Papers by Valentina Punzi
Il Tibet, fra mito e realtà. Tibet between Myth and Reality
C’è una rivoluzione che si sta compiendo sotto i nostri occhi: la scalata della Repubblica Popola... more C’è una rivoluzione che si sta compiendo sotto i nostri occhi: la scalata della Repubblica Popolare Cinese verso l’empireo delle superpotenze mondiali. Nella vita quotidiana di un sempre maggior numero di persone questa ascesa appare evidente nei consumi, nei rapporti di lavoro e nelle mete di viaggio. La Cina la incontriamo ogni giorno, ma la conosciamo poco. Molti ne ignorano la cultura eterogenea, i costumi popolari e gli effetti irreversibili che uno strabiliante sviluppo economico sta avendo su di essi. Per capire la Cina di oggi è necessario conoscerne affondo il processo di formazione nazionale e culturale,il modo in cui la modernità è stata costruita in questo paese. Similmente a quanto accaduto durante l'industrializzazione in Europa - processo guidato da nuove idee sulla società e sul suo sviluppo - parte cruciale in questo percorso di formazione nazionale in Cina è stato ricoperto dall’Antropologia. Quello che ne esce è un quadro di incredibile complessità: la Cina in tutta la sua polivocalità e ricchezza culturale.
Orality and alternative discourses: telling lha sgrung and ‘narrated geographies’ in contemporary... more Orality and alternative discourses: telling lha sgrung and ‘narrated geographies’ in contemporary Amdo Oral narrations lay at the shifting intersection between subjective expression and shared culture. As far as the process of narrating implies a constant negotiation between individual intentions and cultural elaboration, the created narratives express individual creativity, while maintaining those culturally relevant traits that effectively link the narration to its social context. Built upon cultural subjectivity, oral narrations are both forms for producing meaning and cultural tools for processing experience. Thus, they provide valuable resources for gaining insights into the self-perception of a community and into specific representations of collective memory pertaining to beliefs and cultural practices along with neglected pieces of history, ethno taxonomies and folk etymologies of toponyms. This paper attempts a preliminary exploration of the entangled relationship between or...
ibetan Bon and Buddhist religions have recorded their canons, rituals, hagiographies and historie... more ibetan Bon and Buddhist religions have recorded their canons, rituals, hagiographies and histories in detail, establishing the written word as the dominant form of knowledge transmission through the centuries, and therefore assigning to it a privileged place in Tibetan society as a whole. Nevertheless, Tibetans have also been passing down a rich oral culture for generations, too often overshadowed by the large amount of textual sources available. Compared to the written texts, oral narratives present quite a different religious and cultural scenario to what local ordinary Tibetans identify themselves with, thus providing us with an understanding of the richness of those aspects of Tibetan culture not included into the established canons. Before the spread of Buddhism in the eighth century, Tibetan religious life was dominated by Bon religion and the substratum of indigenous beliefs, those classified as “folk religion” by Tucci. 2 Defining the Bon religion of Tibet is not an easy tas...
inghai Province has for centuries been a peripheral borderland between the Tibetan and Chinese po... more inghai Province has for centuries been a peripheral borderland between the Tibetan and Chinese political ‘centres’. The presence of different linguistic, ethnic and religious groups, namely Tibetan, Hui, Han, Monguor and small Muslim groups like the Salar, has historically shaped the syncretic profile of the region, which Tibetans refer to as Amdo. Nowadays, attempts carried by the Chinese nation-state to promote social inclusiveness and ‘harmonious relations’ (Chinese: hexie guanxi) are ideologically motivated strategies to pursue larger plans concerning the modernization and economic development of China’s western regions. However, the clash between the Chinese national and the Tibetan local understandings of modernity and development emerges in multiple ways that deny a single broad-spectrum interpretation for the variety of social and political changes that are taking place in China’s contemporary minorities’ areas like Amdo. In this context, religious rituals, revitalized after...
gins 2014) have defined Amdo, the northeastern area of the Tibetan plateau that now falls within ... more gins 2014) have defined Amdo, the northeastern area of the Tibetan plateau that now falls within the Chinese provinces of Qinghai, western Gansu and northern Sichuan, as a geopolitical middle ground squeezed between Chinese and Tibetan polarities and shaped by the political, linguistic and cultural influences of Beijing to the east and Lhasa to the south. They have accordingly labelled it a frontier zone, where linguistic, cultural and religious hybridity and marginality prevail, in comparison with the assumed wholeness of Chinese and Tibetan centres. Roche (2015, 1-4) insightfully argues that this Sino-Tibetan frame cannot account for the complexity and variety of communities who have been living for centuries in this area, and that it is fundamental to shift the focus back to local agency. Clusters of communities have been interacting over history and have distinctively shaped their local identities beyond the ethnic and linguistic macro-divides that were imposed by the Chinese state's classification of minority populations. On the other hand, western academia's attempts to describe processes of cultural and linguistic change solely in terms of the Tibetanisation of these groups erase diversity in favour of the idea of the Tibetan absorption of local identities (Roche 2015, 13-14). Beyond the academic frame, a Tibetan civilising project oriented toward Tibet's peripheral populations, aimed at stretching Tibetan political, linguistic and cultural influence to the marginal territories, reveals a long-term Tibetan agenda of assimilation (Huber 2010, 2011; Jinpa 2014). The creativity of vernacular religion allows a space for expression that promotes local agency and highlights its specific social and historical context. At the same time, belief narratives redefine local instances of contemporary identities, alternative to those proposed by the Chinese state, into configurations of the Amdo kaleidoscope of cultural and linguistic identities. Although the prescriptive role of institutionalised Buddhism echoes the power of the state in its attitude of standardising and normalising religious beliefs and practices, and casts its shadow of disapproval onto heterodox systems, local M
Based on Derrida's notion of genre participation and Briggs and Bauman's theory of the intertextu... more Based on Derrida's notion of genre participation and Briggs and Bauman's theory of the intertextuality of genres, this article reassesses emic and etic definitions of sgrung, with the aim to propose its classification as a Tibetan intertextual genre that is in dialectic confrontation with history (lo rgyus). It analyzes the interdependent relationship between social groups and cultural production to understand the articulation of genres and authority in contemporary sgrung narration performed in a Tibetan community located in Amdo (Qinghai, PRC).
Floods occurred in 2000s near a contemporary mining site in a Tibetan village (Qinghai, PRC), evo... more Floods occurred in 2000s near a contemporary mining site in a Tibetan village (Qinghai, PRC), evoking local uncomfortable memories of soldiers plundering gold under the brutal rule of the Hui Muslim warlord Ma Bufang in 1930s. The entanglement of this fragment of local history with recent mining exploitation in the area takes center stage of this paper. By giving prominence to the spatial dimension of events over their temporal organization, it demonstrates that past trauma and present fears of the local Tibetan community are inscribed and kept alive in the landscape through precarious relationships of relatedness and alienness among the villagers, the revengeful autochthonous deities, and roaming foreign ghosts.
Asian Ethnology, 2020
Based on Derrida's notion of genre participation and Briggs and Bauman's theory of the intertextu... more Based on Derrida's notion of genre participation and Briggs and Bauman's theory of the intertextuality of genres, this article reassesses emic and etic definitions of sgrung, with the aim to propose its classification as a Tibetan intertextual genre that is in dialectic confrontation with history (lo rgyus). It analyzes the interdependent relationship between social groups and cultural production to understand the articulation of genres and authority in contemporary sgrung narration performed in a Tibetan community located in Amdo (Qinghai, PRC).
Wind Horses. Tibetan, Himalayan and Mongolian Studies, edited by Andrea Drocco, Lucia Galli, Giacomella Orofino, Chiara Letizia and Carmen Simioli, 2019
Dealing with Disasters: Perspectives from Eco-Cosmologies, edited by Pamela Stewart, Andrew Strathern, Diana Riboli and Davide Torri. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020
Sulle Vie del Catai, 2018
Revue d’Études Tibétaines , 2017
Revue d’Études Tibétaines , 2015
Our eyes are socio-culturally framed and gazing is a performance that orders, shapes and classifi... more Our eyes are socio-culturally framed and gazing is a performance that orders, shapes and classifies, rather than reflects the world." 1 inghai Province has for centuries been a peripheral borderland between the Tibetan and Chinese political 'centres'. The presence of different linguistic, ethnic and religious groups, namely Tibetan, Hui, Han, Monguor and small Muslim groups like the Salar, has historically shaped the syncretic profile of the region, which Tibetans refer to as Amdo. Nowadays, attempts carried by the Chinese nation-state to promote social inclusiveness and 'harmonious relations' (Chinese: hexie guanxi) are ideologically motivated strategies to pursue larger plans concerning the modernization and economic development of China's western regions. However, the clash between the Chinese national and the Tibetan local understandings of modernity and development emerges in multiple ways that deny a single broad-spectrum interpretation for the variety of social and political changes that are taking place in China's contemporary minorities' areas like Amdo.
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Papers by Valentina Punzi
Molti ne ignorano la cultura eterogenea, i costumi popolari e gli effetti irreversibili che uno strabiliante sviluppo economico sta avendo su di essi. Per capire la Cina di oggi è necessario conoscerne affondo il processo di formazione nazionale e culturale,il modo in cui la modernità è stata costruita in questo paese. Similmente a quanto accaduto durante l'industrializzazione in Europa - processo guidato da nuove idee sulla società e sul suo sviluppo - parte cruciale in questo percorso di formazione nazionale in Cina è stato ricoperto dall’Antropologia.
Quello che ne esce è un quadro di incredibile complessità: la Cina in tutta la sua polivocalità e ricchezza culturale.