China's Tibetan Frontiers: Sharing the Contested Ground

This Pioneering Ethnographic analysis provides a far-reaching critique of the changing social, political and organizational topography of western China. The seismic changes wrought across this terrain in recent history are seen through the lens of Trinde, a remote `Tibetan autonomous' county. Drawing on over two years of detailed empirical investigation in a region never previously studied by foreign researchers, Beth Meriam traces and interlinks the human, national and global dimensions of continuity and change, and offers a timely reexamination of the complex and subtle processes of identification and belonging in this area.

Set in a region that is never long out of the headlines, the ethnography vividly illustrates how policy fluctuations involve difficult, and often painful, dilemmas for local people. This sensitive and controversial work also provides a rare and intimate account of a diverse range of people, and highlights their central role in shaping a dynamic, changing society.

The book will be of interest to a wide audience, including students and scholars of Chinese nationality studies, Tibetology and social and political anthropology, as well as those who are looking for a penetrating, integrated analysis of this hotly-debated and often misunderstood region.

Beth Meriam is a published writer, anthropologist and researcher. Since 1994, she has worked widely across the Himalayan and Tibetan cultural region. Her 1998-99 investigation of culture, development and education in Ladakh was awarded the James Littlejohn Prize (Edinburgh, 1999). In 2001, she published `Culture' Matters: Developing Ladakhi Education on the Margins of India via the University of Edinburgh, which was the culmination of an in-depth research project. Meriam was awarded a Cambridge University doctorate that included research undertaken while living and working with pastoralists on the Tibetan plateau, and she continued as a Research Associate at Cambridge between 2006 and 2009.