Copyright

Bendi Tso, Marnyi Gyatso, Naljor Tsering and Mark Turin acting as Trustees for the Members of the Choné Tibetan Community

Published On

2023-10-04

Page Range

pp. 1–168

Language

  • Chinese
  • English
  • Tibetan

Print Length

168 pages

Introduction / སྔོན་གླེང་གི་གཏམ། / 导论

Chapter of: Shépa: The Tibetan Oral Tradition in Choné(pp. 1–168)
Shépa is an encyclopaedic collection of antiphonal songs that have been practiced by the Choné people, a Tibetan subgroup residing in Gansu Province of northwest China, for centuries. This collection details Tibetan cosmology, geography, history, social customs, and cultural-religious objects, among other themes. It also contains cultural elements from neighbouring civilisations that were adopted by Tibetans. The content and performative styles of Shépa overlap with other forms of Tibetan oral tradition from northern Amdo to the southern Himalayas. Shépa also has a long-standing and entangled relationship with Tibetan literature, blurring the boundaries between orality and textuality and resisting strict demarcation. Currently, the performance and transmission of Shépa face new challenges and opportunities in the context of intangible cultural heritage preservation. For the Choné people as well as for broader Tibetan society, Shépa constitutes a repository of Indigenous, Bon, and Buddhist knowledge.

Contributors

Bendi Tso

(author)
PhD student in Anthropology at University of British Columbia

Bendi Tso is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include oral tradition documentation, Indigenous knowledge mobilization, and linguistic and cultural identities on the Sino-Tibetan borderland. Her work has been published in Book 2.0 and two peer-reviewed edited volumes.

Marnyi Gyatso

(author)
Postdoctoral Associate at the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University

Marnyi Gyatso is a historian of empires and frontiers in East Asia. He is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Council on East Asian Studies of Yale University. His research focuses on the interaction and exchange between China and Inner Asia from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. He is currently working on a book project that examines China’s transition from empire to nation-state in Inner Asia between 1862 and 1962. He is also editing a book that explores how different ethnic groups along the rivers of the eastern Tibetan Plateau have adapted to, negotiated with, transformed, and interpreted their natural surroundings.

Naljor Tsering

(author)
PhD student in Ethnology, Southwest Minzu University, and in Tibetan History and Philology at École Pratique des Hautes Études, PSL

Naljor Tsering is a Ph.D. student at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. His research interests include early tantric ritual of the Tibetan Bon religion. His forthcoming Ph.D. thesis is entitled ‘dBal Chu: A Study of the Texts and Performance of a Ritual in the Cycle of the Bon Divinity Gekhod.’ He currently participates in two projects: Protecting the Kingdom with Tibetan Manuscripts: Codicological and Historical Analysis of the Royal Drangsong Collection from Mustang, Nepal, and Tibetan Social History and Archives Research in rGyal rong (Jia rong) of Sichuan, China. He has been involved in translating and editing four books.

Mark Turin

(author)
Associate Professor, Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and Department of Anthropology at University of British Columbia
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2262-0986

Mark Turin is an anthropologist, linguist and occasional radio presenter, and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. His research area is ethnolinguistic, language endangerment, linguistic diversity, visual anthropology, digital archives, and field methodology. His numerous publications appeared in Journal of Asian Linguistic Anthropology, Language in Society, Museum Anthropology, Oral Tradition, among other journals, as well as in many edited volumes. He is the author or co-author of four books, three travel guides, the editor of nine volume, and he edits the World Oral Literature Series with Open Book Publishers.