in this Sino-Tibetan frontier region over a period of many decades, spanning the late Qing, Republican, Maoist and reform eras. Her informants consisted of a wide range of Tibetans (including monks and nuns, local cadres, researchers, business people, ordinary folks, pilgrims, nomads, villagers and townspeople) as well as some Han tourists and foreign visitors. Armed with a post-Structuralist and post-colonial sensibility, Makley mixes story telling with high theory (mostly from feminist and linguistic anthropology) to good effect, though some readers might become impatient with what appears to be jargon-mongering in some places. Like most other Western-language anthropological works on ethnic minorities in China published in recent years, Makley’s book focuses on the impact of the incorporation into the Han-dominated Chinese Communist party-state on the ethnic minority in question. The Chinese impact on the Tibetans was not simply in terms of military suppression of rebellious elements but more importantly in terms of the transformation of modes of governance and the political economy, policies emanating from Beijing, political campaigns, influx of migrants, modernist secular and consumerist culture translated through urban China, etc. These factors, superimposed upon the Tibetan-Buddhist religious milieu (which itself changes over time), have been central to the ways in which Tibetans negotiate their gender identities and agencies in the past half century, this being the particular focus of Makley’s study.

Central to Makley’s theoretical formulation is her concept of “mandalization”. Inspired largely by the concepts of the Balinese “theatre state” (Clifford Geertz) and the Thai Buddhist “galactic polity” (Stanley Tambiah), Makley uses mandalization to characterize the mode of domination of the Labrang region by the Geluk-sect Labrang (Tashi Khyil) monastery in pre-Liberation times. Like in a mandala, the Labrang monastery and its Geluk tantrist-lama elite sat at the centre, emanating political and religious power and authority to, and drawing adoration and pilgrimage from, all directions. The closer people were to the monastery, the stronger was the draw of submission towards it. Supporting a large monastic sangha (reportedly as many as four thousand monks at one time lived in the monastery), the monastery depended on the surrounding laity as sponsors, while laypeople depended on the monastery for ritual and spiritual succour.

According to Makley, the Tibetans in the Labrang region have experienced three kinds of “violent liberation” and each liberation perpetuated a particular kind of embodied, gendered order. The first kind of liberation was the traditional Tibetan-Buddhist tantric practice of violent subjugation of evil spirits and enemies of the Dharma by wrathful protector deities invoked by the Geluk monastic elite (high power, high prestige incarnate lamas known as trulkus as well as other lamas). The uses of images and acts of violence are central to such performances of monkish valour and masculinity. Such tantric rituals paradoxically both liberated believers from worldly desires and removed obstacles in the way of achieving worldly goals such as household prosperity.

The second kind of violent liberation was the Communist/Maoist liberation of the 1950s-1970s, when the Communist party-state (known later as Apa Gongjia, literally “Father State”) liberated the Tibetans from a supposedly backward feudal theocracy. This liberation was brutally violent, as a large number of Tibetan men in the Labrang area suffered military suppression and imprisonment as a result of rebellions and resistance against Chinese rule. The Geluk religious and political-economic hegemony and mandalic order were completely broken, as almost all of the monks were forcibly laicized, the monastery’s landholdings taken away and redistributed, and all religious activities prohibited. This dealt a deadly blow to traditional Tibetan masculinity, as being a celibate monk (as well as having a family member who was a monk) was such an important form of masculine ideal in traditional Tibet, especially in a monastically-dominated region such as Labrang. During this period the Tibetans were enlisted into new “participation frameworks” such as political meetings, “women’s work” and socialist collectivist labour.

The third violent liberation was the Dengist reform of the 1980s-1990s, when the Tibetans were liberated from the twin oppressions of a centrally planned economy and strict anti-religious policies, while at the same time there was considerable revival of the traditional monastic order and monastery-laity relations. Though less outwardly violent than the Maoist period, the reform period posed new threats to monastic masculinity because the new religious policies attempted to cow the monks into “pure” thus tame monastic subjects, stripped of ritual agency and power and patron-client relations with the laity. Rampant commoditization and spatial mobility have also brought some competing forms of masculinity (exemplified in the figures of successful entrepreneurs, “wild” young nomads and returnees from exile) and an unprecedented level of sexualization of gendered encounters in public spaces, which in turn has resulted in heightened demands on Tibetan women to conform to domestic gender models. Overall this book serves as a useful guide to contemporary Tibetan gendered anxieties and personhoods.