The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China. By Charlene E. Makley. University of California Press, 2007. 400 pages. $24.95.
摘要
The book under review, The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China, is the first major in-depth monograph of the post-Mao era revival of Tibetan Buddhism, and, moreover, a work that offers the most sophisticated ethnography and analysis to date of gender and identity in a Tibetan community in China. The book is mainly based upon field research that author Charlene Makley conducted between 1992 and 2002 at a site that is of great significance to Tibetans, the monastic township of Labrang (Chin. Xiahe) in southwest Gansu Province. Labrang is one of the major Buddhist pilgrimage centers of the eastern Tibetan plateau, with one of the biggest Gelugpa monasteries and important reincarnate lama lineages at its centre. It has long been an important location for trade and inter-ethnic exchange between Tibetans, Chinese, Hui, and others in this Sino-Tibetan frontier zone. It is impressive how Makley relates to such a wide variety of Tibetan informants—from lamas, monks, nuns, and cadres to ordinary men and women villagers, as well as nomads, pilgrims, and tourists—and how she employed both Chinese and Tibetan historical sources and accounts in her analysis.
As the title of the book indicates, the “violence of liberation” is, first and foremost, the ongoing process characterized by varying degrees of force of incorporating and thereby controlling and transforming …
