MODERN ASIAN STUDIES REVIEW Vol.5 新たなアジア研究に向けて5号
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Articlesa time lag of nearly twenty years from the destruction of the actual old society in 1959. To borrow terminology familiar to anthropologists, these studies would today be considered modern history, but they were originally designed to be ethnographic studies that defined pre-1959 Tibetan society as the “ethnographic present.” I do not know about journal articles, but for a doctoral thesis, how many years does it take for a doctoral student to prepare a thesis after research, find tenure at a university, search out a publisher and negotiate a publication grant, and then publish the results as the sole author? In ethnography, it is by no means rare for it to take ten years after a survey begins before the book appears on the shelf. For researchers of modern Tibet who follow the trend set by Goldstein, the time lag was not ten years, but thirty years, and even fifty years.That being said, there is no denying that this process invites confusion. Though central Tibet suffered such cataclysmic and irrevocable changes in the democratic reforms of 1959, it was scarcely possible for people in the outside world to know the exact nature of these changes. The year 1959 was in reality an epochal year, but the outside world would have to wait until the early 1980s before they could have certain knowledge of this fact. This time lag is a crucial factor. For the refugees, the “old society,” prior to the changes of 1959, represented “contemporary Tibet,” and anthropologists used information collected from these refugees to reconstruct the pre-1959 society. However, for anthropologists, there remained the tricky question of whether the model of this reconstructed Tibetan society was “history” or “contemporary ethnography.” Naturally, the anthropologists also recognized that this model was a reconstruction of pre-1959 Tibetan society, but the opacity of China’s internal political process made anthropologists hesitate to use the label of “history.” During the Cold War, the pre-1959 model of Tibet represented the reality for Tibetan exiles in a way that is difficult to imagine today; indeed, even as the changes that occurred in Tibet gradually came to be known, there was an idea that this change was nothing more than a temporary aberration that would be rectified when Tibet reestablished “independence.” Thus, during this time lag, it remained for a long time unclear whether these studies were modern Tibetan ethnography or the historiography of a lost past, and it is a fact that the weight shifted progressively from the former to the latter. Thus, it was increasingly understood that there existed no more the society depicted by anthropologists, who had started their research as contemporary research, and such work gradually became what is now modern history. The fact that this state of affairs could have ever come about in the first place can be attributed to the abuse of substitutive ethnography and, in particular, Lhasa-centrist studies. In other words, because the surveys took place in locations far removed from the field of study, the research entailed a defect in that it failed to properly assess the changes that were underway in the informants’ “old home” even while the surveys were being carried out.Viewing the research from the historical research perspective is of crucial importance. Since Tibet had scarcely any relations with China during the first half of the twentieth century, all the Chinese language documents were nothing more than secondary sources, and the use of Tibetan language documents, the primary sources, was restricted for political reasons.21 In this sense, historical research on this period was much the same as historical research on non-literate societies.22 Arguably, therefore, an oral history that used refugees as informants was the only methodology that could encompass the target time and space. Using verbatim accounts of exiles is far outside of a direct historical research method, and it is not technically valid historical research, either. As such, it is not an attractive method for young historians who have received philological training. There is also an institutional issue, which tends to get overlooked: It is very difficult for young graduate students to obtain a grant they need to head out to India, while enrolled in a Chinese studies course ostensibly for historical research, set up base in a refugee camp, and acquire fluent Tibetan language proficiency required to record verbatim accounts. Conversely, it follows that those students who succeeded in making such a proposal were researchers belonging, institutionally, in 021

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