindscape (Casey 2000; Tilley 2010). In the relationship between place and memory, body is the placial agent linking both together. Body, then, is an inter-being between place and memory. Implacement pertains not only to the envelopment of place around the body, but also to the moving, absorbant body/mind as it moves in place. Landscape, thus, is simultaneously implaced in the body/ mind. In Casey’s words, body is the “place passage” (Casey 2000, 195) between landscape and mindscape. In this sense body is a culturally constructed materiality of place. Its somatic movement in its native landscape, for example during familial chores and social events, sustains and reinforces this placial materiality rich in layers of both personal and collective memories.

Although, in the context of modern China and the current globalization of human ideas, Shogdong engages in an active imagination of a modern Tibetan nation in the sense of Anderson’s “nation as imagined” (1991, 6), such a modern nation is imagined in a future tense with the set of universal ideas. What needs to be highlighted again is that Shogdong’s imagined modern Tibetan nation is sustained by the landscape of Tibet implaced in his mindscape in spite of his dismissive posture toward it under the invocation of modernity. From this angle, I see the formation of a nation not simply resulting from its residents’ claiming of a geographic region but also resulting from a reciprocal implacement process between the landscape of the nation and the mindscape of its residents. This mutual placing of landscape in the mindscape and the mindscape in landscape completes us as implaced beings with place-based identities existing along with our national orientation toward a place we call “nation.” This simultaneously interwoven and interweaving of identity and place is what Tilley refers to as landscape as “ground” and “figure” to its residents, meaning, “It is ground in the sense that it is the geological and topographic face of the earth that they inhabit and move across. It becomes figure in a process whereby it becomes part of one’s self-understanding and self-knowledge, part of the way in which one’s identity is mediated and constituted” (Tilley 2010, 34). The bio-graphy of landscape, besides its own geologically-based subjectivity, is also a biography of the people who live in, on, and with it. Human subjectivity thus is also embedded and embodied in the landscape. The bio of the landscape is animated and acts reciprocally to humans. In this regard, in the reflexivity of the place-saturated mindscape, memory bonds with place and place with memory. In such a bond, the physical and the symbolic mutually saturate each other’s being. In this sense, memory is place and place is memory, both of which are strikingly objectified as a sign of the paradox of modernity (Oakes 1997, 510) in the case of Tibetan radical modernism.