MODERN ASIAN STUDIES REVIEW Vol.5 新たなアジア研究に向けて5号
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the publication of his doctoral thesis [GOLDSTEIN 1968], modern Tibetan studies had now become established as an academic study that met a certain academic standard. Though Goldstein was the pioneer of this style, there were in fact a number of similar studies being attempted during this time. For example, the anthropologist Nimir B. Aziz presented a reconstruction of the history and social makeup of the Tibetan region of Dingri based on verbatim accounts from refugees who had fled from there [AZIZ 1978].In any case, the studies that used refugees as informants entered the mainstream of social scientific Tibet research, particularly from 1960 to 1970, the period immediately after the emergence of refugees. It is worth noting that most of the people in charge of such research were anthropologists.20 Some would consider this to be a very odd phenomenon. As part of China’s democratic reform in 1959, the social structure of the Dalai Lama regime was completely destroyed, and Dalai Lama-ruled Tibet was reduced to a chapter in history as “old Tibetan society.” Therefore, though it would seem that studying the “old society” should be the work of historians, it was in fact taken on by anthropologists and continues to be performed by anthropologists even today. Arguably, the definitive work is Goldstein’s A History of Modern Tibet [GOLDSTEIN 1989a], a monumental piece of research into the history of modern Tibet that stretches some 898 pages. What must be noted at this point is the fact that these listening surveys did not initially purport historical research but were designed to be contemporary research, akin to regular ethnographic research. Let me introduce an episode that symbolizes this phenomenon.While undertaking his survey of the refugee camps during the 1960s, Goldstein acquired a contractual document from a subject of the old Tibetan government called Nyima. This document was a contract authorizing Nyima to leave the manor to which he belonged. Nyima was initially reluctant to provide the document. Nyima feared that if Tibet should soon regain independence, allowing the exiles to return to their land, then without this document he would find himself in trouble. In the end, Goldstein obtained the document after promising Nyima that if the day came when the people could return to Tibet, then he would promptly return it to him [GOLDSTEIN 1989b]. Considering how difficult it was for the outside world to know about Tibet’s situation after the Tibetan Uprising of 1959, this is a most illuminating episode.It was difficult for anyone outside China, including the Tibetan refugees, to have an idea of what radical change traditional Tibetan society had to sustain due to the 1959 democratic reforms of “new” China. This being the case, as far as the refugees at the time were concerned, their haven of India was ultimately nothing more than a temporary abode, and they would have been in no doubt that their original world (traditional Tibet before 1959) was the one and only “true Tibet.” Considering the fact that little time had passed since the Tibetan Uprising, and the fact that the refugees had not imagined that their exile would last for so long (it has already lasted half a century), such verbatim accounts at the time of the survey would represent, in a sense, contemporary Tibetan research.However, since the refugee informants were indeed refugees, they were not aware of the situation in Tibet proper following the exile (from 1959 onward). Thus, the accounts of the refugees’ experiences in Tibet could only ever be used to reconstruct old Tibetan society, which was in fact already uprooted from 1959 thanks to China’s democratic reforms. The facts of the cataclysmic changes that took place in Tibet were only ever known in detail by outsiders after China had come through its Cultural Revolution and had begun taking timid steps to release information in the early 1980s. As people became increasingly aware of the sheer scale of the changes and damage in Tibet, it began to be understood that the old society the Lhasa-centrist studies sought to reconstruct had already been consigned to history. In other words, the reality that contemporary Tibet, the very target of the project which had begun as contemporary research, no longer existed anywhere, was finally understood after 020MODERN ASIAN STUDIES REVIEW Vol.5

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