Gendered Boundaries in Motion Space and Identity On The Sino-Tibetan Frontier

Gendered Boundaries in Motion: Space and Identity on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier Author(s): Charlene E.
Makley Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Nov., 2003), pp. 597-619 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3805251 . Accessed: 22/10/2013 10:25
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CHARLENE E. MAKLEY Reed College
Gendered boundaxies in
Space and idendty on the
motion:
fronder
Sino-Tibetan
A B S T R A C T In this articleI explorethe genderednatureof religiousrevitalization in the TibetanBuddhist monasterytownof Labrang in southwest Gansu Province, China.Post-Mao reforms in China allowedTibetans to resumereligiouspracticesand rebuildBuddhist institutionsproscribed during the Cultural Revolution, and by the early1990s Tibetans in Labrang wererapidly revitaLizing the famousmonastery that hadonce ruledthis regionalongthe Sino-Tibetan frontier.I drawon the workof recenttheoristsof space, place, and identityto analyzethe complex identitypoliticssurrounding this projectby conceptualizing spatial,ethnic, and nationalboundaries as emergentintersectionsof genderedpractices amongdifferently positionedactors.I focus on the Tibetan practiceof circumambulation as the keyactivitythat reproduced the sacredcentricity and powerof the monastery. I demonstrate that in contemporary Labrang, women,as principal circumambulators and householdlaborers, weredoubly burdened with shoringup the core of the Tibetan community in the midstof intense assimilation pressures. [gender,identity,ethnicity, space, borders,China, Tibet,religion, ritual,Buddh7sm]
Everyambitious exercisein criticalgeographicaldescription,in translating into words the encompassing and politicized spatialityof social life, provokes a . . . linguisticdespair.Whatone sees when one looks at geographies is stubbornlysimultaneous, but language dictates a sequential succession, a linear flow of sentential statements bound by the most spatial of earthly constraints,the impossibilityoftwo objects (orwords)occupyingthe same precise place. EdwardSoja (1989) spent much of my time during fieldwork in the Tibetan Buddhist monastery town of Labrang in southwest Gansu Province, China, | walkingin circles. From the beginning of my stay there, I entered the * flow of local Tibetans' lives by joining the near-constant flow of foot trafficalong what was arguablythe most important course of movement for Tibetans in the entire surroundingvalley:the three-mile-long circumambulation path tracing the perimeter of the monastery grounds (see Figure1). In this articleI examine circumambulation(Tib.skorba 'gropa, skorba byedpa, lit. to encircle) as a gendered spatialpractice,to map out some ofthe processes by which important boundaries were continuously remade, contested, or breached in this multiethnicbordertown, which had seen particularly massive changes since the Chinese Peoplets LiberationArmy (PLA) marched in and occupied it in the autumn of 1949. My focus on the contested production of gendered space in contemporary Labrangillustrates how the grounds for a sex-gender hierarchylocating differentlyempowered male and female bodies within a sacred landscape and in karmictime were being (re)laid,despite ideologies advocating Buddhist or modern feminist forms of gender equality and in the midst of countervailingpractices under the press of the globalizing state and economy. The analysis thus demonstrates that gender differencewas actuallyfundamentalin the ongoing constructionof certainboundariesTibetansconsidered essential for the survival of a Tibetan ethnic identity under siege by a varietyof intensifyingassimilation pressures. As a locale historicallydefined by the culturaland politicaljunctures at the edge of Tibetan settlement to the east and Chinese (Han) and Muslim
T
American Ethnologist 30(4) :597-619. Copyright (C) 2003, American Anthropological Association.
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monastery,summer1995. path at Labrang Figure 1. Prayer wheels on the outer circuit circumambulation
Chinese (Hui) settlements to the west, Labrangis ideally situated for a reconsideration of the significance of "borders"or "boundaries." That is, it is a site well suited for considering "interstitialzones" (Gupta 1992:18),not as insigfor the making nificant margins but as the creativegrounds and unmaking of often competing socioculturalworlds.A1though this perspective arguablyhas informedmuch recent or practices of "postsocial theory on the "performance" spaces, and power, modern"or "postcolonial" subjectivities, my analysistakes its inspirationfrom a line of workthat, because of disciplinaryboundaries, such theories have largely ignored.l In this article,I drawon analytictools developed in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropologysince the 1970s to demonstrate the fundamentallyintersubjectiveand contingent nature of meaning production among gendered agents in Labrang,agents that are alwayspositioned as parof relaticipants in shifting,culturallyspecific "frameworks" tionships within (potentiallyhazardous)"scenes of encounter"(Keane1997:7; cf. Baumanand Briggs1990;Hanks 1996; Irvine1996). frameI arguethat the spatial concept of "participation works,"first elaboratedby ErvingGoffman (1981),is one of the most powerful tools researchershave for avoiding the
"notoriousdualisms"(Asad1983:252)of structureversus intentioned action or all-determining domination versus creativeresistance that continue to haunt recent theories of the relationships between sociocultural meanings and power. Following William Hanks (1990, 1996), I take "participation frameworks"to be the subtle metacommunicative contexts in which interlocutors deploy locally salient linguistic and bodily cues to negotiate their alignments with respect to each other and to a range of other social contexts and agencies that alwaystranscendany moment of encounter. As a startingpoint for analysis, this concept locates the emergence of apparentlystable or hegemonic sociocultural forms in the essential dynamics-and politics of embodied social lives (cf. Mannheim and Tedlock 1995;Silverstein 1997).Further,such an approachhighlightsthe intersubjective and often unconscious ways differently positioned agents bring various cultural constraints to bear and thus demonstrates the historicallyspecific mechanisms through which meaning and context, action and structure,or resistance and domination are in realitymutuallyproduced. The then, providesa groundconcept of participation frameworks, ing methodology for grasping the complex simultaneity of space-time the "cultural work" by which participants
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motion * American Ethnologist boundariesin Gendered
mark off and construct arrangements of subjects, places, and nations amidst the actuallymessy and recently intensifying interconnectedness of people and spaces (cf. Alonso 1994; de Certeau 1984;Gupta 1992;Lefebvre 1991;Massey 1992;Soja 1989). I find this perspective very helpful in attempting to avoid understanding sex and gender as structures of fixed and binary relations between already-defined men and allows frameworks" women.2 The concept of "participation me to emphasize instead the irreduciblyintersubjectiveand thus contingent nature of meaningful action or agency by grounding gendered performance in the "vitalborders"at which participantsengage in the everydaypolitics of spaceThat is, here I focus on local Timaking (Hanks 1996:162).3 betan notions of sexed bodies and circumambulationritual as particularly crucial, intersecting participation frameworks that people accessed to negotiate the reach of effeccontentious social field.4 tive agencies within a particularly During the Maoist years, the unprecedented reach of the Chinese state into citizens' lives was accomplished in part through a radical reconstitution of lived space and a forced reorientation of ("scientifically")sexed bodies to serve a socialist nation, including the periodic proscription of all gendered ethnic difference (cf. Evans 1997; Hanks Mueggler2001:4;Schein 2000). Followingthat pe1996:162; riod, Tibetans in Labranghad entered an era of restoration (Ch. huffu). Since the reforms of the 1980s easing regulations on the monastery, individual households, and the market economy, Tibetans' heightened awareness of and insistence on ethnic boundaries in town also served to accentuate the gap between ideally stable, internal realities and the unprecedented interminglingof peoples and contexts under Chinese rule. In this fray, perhaps the most charged participation frameworks were those produced through the state-local politics accompanyingthe development of the tourism industry focused on the revitalizing monastery, which since the mid-1980s had drawn tens of thousands of foreign and Han Chinese visitors (YangMing 1992:14).5 Amidst the powerful reductive pressures of the commodification of Tibetanness, a process that was tying the frontiertown ever closer to the needs and demands of the Chinese nation-state, I found that Tibetan residents' assertions about the nature of males versus females helped them to identify familiar relationships between body and mind, household and monastery, and to reorientbodies to the essential centricityof the sacred spaces encompassed by the monastic community.
Genderand the productionof empowered centricity

Since the founding of the famous monastery of Labrang Tashi Khyilin the narrow Sang (Ch. Daxia) Rivervalley in
1709, Labranghas been both at the edge of empires and a powerfulcenter of religiousand political-economic life. It is now located in Labuleng town, the seat of the county of Xiahe, one of seven counties that constitute the GannanTibetan Autonomous Prefecture in the southwesternmost corner of Gansu Province bordering on Qinghai Province (see Figure 2). But these modern boundaries are just the most recent in a long historyof contending "mapsof power" over the region (cf. Sun Zhenyu 1993:2). By the late l9th and early20th centuries (the latteryears of the Chinese Qing dynasty), Labrangwas peculiar in this frontierzone in the extent to which its monastic center was able to resist or render ineffective the boundary claims of Chinesejurisdictions-including those of the Chinese Communists until the mid- 1950s.The reach of the monastery as a political, economic, and religiouspower in the region was in turn predicatedon the extent to which its Geluksect BudTibetan dhist founders were able to appeal to a particularly sense of gendered and ritualized space and establish the monastery as a sacred "powerplace." This process underpinned for the laity the ritualefficacyof their crucialroles as supporters(Tib.sbyin bdag) of the monastery and its sacred hierarchs,or lamas. A gendered liberation path emphasizing male renunciation of the mundane world in monastic fraternities(ostensibly) separate from the distractionsand temptations of household contexts underwrote the "cultural nexus of power" (Duara1988) that resulted in the ascendancy of the Geluk(lit.practitionersof virtue) sect in centraland eastern Tibetan regions by the 17th and 18th centuries and produced a particularly intricate synthesis of religious and secular landed authority (cf. Danzhu and Wang 1993).6 Thus, in the Labrangregion, the greatprestige of a monastic career based on an ideal of lifelong celibacy resulted in an ethic of "mass monasticism," which, as Melvyn Goldstein (1998a:15)emphasizes, was unique to Tibetan contexts in the relativelylarge percentage of men it drew to life in monastic communities.7 Chinese observersin the early20th centurywere horrified at the peculiarityof the sex-gender system that consequently developed in the region and complained about the social "chaos"apparentin the juxtapositionof celibate monasticism in Labrangwith the relatively open sexuality in the teeming market town next to the monastery (Gu Zhizhong and LongZhi 1935;YuXiangwen 1943;cf. Makley 1997).Historically,however, the juxtapositionof asceticism and sexualitydid not represent a ludic chaos. Instead,what most fundamentallyconstructed the boundarybetween lay and monastic worlds were practices that produced a basic and groundinggenderedbodyspacevis-a-vis the monastery. The ongoing coherence and efficacyof this bodyspace relied on the practicallinks locals forgedbetween ritualand everyday activities and discourses that placed sexed bodies relative to spaces in a gendered social hierarchyvis-a-vis ritual
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Figure 2. Locationof Labrang in the People'sRepublicof China.
power and bodily (andhence moral)purity,with lamas at its pinnacle and laywomen at its base (cf.Huber 1994a, 1999). Tibetologists have often remarked on Tibetans' intensely ritualizedrelationshipswith natural or constructed environments relationships that do not always accord
with Buddhist doctrine (cf. Bishop 1989;Epstein and Peng 1994; Germano 1998; Karmay1994). In his insightful work on Tibetan pilgrimage practices, Toni Huber (1994b:25, 1999:10) argues that ordinaryTibetans' sense of efficacious space is shaped by intimate relationshipsbetween humans
glo
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and deities seen as inhabiting matter and bodies as well as space. Deities' abodes are called gnas in Tibetan, meaning "place"or "abode"or, as an involuntaryverb, "tobe" or "to abide." These layers of connotations point to a pervasive "everydayontology," operative among Tibetans across regions and social statuses, that emphasizes the substantialor embodied nature of their relationshipswith powerful,transcendent agencies and foregroundscontiguityas the principal means by which individuals or collectives interactwith those agencies.8Thus, in Labrang,as elsewhere, practitioners entered into beneficial relationships with deities-gnas primarily through rituals of "worshipfulencounter" (Tib. mja[) focused on bringingthe body into close contact with the divine. Importantly,part of the wide appeal of Buddhism was of a gnas as a function of emthe emphasis on the efElcacy bodied moral purity (Tib.dag pa). Committed contact with a gnas could then cleanse (Tib.sel ba) the "pyschophysical person" (Huber 1999:16) of his or her accumulated bad deeds (intentional or not), deeds indexed by the unclean (Tib.mi gtsang)state of the ordinarybody, and clearthe way to desired outcomes in this or future lifetimes. Such purifying power places were constructed spatially as having, in Huber'swords, "acentralfocus atwhich resides the . . . deity of a gnas; the closer or more directlyoriented one is to this center the stronger the empowerment and more intimate the encounter" (1994b:46).Thus, the social construction of space among Tibetans is generallycharacterizedby the priority given to (purified)centralityover (impure)periphery. in which the worshipperperformedcirCircumambulation, place, object, or person, was empowered an around cuits the practice par excellence for bringing the body into sustained and close contact with a sacred center, thereby absorbing into oneself some of the physically manifest benefits of the center's power (cf.Ekvall1964). The centrality of Labrangmonastery as an unadulterated power place, or gnas, was primarilyestablished and maintained through the everyday performance of a sex-gender binarythat kept women in appropriatesupporting roles at its periphery.In that region, a monastic career was the ideal place for aspiring young men, whereas the ideal place for women was a patrilocalmarriageand a lay careerof responsibilityfor most subsistence labor and child rearing in the husband's natal household. A well-known proverbin the region succinctly expresses this fundamental gendered spatialpolarity: ban de 'grosa sgar red/ byismo 'grosa gnas red [Theplace where a young boy goes is a monastery; The place where a young girlgoes is her new husband's home]9
The terminology used in the proverb reflects spatial categories in everyday use in the Labrangregion. Significantly, the word gnas, used in other contexts to refer to sacred power places, appearshere in its meaning as "home"or "abode."Tibetans used this word, however, to refer almost exclusively to the natal home of a man, so that the phrase used to referto the preferredand still most widespreadtype of marriagewas gnas la 'gropa, literally"to go home" or "to go to a husband's natal home." A spatialized division of labor that associated women with affairs"inside"the household and men with prestigious ritual and political affairs "outside"the household was widelyjustifiedby appeals to a law of embodied karma,what I call a sexual-karmicpolarit.l When the issue of essential differences between men and women came up in my conversationswith them, Tibetans across the community (men and women) tended to argue that the male body was the result of greater stores of merit (Tib.bsod nams) from past lifetimes and that this underlay men's ability to transcend bodily limitations and to succeed in pursuits of the mind. Meanwhile, the female body was considered to be a lower rebirth(Tib.skyedman), more hampered than male bodies by physiological processes and thus suited to household labor.ll Females, inherentlyperipheraland karmicallyimpure, were thus the entailed other for the male abilityto both pursue and embody the sacred. Their labor and worship supported a system that placed monks at its center, especially incarnatelamas (Tib.sprul sku)-men considered to be incarnations of deities or previously enlightened lamas, a status that lent them miraculouspowers to transcend space and time, to tame demons to the service of Buddhism, and to teach Buddhistknowledge. By the early 20th century,inthe founding lineage of Jamyang carnatelamas, particularly of a ritualnexus that sacralcenter Shepa lamas, were at the ized the landscape in a cohesive regional identity linked to an arrayof translocalreligico-politicaland Buddhistcosmological spatial orders, giving residents a sense of their territoryas a centerbetween threateningpowers, not as an insignificant and subjugatedmargin (cf.Aris 1992:13). Labrangmonastery was established in this way as a great power place and pilgrimage site (Tib. gnas mchog). The complex grew outward from a core group of buildings until it was a veritable city housing over 3,000 monks and occupying the whole width of the valley to the river(see FigIn its heyday,the tightlyintegratedreligico-political ure 3).12 system preservedloyaltyto the Buddhistorderover regional and even ethnic difference.Thus, throughout the Republican period in the early 20th century, Labrangremained efof the Chinese fectively "outsidethe fortresses"(Ch.saiwalD frontier.
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Figure 3. Labrang monastery,winter 1947. (Photo by WaynePersons,used with permission.)
Contested circuits
In his discussion of ritualpractices among Tibetans,Robert Ekvall (1964:253)remarked that the importance of circumambulation often went unnoticed by foreign travelers.I found this to be the case in Labrang,where the unceasing flow of Tibetansturningthe prayerwheels aroundthe monastery seemed to get lost in the bustle of state-sponsored tourism and commercial activityfocused on the great monastic buildings and festivals. I argue, however, that it was this quotidian activity,at the peripheries of the tourist lens and the state gaze, that was most important for the reconstruction of the monastery as a center of Tibetan community. For Tibetans, the resumption of circumambulation during the restorationperiod was not just a returnto tradition; the practice had new meanings in a transformedsociety farfromwhat most referredto as the "old world"(Tib.jig rten rnying pa). Under the authorityof a Chinese state Tibetans experienced as an alien, unitaryagency essentially hostile to Buddhism, circumambulationbecame a form of resistance.l3 Yet in my conversations with locals, many also expressed awareness that the monastic center it outlined had a changed relationship to the community, making the
monastery both more threatening to the state in recent years and more precariousas a Tibetanpower place. The "outercircuit,"or shikor,had special importance as a transitionalspace between monastic and layworlds. Itwas both a boundarythat separatedrituallyrestrictedspaces for the reproduction of the Buddha Dharma (Tib. chos) from the mundane world (Tib. Jig rten) and a public space in which all Buddhist practitioners-men and women, young and old, lay and monastic shared a practice and an orientation toward the monastic center. Importantly, as Ekvall (1964:239)points out, such outer circuits were not actually circularbut followed the ground plan of the monastic complex. Hence, at Labrang,the path outlined a center that included all monastic buildings. It formed the perimeter within which monastic spatial regulations were in effectbeyond the prayerwheel sheds monks could not freely go, women could not enter, and laymen had to dismount and disarm (see Figure4). At the same time, the huge oval traced by the path was considered the most efficacious circumambulation space for the laity because it encircled all of the monastic buildings, deities, and lamas, thereby combining the efficacy of the various power places, or gnas, within its confines (Ekvall1964:244).
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Figure 4. Viewof Labrang monasteryfrom a village east of it, winter 1947. (Photo by WaynePersons, used with permission.)
Afterthe overthrowof the monastic leadership in 1958, inhabitants of the valley experienced a fundamental reorientation of social space that saw the center of power shift to the secularspace outside the monastery.By desecratingthe monastery and establishing the Weixing People's Commune in the town formerly referred to in Tibetan as the "edge" of the monastery, the Chinese Communists constructed a new center with extraordinary power to regulate people's everydaylives. Even though the monastic authorities had not participated in the revolts that had spread throughout the region in the mid-1950s, Labrangwas surrounded by PLAtroops, shelled, and looted.l4 Buddha images were draggedin the streets, and high lamas and monks were arrestedor forced to marry(International Commission of Jurists1960:35; Smith 1996:442). Layworshipwas banned, and within a few months villages and encampments were organizedinto a commune system that carvedup the region and effectively funneled all wealth to the state (Li Shangcheng 1987:112) . The ten-year-oldsixthJamyangShepawas separated from his tutor and detained, and he became the first of Labrang'srulinglineage of incarnate lamas who did not study in the great monasteries in Lhasa.l5The "moving boundary"of circumambulationthat had continually constructedthe monastery as center was forciblydisintegrated.
Forthose who could rememberthose days, the image of the empty monastery,its outer circuitmotionless, encapsulated the ascendance of the state's secular power over the region. The culmination of that power came during the Cultural Revolution,when all but the core group of monastic buildings were destroyed, materials carted away, and work units and residences built in their place. In contemporary Labrang,the impress of state power could still be felt in the organizationof monastic space (see Figure 5). Whereas before 1958, all traffichad been routed aroundthe monasteryon the shikor,under Communistcontrol the Lanzhou-GannanNational Highway cut straight throughthe monastic grounds,bifurcatingthe originalovalshaped complex and taking all manner of secular traffic through it. Further,monastic leadership was drasticallyreorganized under the (ostensible) authority of the state-supervised Democratic Management Committee that convened in the former estate headquarters of an important incarnate lama. But the gamble the state chose to take at Labrangin supporting its revitalizationas a tourist site resulted in a newly dangerous situation. Afterthe mid-1980s and the reinstatement of the policy of Freedom of Religious Belief,there were two competing centers at opposite ends of the valley the rapidly revitalizing monastery, which had
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Figure 5. Panorama of Sang Rivervalley, with new highwayconstructionthroughthe monastery,summer1995.
the highest concentrationof larnasin the regionand was attractinghundredsof young monastics and lay worshippers, and the headquarters of the party and the government of XiaheCounty. The revitalization of the lay-monasticrelationship among Tibetans criticallyinvolved the reassertion of the relationship between the sacred power generated by the monastic community and the space it formerlyoccupied. As soon as open worshipwas once againpermitted,Tibetancircumambulators reclaimed the boundaries of the monastic center by persistentlytracingthe originalshikor.With the reopening of the monasteryin 1981,the provincialand county governments formallyagreed to returnall land originallyoccupied by monastic buildings to the monastery.The upheaval and resources involved in such a move and in reconstructing buildings to match as closely as possible their original appearances were evidence of Labrang's(perhaps unique) cloutwithstateauthorities and of the steadfastconservatism of monastic authorities. The reconstruction was, as Marshall and Cooke (1997:1430)reported, one of the "greatsuccess stories" of Tibetan religious and cultural revivalunder the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).By the early nineties, the space within the shikor "almost seethed with animation" (Marshalland Cooke 1997:1457)as monastic life resumed
and reconstruction progressed at a rapid pace. From the mountains above the valley, the perimeters of the monastic complex could be seen to revolveonce more (see Figure6).
The tour: Fearand loathing in the monasteFs center

When I first arrivedat Labrangfor my third stay in March 1995,I took the standardtour ofthe monasteryto get a sense of what had changed. As a foreigner,I had to buy a ticket (at 21 yuan or around $3 each for foreigners,the price was up from 8 yuan in 1992) at the "reception hall" in the newly paved main courtyardof the monastery.Along with the few Han tourists there that cold day, I followed our l9-year-old monk tour guide toward the great whitewashed walls and gold-platedbronze rooftop of the monastery's main assembly hall (see Figure 7). Tibetans have traditionallyconsidered this hall the center of the monastery. It is the largest building and the seat of the Tisamlangor Tshanyi "college" to which the majorityof the monastery'sinmates belonged.l6 It was also the meeting place of the monastic councils that, under the ultimate authority of Jamyang Shepa, governed the monasteryand the surrounding region.In the largecourtyard in front, monastery-wide religious dances were (and still are) annuallyheld for all to see, and the main roads inside the monasteryall emptied into it.
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Figure 6. Tibetanscircumambulating the stupa marking the northeast cornerof the monasteryon the outer circuit, winter 1995.
Ourtour guide, who had been casuallytelling me in Tibetan that he hated tour-guiding and especially disliked Chinese tourists, marched us to the side door of the assembly hall.l7 I was struck by the careless ease with which he moved his body and openly talked Sino-Tibetan politics with me as we walked. Just outside the door of the hall, he paused and turned to address two young Tibetan women acquaintances in LabrangTibetan dress who had been on their way to circumambulateone of the temples. Callingto them in Tibetan, he invited them to come along with the
tour and take the opportunity to worship. The two women seemed surprisedand embarrassed,as this was not a festival period in which women were traditionallyallowed to worship in monastic buildings.Hesitatingfor a momentt they finally shuffled forward,eyes down and giggling as they said again and again, "ngotsha gi, ngo tsha gi!" (we're embarrassed,lit. [our]faces are hot). I stayed at the back of the groupwith the two women as our monk guide led us into the dim interiorof the huge hall and began his tour in Chinese. We slowly moved along the
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Figure 7. Mainassembly hall at Labrang monastery,summer1995.
peripheryof the hall while the monks seated on cushions in the middle chanted the morning assembly. The only light came from the open doors, a few smallwindows high above, and the butterlamps burningin front of the Buddhaimages on the altar at the front of the hall. The younger monks on the edges of the assembly eyed us with amusement and curiosityas our guide describedthe two scarf-ladenthrones in which JamyangShepa and the abbot of the college sat above the assembly for important meetings. The Han men and women whispered to each other, exclaimingthat they could not stand the smell of the butterlamps. Meanwhile, my Tibetan women companions could barely contain their fear and embarrassment.Their bodies registered all the ways Tibetans display respect and status inferiority:Hats off, shoulders hunched and forward,eyes down, they touched their foreheadsto the walls at the feet of every deity depicted there. They would not speak, except when one of them, sweatingprofusely,whisperedto me that she was afraid.Their fear and discomfort visibly increased when our guide led us into the posterior temple, where the higher ceiling and narrowerspace made one feel small in frontof the five-meter-highbronze statue of the futureBuddha Maitreyaand the gold and silverreliquarystupas of the
five previous incarnationsof JamyangShepa.While the Han tourists watched at the door and our guide introduced the images, the Tibetan women hurriedly did several prostrations in front of Maitreyaand backed out of the temple. The monk's briefmonologue never mentioned the side room accessible only through a closed door from Maitreya'schamber. We were ushered out without seeing the weaponadorned abode, or gonkhang, of Bhairava,Mahakala,and Dharmaraja, orYama,the fierce protectordeities who guard the internalaffairsof the college.l8 Finally,moving clockwise around the chanting monks in the center, we made our way around to the door on the east side of the hall and left the dim interior for the main courtyardof the monastery.As we emerged, the two Tibetan women seemed pleased and relieved, and one wiped her brow and pointed to her chest, telling me that her heart was still beating very fast. They hurriedoff then to continue their circumambulation, leaving us and the Han tourists who, laughing and chatting among themselves, followed the monk guide to the next temple on the itinerary.
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Bodily commitments
I chose to describe this brief encounter, among hundreds like it occurringeverydayin Labrang,because the complex produced during it enarray of participation framevrorks capsulated so well both the collaboration of Tibetan men and women in (re)producinggendered sacred spaces at the very core of the LabrangTibetan community and the unequal possibilities for their social mobility in relation to those spaces. Drawingon the insights of Goffman,theorists now increasinglyrecognize the complexity of participation within speech events, in that differentroles and frameworks responsibilities of interlocutors vis-a-vis the contexts and agents they project can be embodied concurrentlyby one person or shift quicklywith minute changes in linguisticand bodily cues. Hanks (1996:169)argues that the best way to capture this complexity is to consider the ways in which multiple participationframeworksare embeddedin an encounter as participantsposition themselves, within the cultural constraints of locally salient discourse genres, as speakers or addressees at degrees of distance from an assumed originalinteractionor framework(cf. Goffrnan1981; Irvine 1996).In the encounter described above, all involved negotiated the newly emergent culturalpolitics at Labrang in which the basic frameworkof Tibetan ritual efficacy requiring bodily proximityto a sacred center had been dangerously interwoven with that produced in Chinese statesponsored tourism on which the monastery depended for income and state sanction and subsidies, and which facilitated tourists' "romanceof proximity"(Schein 2000:123)to authenticallyethnic sites staged fortheirviewing pleasure.l9 In this context, the monk guide's simultaneous interaction with the Tibetan women and the tourists asserted the moralpriorityof the centralsources of Tibetansacralityover the state-sponsored authorities and marketforces that had brought the tourists there. The monk's gesture to include the Tibetan women in the group of ticket-buying tourists and the women's acceptance of his authority to do so, as well as their very visceral sense of fear and awe at finding themselves in the most hallowed center of the monastery, worked to reanimate and re-empower the images of deities and lamas and the assembly of chanting monks in the face of of their reduction to flattened and staged representations to the exotic by the tourists' gaze and purchase of tickets viewthem (cf. Mitchell 1992:310). By allowing the women to perform the most basic of Buddhistdevotional practicesamidst the tourists,the monk joined with the women to reassert the three-dimensional natureof the assemblyhall space and its occupants, their location in a gendered Buddhist cosmology extending horizontally through this world and verticallyto worlds beyond. In this way, the guide and the two women mutually produced faith, or dapa, that very physical orientation of submission, devotion, homage, and offering to Buddhist and
various other supernaturalauthoritiesthat had become emblematic of Tibetanness in the face of threatening social Nowak 1984). change (cf. Ekvall1960:46; The performance of dapa was the measure by which pilgrims to the monastery (of any ethnicity) were distinguished from tourists, and it was so closely associated with Tibetanness that often merely speaking (any dialect of) Tibetan was enough to gain one entrance to (appropriate) monastic buildings sans ticket and tour. I witnessed and experienced this on many occasions, and many monk tour guides I met over the years, including our guide that day in March 1995, told me this explicitly.Apparently,the proactive function of ticketingand restrictedguided tours in supporting Tibetan monasteries financially, as well as in preserving sacred spaces and the efficacy of Tibetans' faith in relationto them, is lost on many foreigners,who depict such practices as foisted on Tibetans by the Chinese state (i.e., Buffetrille 1989; Marshall and Cooke 1997).2As this encounter illustrates, dapa was not a primordialorientation uniformlyshared.Instead,Tibetanmen and women were at base differentlypositioned vis-a-vis sacred authority.And importantly,this difference became most salient for Tibetans in ritual contexts involving respect for the most sacred and central of spaces, the very spaces that, to them in the transformedpolitical economy of contemporaryLabrang most stronglyexemplifiedTibetannessunder siege. During my circuits of the monastery every day for a year, I found the shikorthe most Tibetanof public spaces in town. Life on the path was an essential element of the continuing cohesiveness of intervillage and interregional Tibetan community. Unlike the streets and markets, or even the courtyardsof the great monastic buildings, the shikor was essentiallya monolingual space; and all practitionersof circumambulationwere united by a corporeal orientation to the monastic center as an efficacious gnas. The core group of circumambulatorsconsisted of local villagerswho met on the shikor, caught up on family news, conducted business, and gossiped while walking. Importantly,in our debates about the nature of gender among Tibetans,one of the main ways my interlocutors argued for the essential gender equality of Buddhism was to say that the mechanisms underlying the ritual efficacy of such "meritorious work"(Tib.dge las) were the same for everyone. In the face of great social changes and moral upheaval, Tibetans I spoke to found this merit work to be empowering, and they widely insisted that anyone could participatein the potenof tial "justiceand optimism"(Lichterand Epstein 1983:254) individualkarmic agency by choosing to work hard at worship practices that expressed pure faith in the power of the sacred center, person, or deity. Individual faith was most essentially performed through the public display of bodily commitment to the completion of circuits.Many insisted that there was no efficacy in walkinghalf a circuitof the monastery.And the most
617
determined of practitioners,the ones who walkedso rapidly that they passed everyone else many times, were those who had ritual obligations (Tib. bsa' ba) given them by a lama they had approached for help with a particularproblem, usually physical ailments, but also familydifficulties.2lSerious practitionersconceived of their meritworkas geared toward the achievement of a "circumambulationstandard" (Tib.skor tshad),which was set at a daunting 10,000circuits (for any sacred structure)and most often formed the basic numerical unit of lamas' ritual prescriptions. As one old man insisted to me, using his fingers for emphasis as he walked the path, "The circumarnbulationstandard is not 100 circuits,not 1,000circuits,but 10,000 circuits!!" People I walked with often made elaborate calculations of time needed to complete such tasks.At averagewalkingspeed, it took an hour to complete a circuit and thus severalyears to finish 10,000 circuits.The sheer amount of time and physical energy necessary to bring about sought-for benefits required quite a bodily commitment from practitioners,and some of the most serious, usually the elderly,devoted hours every day for severalyears to their tasks.22 In the contemporarycontext, however, circumambulation formed a moving "bulwark"against unprecedented and increasingintrusions into the sacred space of the monastery and the inner sanctums of local Tibetan identity. Instead of encirclinga center whose sacred power and worldly authority derived from its ritual separation in space and time from the mundane world, Tibetan circumambulators had to elbow through and cut across the secular and state spaces that not only extended rightup to the former"walls" of the monastery but that also penetrated the center itself, threateningits status as a sacred power place and rendering its worldlyauthorityambiguous.The daily,multiethnictraf1C of the urbanizing valley cut a straight line through the monastery and connected it directly with state headquarters, therebytracingthe channels of authoritythat now supposedly sanctioned monastic officialsand drawingthe lines of translocalmarketexchanges on which the monastic community increasinglydepended. Tourism brought Han Chinese and foreign visitors as well as Muslim merchants, including women, onto monastic grounds in movements and at times that disrupted the cycles of rituallife (see Figure8).23 And Tibetansthemselves were caught up in the transformations breaching ritual boundaries, as women vendors and worshippers came and went, and, because of the diminished abilityof the monastic leaders to discipline them, young monks regularlyleft the monastery to indulge in the increasinglyavailable worldly pleasures in town.
Genderedboundanes: The corporeality of a woman

Despite the communal nature of circumambulation,on the shikorgender differencewas highly significant in both the
maintenance of the moving bulwark and in the processes that threatened it with disintegration.I found that contemporarycircumambulationpractice was both reconstituting and reconfiguringbasic gendered participationframeworks operativein precommunistLabrang,a process that was producing new and differential consequences for Tibetan women and men. Both before and after the communist takeover,the majorityof circuambulatorswere women, including younger adult women, marriedor not. And most of the men on the path were elderly individuals working in their waning years for a better rebirth.24 This differencein numbers of men and women is striking when one considers that historicallyand in recent years, nomad, farmer,and urban Tibetan women had far less leisure time than men because, in all of those contexts, they were responsible for the vast majorityof household labor (including most farmwork,dairy production, and care of livestockin both natal and affinalhouseholds). In this, I suspect that my monk friend Konchok,in explainingwomen's disproportionateparticipationin worship practices like circumambulation and ritual fasting (Tib.smyung gnas), was citing traditionalculturallogic that magnified men's contributions relative to the prestige associated with masculine, "outside"tasks.25 Contraryto overwhelmingevidence indicating the opposite, Konchokinsisted to me that more laywomen participatedbecause they had less to do than laymen and their tasks in the household requiredless energy because laymen did all of the major, "heavy"(Tib. IjEd mo, with connotations of "weighty" or "important") work. But Konchok'sappeal to traditionalgender ideals to account for Tibetan women's greater presence on the shikor elided the fundamentally transformed conditions for the performanceof gendered subjectivitiesin Labrangand elsewhere in China.I arguethat the reconstitutionof the participation frameworks of circumambulation allowed for the performance of an oppositional and remedial Tibetanmarked sexedness that had particularly difficult consequences for young Tibetan women. Especially since the early 20th century, with the increasing militarizationof the region (cf. Lipman 1997),Tibetans in the frontierzone have negotiated accommodations with Han and Hui lifestyles. And since the CCPtakeover,the pressures and alluresof alternative discourses about the proclivities of sexed bodies have arguablybeen one of the main factors contributingto "strategichybridity"(cf. Bhabha 1994;Schein 2000) among Tibetans as well as constituting a crucial avenue through which the Chinese state has expanded its reach across the frontierand into Tibetans'dailylives. CCP-sponsoredeffortsto "liberate" Tibetanswere part of a larger"civilizing project"(Harrell1995)aimed at breaking male monastic authorityby reformingTibetan families. With the advent of collectivization schemes and of state feminism under the auspices of the local Women's Association (Ch. Fulian), social mobility under the new order
eos
Figure 8. HanChineseworkunit from Lanzhou on a tour of Labrang monasterytsummer1993.
requiredTibetans to demonstrate loyalty to new roles that both claimed the irrelevance of (local) sex differences and drew on "scientific"discourses about sex and sexuality to retainmale privilegein serviceto the state (cf.Dikotter1995; Evans 1997;Yang 1999).In practice,the coexistence of these culturallogics of sexedness providedstate officialsflexibility in maneuveringTibetanwomen's bodies as pivots between state and Tibetanmale ritualauthority.Duringthe upheavals of the years 1958-78, state agents attacked local male authorities by conspicuously displayingTibetan women in sacred spaces and in public roles, thereby making dangerously explicitthe traditionallyelided (yet crucial)mobilityof Tibetanwomen locally.26 During that period, as several elderly women told me, Chinese work teams attempted to ally with Tibetanwomen as disaffected masses and made the most "activist" among the women local cadres and partymembers.27 Duringstruggle sessions Tibetan women were encouraged to denigrate lamas by accusing them in front of assembled villagers of horriblesex crimes (cf. InternationalCommission of Jurists
1960). And, at the height of the CulturalRevolution,when the campaign to "destroythe four olds"was well under way, state officials and red guards desecrated Tibetan sacred spaces by bringingwomen into them. Priorto the communist takeoverwomen had been crucial to the Tibetan community as maintainers of the household economy when (in nomad regions) most adult men were at war with the Chinese; afterthe crackdownin 1958 they continued to be crucial to the state as maintainers of the commune economy when the majorityof adult men in Labrangwere arrested and sent to prisons or labor camps (cf. Dhondup Choedon 1978:21; Enloe 1989:58; Smith 1996:482; Tibet Information Network1997:101). With the "reformand opening up" period in the mid1980s, Tibetansin Labrang were subjectedto stateandpopular media appeals to biological explanations for male dominance, which workedboth to naturalizethe increasinglyinterconnected and capitalistmarketeconomy and to provide avenues for state-local and interethnic male collusions. As EmilyChao(2001) has pointedout, the masculinizationof the
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burgeoning private sector in China, embodied in the figure of the bold, urban entrepreneur,also feminized state work as passive and static and (hyper)sexualized young women's bodies and motives if women appeared in commercial spaces. The reformprocess, then, had very differentconsequences for the mobility of Tibetan men versus women. State hegemony had renderedmonastic leadershiptenuous and emasculated male secular authority in the villages. These changes, combined with state limits on numbers of monks and the decline of rural secular schools (cf. Bass 1998), left a vacuum in which young Tibetan men literally had no place to go locally.28 Young men thus increasingly shored up threatened masculinitiesby pursuingopportunities for modern, urban work and pleasure outside household and monastic life. Meanwhile,young women with such aspirationsfound themselves squeezed between broadened participation frameworksfor their gender-appropriate public agency and intensifying demands that their mobility remain narrower relative to that of men. Nonetheless, Labrangby the midl990s had become a crucialnode in a regionalmovement to "urbanity" (Schein2000), a gatheringplace for young aspiring Tibetan men and women. Young urban women I came to know idealized the gender equality that mobile Han and foreign women tourists seemed to enjoy, and they envied the fashions and beauty products they saw modeled by cosmopolitan women on television. Deji and Tsomo, both lowlevel cadres in their late twenties who lived in my small apartmentbuildingwith their husbands and small children, expressed pride in their (albeit meager) independent incomes and in their abilityto establish households separate from their in-laws in the villages a practice that contravened renewed pressures for patrilocalresidence. But both also chafed at the added time and effortit took them to run between the duties they shouldered in their work units and in their own and their in-laws' households. As Deji and Tsomo discovered, state-sponsored "women's worK' (Ch.funu gongzuo) did not address the basic gender asymmetries that still severely limited Tibetan women's social mobility the difficulties of arranged,patrilocal marriage,divorce laws that favored husbands, and the division of labor that kept women and girls working longer and harderin the household than men and boys (cf. Barlow 1994; Evans 1997; Gilmartin1990;Judd 1994;Wolf 1985; Yang 1999). And during the time of my fieldwork, young women like Deji and Tsomo faced difficultdecisions as they envisioned their sexual and reproductive lives amidst pressures from lovers, families, and, increasingly, the state. By the mid-199Os, birth control policies originally aimed at curbing growth among Han Chinese populations were being implemented among Tibetans. In Labrang,as elsewhere in China, the implementation and enforcement of such policies were carried out completely on women's bodies.29In this way, an asymmetric notion of sexedness
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that constructedfemale bodies as the appropriateobjects of scrutiny and control justified one of the most austere state policies enforced duringthe reformera, one that, especially in Tibetanregions, was instrumentalin "restor[ing] the statist ambitions of the partyleadership"(Anagnost1995:23; cf. Anagnost 1997)afterthe debacles of the Maoistyears. For Tibetans in this region, a basic polarity of sexed bodies (Tib.pho mo gnyis, lit., the two, males and females) enabled what was in practice a very flexiblesex-gender system underpinning Tibetan hegemony.30In the contemporary context, then, the terms and conditions under which bodies were sexed became key sites of "boundarywork" among locals. Amidst all the contestations around gender occurringin the valley, historicallyand in recent years spatial practicesvis-a-vis sacred centers most clearlyindexed a basic hierarchythat was not at all ambiguous to Tibetans: The exclusion of females from sacred spaces, regardless of age, status, or ethnicit,v,emphasized a polar opposition of hierarchicallyarrangedsexed bodies above all other social distinctions.3lIn strikingcontrast to confident exegeses of the egalitariannature of Buddhism or to discreetlyphrased criticisms of gender asymmetry among Tibetans, the topic of female exclusion from sacred spaces elicited, among laity and monastics alike, exclamations of ready agreement and an embarrassedlack of exegesis about the reasons for such exclusions-even among the most "feminist"of my young urbanwomen friendslike Deji and Tsomo. Unlikeother forms of pollution that could applyto both men's and women's bodies, the pollution associated with female bodies in sacred spaces was not subject to purification efforts (in this lifetime). It was, instead, a kind of negative power that adhered to a female body and derived from its opposition to male bodies, females being more determined by corporeality than males. TibetansI spoke to, both lay and monastic, did not talk about females in sacred spaces in terms of "pollution"(Tib.grib/sgrib). Instead,they focused on the dangers contiguity with the female body posed to the ritual efficacy of both lay and monastic sacred contexts.32 The pollution of female bodies in sacred spaces was essentially the congenital capacit,vto drain the male power (Tib.nus pa) to transcend and control,the power that was the basis of the sacred for Tibetans.Thus, this contiguity was unlike other forms of pollution (such as the presence of bodily fluids), for which avoidance practices were not necessarily enforced or universalbut which were open to a range of individual decisions for action, and people were very clear that female avoidance of sacred spaces was mandatoryand enforced (Tib.mi juggll-33 Tibetan women in contemporaryLabrang,as absence and presence, respectively,were thus crucial to the reconstruction of the main sites of male ritual authority, both sacred power places and the ideal household to gnas in both of its senses the abiding foundations of the Tibetan community. And, at the very time when opportunities for
translocalmobility were greaterthan ever before in the era of "reformand opening up," the Tibetan community and Chinese state policies together narrowedthe parametersfor the performanceof properTibetanfemininity,requiringTibetan females to be to embody and fix, to produce and maintain the continuity of basic social units (within competing social orders) in time and space. Ideally, females fixed locality whereas males embodied the possibility, and the danger,of translocality. Arnidstthe transformationof lifeways locals had experienced since the communist takeover, perhaps the most importantroles and boundaries to Tibetans,the most available for delineation,were those of the monastery.One of the most salient aspects of sacred power places in this context was, after all, theirfixicin time and space. As my lay male friend Gazangonce said to me in a conversation about the nature of a gnas, "Once a deity inhabits a gnas, you can't move it here and there like you can a chair."The elderly, whose nostalgia for the "oldworld"led them to project the fixity of boundaries onto the past, often told me that "before,"gender roles were clear and monastic discipline was the strictest in the region. They contrasted this with the changed state of affairsnowadays, epitomized especially by the presence of women within the shikor at all times of the ritual year. The desacralization of monastic space corresponded to the attenuation of monastic authorityto regulate both lay and monastic bodies. And, because many young men were adriftin the absence of traditionalroutes to social mobilityand power, what women chose to do with reimportant. gardto sacred spaces was particularly within perhaps,Tibetanscollaborated, Most significantly for inparameters wider allowed that new spatial practices sacred of dividual choice, to establish "inner sanctums" fixityin which the exclusion of females was both deeply assumed and consciously enforced. These inner sanctums were, not surprisingly,the gnas at the core of the monastery the abodes of the fierce protectordeities whose task it was to defend Buddhism against human and supernatural enemies by guarding the internal and external interests of In recent years, these deities and their cult the monastery.34 represented the last bastion of a "militaristic"Tibetan power at the core of the monastery the transcendent (male) power to stave off, attack, or tame intruders.These core spaces, therefore,were also the last bastion of the mandatoryexclusion of females. These were the spaces that, for my interlocutors men and women, lay and monasticwere immediately and emphatically associated with the most basic differencebetween men and women. The presence of a female body in such places was so unimaginable that most could not speculate about what would happen if a woman were to enter them.35 On my daily circuits on the shikor,and in interactionsI had in and around monastic space, I found that Tibetan women self-regulated to avoid the most sacred of spaces
and times. Their avoidance, however, was not disempowered absence women performed their absence from sacred centers by actively engaging with them from the ritually demarcated peripheries. In fact, in the contemporary context, circumambulationas an opportunityfor individual and collective agency was particularlyappealing to Tibetan women. The juxtaposition in recent years of alternative logics of sexedness amidst the high stakesof interethnicand state-local politics had feminized the participationframeworksof such ritualagency producingfaith, or dapa, among Tibetans. Perhapsthe best indicatorof this process was the transformation I found occurringin the meanings people attributed to a famous series of folktales about "the Simpleton from Arik"(Tib.Arik Lenpa). These well-known narratives, relatedto me by Tibetansacross the community as true stories, tell of the pilgrimagesof a nomad man fromArik,south of Labrang,to the Jokhangtemple in Lhasa,and of the miraculous effects of his deeply sincere and naive faith in the living reality of the deities there. In one tale, ArikLenpa's faith is so honest that, when he enters the temple to worship and asks the protector deity on the wall to hold his staff for him, the deity complies. In another tale, the barefootimage of Maitreyadutifullylifts his foot so that ArikLenpa can fit the deity with the shoe he made for him. As several local men told me, however, the stories previouslywere taken to indicate the great benefits of pure faith in that an unobscured mental state actually brought to life the deities and bent them to one's will. In recent years,however, the stories were often interpreted as evidence of the naive stupidity and hopeless parochialismof the nomad pilgrim,a dupe of his blind faith.In effect,the currentcontext called into question the masculinityof ArikLenpa,his faithfulpilgrimagefocused on the sacred core of the central city contrasting sharplywith the wily, cosmopolitan masculinity of the urban entrepreneur. Thus, on an ordinary day in Labrang,village women could be seen rushingabout on errands,workingin fields, or hurryingto do a few circuits of the monasterywhile crowds of young men gathered at pool tables set up in the streets. And on holidays,when the merit-makingpower of the monasterywas said to increase a thousandfold,women still outFor young and numbered men on the path by two-thirds.36 old women I spoke to, circumambulation was the most important avenue for empowered action aimed at selfimprovementin a rapidlychangingworldwith few opportunities for women's social mobility and education. Withlittle access to resources necessary to reap benefits from the corrupt, globalizing marketplace, at the same time that demands on them from state and household had increased, many Tibetanwomen took what little time and energy they could find and invested them in the efficacy they sought from lamas and deities in the monastery.
ell
I was struck by the wide range of strategies I found among women on the path to derive benefits from their meritwork,benefits they conceived of sometimes as veryindividual and sometimes as accruing to their loved ones. And, even though Tibetanwomen had unprecedentedyearlong access to monastic space in recent years, the vast majority of those within the shikor at any one time were performing daily circumambulations of temples to obtain specific benefits associated with those temples. Significantly, women circumambulatorsacross regions, statuses, and generationssharedan overwhelminglycorporealorientation to the gains they sought. The majorityI found to be resolutelystrategizingfor relieffromphysicalillnesses or for help with their reproductivefitures. Thus, most circumambulators of the monastery's medical college (lookingfor relief from illnesses) and Drolma temple (lookingto influence childbirth)were women, whereas the largestnumber of laymen and monks on ordinarydays could be found circling the Maitreyatemple, which was thought to bring about better rebirths.Finally,for hard-pressedwomen, circumambulation was "working leisure"time the shikorespeciallywas a noncommercial public space outside the household where women could legitimately relax and interact with others from across the village and region while simultaneously performingvirtuous "work."37
lEe tourrevisited: lEe .significance of fearfulbodies

Returningto the tour of the main assembly hall and looking at it in the light of this analysis, the crucialrole of gender in the boundary work engaged in by the Tibetan participants becomes even clearer. In this encounter, in which monk guide, Han and foreign tourists, Tibetan women worshippers, and chanting monk assembly interacted at the center of the monastery,the assertionof a basic Tibetansex-gender hierarchystructuredthe complex embedding of participation frameworks involved and enabled the negotiations among them that, for the Tibetans,reestablishedthe sacred authority of lamas, monks, and deities. This was accomplished in the same way I have argued that gender difference generally operated among Tibetans in contemporary Labrang: By allowingthe Tibetanwomen to worship during the tour, the monk guide used the women's embodied alienation from the authoritative contexts indexed by the presence of Han tourists, foreign "Tibet supporters,"and chanting monks to powerfully augment his status as an authoritativebrokerbetween the main sets of participation frameworksthose variedpeople and interests created. Amid the intermingling of bodies and motivations in that sacred space, the presence of the Tibetan women brought clear difference into play:The women understood neither the Chinese language tour nor the texts chanted by the monks. Their awkward,timid, and deferentialbehavior and limited participant roles contrasted sharply with the
el
casual ease with which the monk guide negotiated the various participationframeworksin the encounter and simultaneously inhabited different participant roles within them. After inviting the Tibetan women along, the monk guide never addressed them again. Their hushed "side play"talk to me about their fear and embarrassmentboth registered their subordination to the participationframeworksof the tour and the monk assembly and, because their comments were still loud enough for the monk guide to hear (yet were unintelligible to the Han tourists), constructed a participation frameworkthat included the monk guide as authoritative listener. In this encounter and others like it, the traditional authorityof monks was challenged by the presence of Han and foreignmen and women, whose bodies in the monastic space indexed the superior power of the Chinese state as well as the privilegeof access to the globalizingmarketplace. The monk guide countered that intrusionby allyingwith me in Tibetan-language talk the Han tourists did not understand and by limitingtourist access to sacred spaces, but his inclusion of the Tibetanwomen brought the visceralpower of the women's sincere corporealityinto play. In contrastto the Han tourists'blase observations,my talk of politics, and the monk's Chinese-language exegeses, the Tibetan women's comments were limited to exclamations about the state of their bodies. Theirperformanceof dapa as an involuntaryphysicalresponse of shame, fear,and awe powerfully asserted the basic sex-gender hierarchythat establishes Tibetan Buddhist authorityas unquestionable and sacred (cf. Rappaport1979).Duringthe tour, although everyone in the group was kept out of the gonkhang, the Tibetan women performed the fear and awe that established the protector deities inside as terrifyingly powerful to Tibetans. In effect, then, the Tibetanwomen's worshipfulperformancedid for the encounter what women's circumambulation practice was doing for the community in general: Contraryto the "exhibitionary order"(Mitchell1992)of the tour for tourists, their (feminine)worship restoredthe reciprocalbodily contiguitythat groundedritualefficacyfor Tibetans,therebyreassertingthe abidingcopresence of deities (andby extension of the lamas and monks empowered to invoke them) as agents or participants,not mere objects, in the encounter. By very publicly grantingthe Tibetanwomen access to that sacred space without tickets, the monk guide declared to his audience of Han and foreign tourists the moral superiorityof such a bodily orientation.The monk guide's move to include the Tibetanwomen allowed for intraethnicbonding among Tibetanmen and women aroundthe reestablishment of the monastery as a sacred power center. The women came from the ritual peripheries (the shikor) into the monastic center on the monk's authorityand returned to the peripheriesto continue their circumambulationafter the encounter. The Tibetan women's circular movement thus counteracted the linear, alienated movement of the
tourists into and out of the monastery on state authority reducing Labrang to an inferior periphery serving a Chinese center. Fromthis angle, then, we can see the recent increase of women's access to monastic space in Labrangin the way Konchokdescribed it to me as an effortamong Tibetans to "expand"or "raiseup the Buddha Dharma"(Tib. chosgong 'phelgtongba)in the midst of intense assimilation Tibetanwomen were allowed within the shikor pressures.38 to counter the desecrating intrusions of tourists and the Chinese state by interactingappropriatelywithmonastic inner sanctums and thereby turning some of the efficacy of those centers to their own ends.
In all lated towardone's next life, no merit at all, none at all!" and men Tibetan my discussions and interviews with silences, women about gender difference,the embarrassed the various explanations, the emphatic denials were all attempts to deal with the dilemma posed by this essential fixityof sex among Tibetans, despite the availabilityof conventional forms of (potentially)liberative gender transformation, as in nunhood or monkhood.40Indeed, as I have shown, the spatial practices constructingthe most essential places to the Tibetancommunity fixedsacred space by turning on the construction of the static natureof sex.
Conclusion:Genderand the penetrated center The burden of encireling

Thus, amidst unprecedented gender mingling within the shikor, spatial practices that excluded all female bodies from sacred power centers reestablished a particularlyTibetan gender hierarchy that both grounded and empowYet, ironically,the ered the Tibetan community in Labrang. sex-gender hierarchythat was so foundationallyempowering in these ways to the Tibetancommunityvis-a-vis outsiders was taking an especially heavy toll on Tibetan women. Althoughwomen viewed their circuitsof the monasteryas a way to exercise a form of (karmic)agency, many of my laywoman and nun interlocutorsexpressed weary resignation about the prospect of ever being able to escape either the seasonal cycles of familylife or the rebirthcycles of samsara. I found that for Tibetanwomen, especiallythe younger generations, the potential "justice and optimism" of karmic agency were muted by the limitations of sex. As Charles Keyes (1983) argues, people in Buddhist communities explain and amelioratemisfortunes in variousways, but most often karmic causation is associated with a lack of agency. In Labrang,karma was most generally invoked to explain basic social inequities that could not be changed. Tibetans spoke of relativestores of merit (Tib.bsod nams) most often to account for those whose social privilegevis-a-vis others could (i.e., men, the wealthy, and foreignerssuch as myseliLD be read from their bodies and behavior.39 In the contemporarycontext, aspiringTibetan women were increasinglyawareof the catch-22 in which the karmic explanationof gender differenceplaced them relativeto Tibetan men and foreignwomen: If men's inherentlysuperior accumulationof merit allowed them access to social and ritual resources necessary for upwardmobility,women's inferior merit kept them both excluded from access to highest ritualpowers and encompassed by the affairsof the housework that leads to hold, with little time for the "virtuous" Buddhist advancement or the self-improvement required for social mobility.As a young woman who had persevered againstgreatfamilyopposition to become a nun at age 21 so emphatically put it, "Women must have children . .. and work and workvery hard so that one has no merit accumuI have focused on circumambulation among Tibetans in Labrangas a gendered spatial practice to demonstrate the everyday processes by which important boundaries structuring social lives constantly "move"despite efforts to fix them in space and time. In recent years, the Chinese state and local Tibetans shared an interest in fixing monastic boundaries.But the differencesin the monastic center each hoped to thereby construct underscored the great threat of the monasteryto the state as well as the precariousnatureof its role in the Tibetan community. The state wished to contain the monastery as a neutral package of exotic Tibetanness, commodifiable as a tourist site and available as gorstate under geous evidence of China as a "multinational" the benevolent rule of the party.For Tibetans,however, reconstructingritualboundaries involved reestablishinglinks between lay and monastic communities that, especially nowadays, constructed loyalties that always already overflowed the bounds of the state's "mapof power."Forthe ordinarylay and monastic Tibetans I came to know, real, efficacious authority still flowed from the sacred power of lamas. In the valley the vigorous cycles of monastic life contrasted sharplywith the stillness of state work units and the emptiness of unfinished state buildings. Yet there was also the recognition among Tibetansthat the intervention of the Chinese Communists opened the way to unprecedented spatial intrusions that had altered foreverthe center that once ruledthe valley and kept outsiders at bay. The monastic center had been engulfed and penetrated,renderingit a jealously guardedicon of, yet poor substitute for, the "old world." Tibetans young and old thereforewere also looking outside and away from Labrang for hope for the future.Ambitious young men were drawn away from bodily commitments to the monastery in circumambulationor ordination.Meanwhile,for the firsttime in its history, the monastery's central incarnate lama did not inhabit the residence for which the monastery was named. As a marriedlayman and Chinese-educated cadre, the sixth JamyangShepa resided for the most part in Lanzhou, the provincialcapital. His contemporarystatus epitomized the emasculatingcooptation of Tibetanmale authoritieswhose
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sacred power once established the inviolabilityof the monastic center. Perhapsit was the desperationborn of this realizationthat had led to the widespreadbelief in the region, expressed to me by illiteratenomads as well as learned lamas, that the "real" sixthJamyangShepa was not the man in Lanzhoubut in fact the president of the United States,William JeffersonClinton. The process of monastic revitalizationin Labrangwas inextricablefrom locals' efforts to redeem Tibetan masculinities under Chinese rule. But the wishful longing expressed in the rumor about Clinton-as-lamaalso held the peril of a repudiation a resigned and paradoxical belief that the only effective power to resist intrusion would be embodied in a non-Tibetan, a white man and a syrnbol of modern, sovereignnationhood. The longing for a social efficacy unattainable within the parameters of local Tibetan masculinitywas preciselywhat was drawingyoung Tibetan men awayfrom obligationsand commitments that were the foundation of Tibetan power in the region. Ironically,perhaps the greatestthreatto both the integrityof the monastic community and the efficacyof state authoritywas the dwindling numbers of young men willing to take on the ritualrestrictions of monkhood within the eroded ritual infrastructure of the monastery.And yet, as large numbers of restless young men convergedon the valleyseeking to participatein modern forms of personal advancement and pleasure, the burdenof publicscrutinyand socialconstraint fellon women. An analysis that located the irreduciblyemergent nature of social orders in the space-making politics of interlocutors' negotiations of participation frameworkswithin everyday encounters demonstrated that Tibetan residents were reworkingthe participationframeworksof quotidian worship practices in fundamentally gendered ways. Most significantly, locals' spatial performance of gender difference around sacred power places, or gnas, worked to reassert an essentially Tibetan notion of hierarchicalsexedness that was reorienting bodies to the centricity of the monastery and its male authorities. But what aspiring women (such as nuns or educated laywomen) especially recognized was that the responsibilityfor and consequences of the relative immutabilityof sex among Tibetanswere largelylaid on women's shoulders. Tibetan women's enclosure by the household, as well as spatial practices that excluded them from the most powerfulof ritualcontexts, ensured that they did not have the opportunities for "maximumbodily contact" (Huber1994b)with a gnas that men did. And their importance to the household economy kept them home while young men pursued new opportunities for secular education and advancementin the Chinese state bureaucracy. As I have demonstrated, women were moving, to empower themselves and to take care of their families, but within an ideology and emergent social eifect (i.e., through the division of labor and social space) of fixity,their movement was ultimately circular.In this context, women's en-
circlingwas movement-in-stasis;they encircled the monastery (Tib.skor ba 'gropa) and yet had few prospects other than to keep malcingthe rounds of rebirths (Tib. 'khorbar 'khorba), in which the highest life form they could realistically expect to achieve was anotherfemale body.4lThus, at a time when local memories of an unprecedented attack on the very foundations of the Tibetan community were still freshand greatassimilationpressuresthreatenedthe reconstruction of local forms of authority,Tibetan women were chargedwith maintainingthe stability,the "abidingness" in time and space of both sacred center (gnas) and lay home (gnas).At the same time, that great burden was not associated with new or traditional routes to social mobility and prestige. Notes
Acknowledgments. I conducted research during three trips to Labrangover a four-yearperiod between 1992 and 1996. The research was sponsored by the Committee on ScholarlyCommunication with China, the Wenner-GrenFoundation, a Foreign Language and AreaStudies fellowship,a National Science Foundation predissertationgrant, the Institute for Research on Women and Genderat the Universityof Michigan,and the Universityof Michigan RackhamGraduateSchool fellowships. An earlierversion of this articlewas presented in March1998at the Associationof Asian Studies Conference in a panel entitled "Displacingthe Center in China:The FrontierZone as Place and Process."I would like to thankmy Tibetanand Chinese interlocutorsin Labrang for sharing aspects of their lives and frustrationswith me. I am also grateful to Tony Berkeley,NormaDiamond, LuisGomez,BruceMannheim, Ellen Moodie, ErikMueggler,Jennifer Robertson, Rupert Stasch, MicheleGamburd, IraBashkow,Susan McKinnon,and four anonymous AEreviewersfor theirhelpful comments and encouragement on earlierversions of this article. 1. See, for example, Anzaldua 1987; Appadurai 1991; Bhabha 1994;Gupta 1992;Ortner1996. 2. Therehave been attemptsto rethinkgenderrelationsas "practices" (i.e., Collierand Yanagisako1987). Such an approach,however, made it difficult for feminist theorists to conceptualize the relationship of gender to other forms of difference and thereby avoid assumptions of a universal experience of "womanhood"or of feminist empowerment (cf. Mohanty1984;Ong 1988).Myanalysis here takes its inspirationfrom a recent and productiveconvergence of interest across disciplines in the "performativity" of social positionings. In gender studies, attention has focused on gender as an embodied process, shot throughwith politics and ambiguity, in which people enact a multiplicityof subjectivitiesvis-a-vis particular notions of sex and sexuality (see Bordo 1993;Butler 1988, 1990, 1993;Morris1995;Weston 1993). 3. In other words, from this perspective, at no time is any individual solely responsiblefor the integrityor authorityof any meaning produced, regardless of expressed or experienced intentions (cf. Mannheirnand Tedlock 1995). 4. Elsewhere I explore the cultural politics of other aspects of the sex-gender-sexualitynexus operativein post-MaoLabrang(see Makley 1999, 2002). 5. The vast majorityof tourists in Labrangare Han Chinese urbanites. 6. By the late 18th century, the Geluk sect dominated among Tibetans in this region because of the power and influence of the
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two main Gelukmonastic centers, Labrangand Jonay (Tib.Cone; Pu Wencheng 1990:506). 7. Goldstein(1998b)points out that,whereas in Tibetthis "mass monasticism"resulted in 10-15 percent of the male population in monasteries,Buddhistmonasteries in Thailandheld only 1-2 percent of men. The situation at Labrangwas the same as that described by Goldsteinfor the huge monasteryof Drepungin Lhasa: The size of the monastic community, at over 3,400 monks by 1949, was considered to indicate the success of the monasteryitself (Pu Wencheng 1990:508). 8. Huber (1999:10)argues convincinglythat this "set of orientations" among both ordinaryand elite Tibetans antedated the introductionof Indian Buddhistsystems into Tibet and continues to profoundlyshape TibetanBuddhism(s)in practice,a quotidianreality that is often missed by analysts focusing solely on normative Buddhist narratives or ritual liturgies (cf. Lichter and Epstein 1983:225). 9. Collectedby WangQingshan(cf. Makleyet al. 2000). Proverbs (Tib.gtam dpe),usuallystructuredin parallelismsthat expressbasic conceptual similaritiesand oppositions, were a vital part of local Tibetan culture. They were rarelywritten down (althoughseveral collections of "Tibetanproverbs"have recently been published in Qinghaiand Gansu)but were passed along throughfrequent citation in everyday interactions and in more formal rhetorical exchanges such as comedic duets (Tib. kha shags) and speeches. 10. Note that this gendered inside-outside dichotomy among Tibetansdid not necessarilymap onto the culturalpolitics of "public-private"dichotomies assumed in capitalistWestern countries. 11. The term skye dman (lit. low birth), albeit not in wide colloquial use in Labrang,means "female-woman" (cf. Aziz 1988; Havnevik1990). My Tibetan interlocutors,men and women, were often embarrassedby the starkhierarchyexpressed by this term, and women especiallyobjected to its very pejorativeconnotations. Still, most did not challenge the seFgender hierarchyunderlying it, referring instead to the basic difference between men and women in terms of men's greateraccumulationof merit (Tib.byis lu cho bsod nams che glD. 12. According to Pu Wencheng (1990), before 1958, Labrang monastery rented 21,700 square mu (about 3,580 acres). The 900 villageswere all tenants. Thus, or so households in the surrounding most capital and propertywere controlled by Labrang. 13. Schwartz(1994) makes this same point in his discussion of as protest. He describes how the Barkkhorra(circumambulation) hor in Lhasawas used as a site for public protests against Chinese rule in the late 1980s. In Labrang,however, this use of the circumambulation path for overt resistance and public demands for Tibetan nationhood did not develop. 14. Monasticauthoritieshad even triedto convince Tibetansnot Huang to put up armed struggle (bsTan-'DzindPal-'Bar1994:102; Zhengqing 1989:78).The PLAshelled the monastery in retaliation for reportsthat monks there had given provisionsto Tibetanguerrillas. The damage was said to have been minimal (International Commission of Jurists1960:35). 15. Although he had taken his preliminarymonk vows, he was returned to lay life in Lanzhou, eventually marriedand had children, and held various figureheadposts as a government cadre. 16. The main assembly hall was one of the firstbuildingserected at Labrangafter it was founded in 1710. In April 1985, the main hall burned to the ground because of faulty electric wiring. Most of the Buddhaimages and a greatmany precious artifactsthat had Revolutionwere destroyedin the fire.By 1990, survivedthe Cultural with state support, the hall had been rebuiltto match the original, and the main deities'statueshad been commissionedand imported from Nepal (Luo Faxi 1987:5;Su Mo 1987:12;Suo Dai 1992:125).
17. The guide's comments echoed a refrainI heard often from the young monk tour guides at Labrang.Chosen for their ability to speak Chinese (not English),no doubt many of them did dislike the job and especially resented Han tourists, who could be very disrespectfulin monastic space. Others,however,liked the job because it allowed them to interactwith foreignersand to learn English. Some told me they liked the opportunityto representTibetan Buddhismin a good light to Han and foreignersalike. In addition, in a monastic culture in which scholarshipwas highly valued and prestigious, it was almost required for a young monk, regardless of his actual scholastic aptitude, to complain to visitors that such work took him away from his studies. 18. These three deities were considered high-rankingprotector deities who had left the mundane world still subject to karmiclaw (Tib. Xigrten las 'daspa'i srung ma). Theirtexts were chanted daily in the assemblies of the college. Allthree deities, along with several others, also resided in the gonkhang of the other five colleges at Labrang.Mahakalais one of the most importantprotectors of Tibetan Buddhism and is particularlyrevered by the Geluksect (Li 1956). Nebesky-Wojkowitz Anzhai 1989:159; 19. The State Council declaredthe monastery a national center was officially for the preservationof culturalrelics in 1982.Labrang "opened"to foreign and domestic tourism in 1985. The state has since contributed millions of yuan to the reconstruction of monastic buildings.Accordingto a 1991estimate, total annual income for the town from commerce associated with the tourist industry was over six millionyuan, with the monasterytakingin over600,000 yuan from its various tourism enterprises. 20. Foreign visitors to LabrangI met there and in the United States often complained to me about the limitations that restricmonasticspaces. through imposedon theirmovements tionson tourists 21. The etymology of the term boa' ba is unclear. In Labrangit was used to referto all ritualobligations given by lamas to laity as a way to handle particularproblems. Such obligations included a prescribed number of recitations of particularmantras or texts, usually prayersor homages to certain deities, and specified numbers of circumambulationsor prostrations around temples seen to have particulardomains of efficacy or around the whole monastery. They were analogous in a way to a doctor's prescription, except that they carriedmoral weight. 22. Elderlywomen and men working on a circumambulation standard on the shikor walked from two to six circuits or hours a day over a period of three to six years. Practitionersworking on standardsaroundtemples within monastic space would walk20-70 circuitsa day. One middle-agedvillagewoman from a neighboring the stupa of the famous incarnatelama region, circumambulating Gongtangto alleviatea majorillness I suspect was terminalcancer, told me she was workingon completing seven circumambulation standards (70,000 circuits!),walking 60-70 circuits per day, a task she estimated would take her five to six years to complete. 23. UnlikeotherrevitalizedGelukmonasteriesin Amdo,women, as tourists, are allowed onto monastic grounds at Labrangeven during the summer retreat(Tib.dbyarmtsham).As a monk friend sheepishly explained in a letter to me, tourism is too importantto the monastery because of the income it generates to ban women during the peak tourist season. 24. This demographic roughly fits written descriptions of gendered participationin circumambulationin the decades prior to Chinese Communist intervention in Labrang(cf. Ekvall 1964; Li Anzhai 1989;Ma Haotian 1942-1947), as well as those of oral accounts I heard from older Tibetans. 25. All personal names used in this article are pseudonyms. 26. As I and others have noted elsewhere (Aziz 1988; Makley 1997), in part because of Tibetan men's participationin monasticism and long-distance trade, women across Tibet had a broader
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range of spatial mobilitythan their Han, Hui, and foreign missionary counterparts. Chinese and foreign observers in the Labrang regionpriorto the CCPtakeoverexpressedconcern about Tibetans' relativelyflexible marriagepractices,which gave women much informalpower locally, and about the consequently large number of woman-headed households. 27. The daughterof Labrang'smilitarychief, the most powerful lay Tibetan official in the region, was one of these "activists," accordingto one prominent layman close to the official.The highest positions, however, were still reserved for men. To this day in at least one villagein Labrang, the majorityof CommunistPartymembers are women, whereas the village and productionbrigadeparty secretaryis a Tibetan man who has held that position since 1958. 28. See Makley 1999 for a detailed discussion of these issues in relationto the reconfigurationof Tibetanmasculinitiesunder Chinese rule. 29. In Chinese state censuses, only females were ranked and analyzed according to numbers at childbearingage. Birthcontrol polices did not address men's involvement in reproductionor encourage men's responsibilityin birth control practices. The most devastatingaspects of this scenario for women were forced abortions for unregisteredpregnancies and mandatorysterilizationafter the child quota was reached. These policies were being implemented to varyingdegrees in ruralareas around Labrang. 30. Tibetans across the community accepted the possibility for sex transformation(as in female to male, male to female, or a mixture of the two) and for liberative gender transformation(as in monkhood, nunhood, or lamahood). Such acceptance was in part due to widespread assumptions that the biological body did not exist as a fixed isolate. Instead, as Toni Huber (1994a)has put it, Tibetans considered the corporealto be ontologicallycontinuous with particularmental proclivities,spaces, times, and deities and thereforesubject to change in this and future lifetimes (cf. Adams 1992, 1999). 31. The sign I encountered in the summer of 1995 at Rong-bo monastery in Reb-Gong(Ch. Tongren),Qinghai,just northwest of Labrangis a case in point. I arrivedat Rong-bo during the monastery'ssummer retreat(Tib.dbyargrlas),when monastic space is strictlyoff-limits to all women. The sign read "budmed nang 'gro na mi chog" (women cannot enter);the word for women here, bud med, is a term that indexes Buddhist discourse. It is not widely used in colloquial speech and refers to female bodies as impure, sexual threats (cf. Campbell 1996:31).Thus, even nuns, who supposedly have renounced lay life, are not allowed to enter. 32. Just as they are excluded from the abodes of monastic protector deities, so women are barred from attending rites for lay territorialdeities that protect particularlocalities. 33. Ortner (1983:109)argues that amongSherpas, the concept of pollution (Tib.grib) is not particularly "sex-linked" because the effluvia of both male and female bodies are considered polluting. Gamchu, by contrast, the female power to drain others' special powers throughtouch is the only real sex-linkedpollution among Sherpas.In monastic contexts like Labrang, however,female bodily effluviaassociatedwith sexuality(i.e., menstruationand childbirth) were considered more polluting than the effluvia of male bodies. Thus, whereas monks and laymen could urinate on monastic grounds, menstruatingwomen in that space were considered unclean.Still,laywomenand nuns exerciseda rangeof decision-making options with regardto worship while menstruating.By contrast, a female body, regardlessof age, sexual experience, or time in the menstrual cycle, was uniformlyexcluded from the most sacred of spaces. 34. The protector deities worshipped at Labrangare a combination of those considered the most powerful of "other-worldly" deities, who appear as wrathfulaspects of Buddhas and Bodhisat-
tvas, and "this-worldly" indigenous deities tamed to the service of Buddhism (cf. Nebesky-Wojkowitz1956). The monastery also had a separate tsankhang in which resided Naychong Trinlay Gyapo, the god who was made a special protector of the Geluk sect by the fifth Dalai Lama 35. One monk friend said that such a woman would be told to leave, but most could only imagine that a woman would enter such a space by accident or in extreme circumstances, such as during the violence of the CulturalRevolution.One nomad woman friend told me the story of a woman in her encampment who, while out herding,had accidentallystumbled onto a ritualfor a local mountain god. Accordingto my friend,the woman was stoned and beaten by young male attendees. 36. Many young urban women lamented to me that they did not have more time to complete circumambulations,something I never heard fromyoung villagemen, and I often talkedwith village women young and old who would snatch the time off from field workduringinclementweatherto circumambulate. In a head count of circumambulatorsduring the fourth-monthNyongnay festival, one of the most popular times to circumambulatethe monastery and one of the annual occasions on which men turn out, women still made up 65 percent of circumambulators. And although the number of young men was close to that of young women (20 and 24 percent,respectively),the vast majorityof those wearingTibetan clothing for the occasion were young and older women. 37. Because village women did the majorityof farmwork,fields could also be an interactivespace for them (exceptduringthe winter). Women from differenthouseholds, usually relatives but also friendsin mutualaid networkswithin or acrossvillages,would help each other with stages of the agricultural process. Throughoutthe spring and summer, women spent much time in fields workingin small groups with children nearby. Fields, however, are arguably not "public"spaces but part of the household domain. 38. In this way, such relativepermissiveness is analogous to the unprecedented use among Tibetans of mass empowerment ceremonies in exile and at places like Labrang(cf. Germano1998;Kohn 1997;Lopez 1998). 39. People often accounted for my greater height and good health relative to locals by considering these attributes evidence of my greatstores of meritfrompreviouslifetimes.Such statements thus indexed locals' resigned sense of inferiorityvis-a-vis wealthy foreigners. 40. Such difficulties and debates are contemporaryversions of debates waged in Buddhist circles historically.As many scholars have pointed out, for centurieswritersof Buddhisttexts and commentarieshave grappledwith the relationshipbetween sexed bodies and the ability to attain ultimate liberation (Cabezon 1992; Campbell 1996;Gross 1993;Paul 1985;Shaw 1994;Sponberg 1992; Zwilling1992).The fundarnental hierarchyof sexed bodies, I would argue, helps explain the proliferation of still-current practices among Tibetans in Labrangconcerned with the relative value of sexed bodies the rituals in which women pray for male rebirths for themselves and theirunborn children;legends, ritesland recent stories evincing a fear of male to female transsexual change (cf. Aziz 1978; Huber 1994a);and the texts and legends replete with stories extolling the virtues of female to male transformation.By contrast, foreign feminist advocates for an "androgynous" Buddhism emphasize the small group of Mahayanatexts that explicitly argue for the irrelevanceof sex difference vis-a-vis Buddhist enlightenmentand state that a female adept need not be transiformed into a male to become a Buddha (cf. Gross 1993;Paul 1985). 41. The terms skorba and 'khorba are closely relatedetymologically. See Ekvall1964.
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Gendered Boundaries in Motion: Space and Identity on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier Author(s): Charlene E.

CHARLENE E. MAKLEY Reed College

* Volume30 Number4 November2003

motion * American Ethnologist boundariesin Gendered

Genderand the productionof empowered centricity

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Figure 2. Locationof Labrang in the People'sRepublicof China.

in motion * American Ethnologist boundaries Gendered

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Figure 3. Labrang monastery,winter 1947. (Photo by WaynePersons,used with permission.)

Gendered boundaries in motion * American Ethnologist

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Figure 5. Panorama of Sang Rivervalley, with new highwayconstructionthroughthe monastery,summer1995.

The tour: Fearand loathing in the monasteFs center

Gendered boundaries in motion * American Ethnologist

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Figure 7. Mainassembly hall at Labrang monastery,summer1995.

in motion * American Ethnologist boundaries Gendered

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Genderedboundanes: The corporeality of a woman

Gendered boundaries in motion * American Ethnologist

Figure 8. HanChineseworkunit from Lanzhou on a tour of Labrang monasterytsummer1993.

* VoLume 30 Number4 November2003

in motion * American Ethnologist boundaries Gendered

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lEe tourrevisited: lEe .significance of fearfulbodies

in motion * American Ethnologist boundaries Gendered

Conclusion:Genderand the penetrated center The burden of encireling

* Volume30 Number4 November2003

in motion * American Ethnologist boundaries Gendered

* VoLume 30 Number 4 November2003

in motion * American Ethnologist boundaries Gendered

* Volume30 Number4 November2003

in motion * American Ethnologist boundaries Gendered

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