Oral and Festival Traditions of Western Tibet

Oral and festival traditions represent a salient feature of the society of Western Tibet which permeates various cultural spheres and activities. In the proposed project, diverse forms of oral traditions as well as accompanying gestural, visual and other non-verbal elements will be studied together with their performative `contexts`, which in fact represent an essential constitutive element of these traditions. The main focus of the investigations will be on the oral and related festival traditions belonging to (or integrated into) the sphere of folk culture and religion of the local village communities. Reciprocal influences and transitional processes characterising the historical and structural relationships between the oral and festival traditions of the local village communities and those associated with the royal, aristocratic and religious elite will be considered. Therefore, political and socio- economic factors and processes of cultural memory and renewal constitute central aspects of the conceptual framework of this project. The detailed comparative analysis will focus particularly on wedding songs and rituals, village festivals (mainly seasonal festivals which are often related to the cult of protective deities) and festive assemblies, folksongs (and accompanying performative elements), certain types of religious practitio-ners and specialists (for example trance-mediums) and in association with them certain forms of folk oratory, as well as narrative forms of oral traditions. The research methodology followed will combine anthropological fieldwork (in particular audio-visual recording) with in-depth analyses of (both oral and written) texts and performance events in their respective socio-economic and political setting.

Research carried out by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) project Oral and Festival Traditions of Western Tibet (P20637-G15) resulted in the documentation of an enormous amount of new material from various areas of historical Western Tibet (mainly Spiti, Upper Kinnaur and Purang). The main focus of the investigations among diverse local village communities were marriage customs, village festivals, festive assemblies, folk songs, performances of popular plays by members of lay Buddhist lineages as well as certain forms of ritual and authoritative speech as they are practised by trance mediums and speechmakers. In addition selected examples of narrative forms of oral traditions (epic tales and hell stories) were analysed. This took place in each case on the basis of phonetic transcriptions (partly also of transliteration into written Tibetan) and English translations.Together with a great amount of new ethnographic and historical data (such as, for example, the first audiovisual documentation of so far unknown song and festival traditions in Ngari Prefecture, Tibet Autonomous Region), one of the most important findings in the course of the project, of relevance not only for the field of oral and festival traditions but also beyond, concerns the interrelationship and interaction between the oral and literary spheres. Based on studies of a wide range of traditions, for the first time it was possible to show a) the range of interaction, transition and mediation between the oral and literary spheres, b) the way this interaction, transition and mediation occurs between the oral and literary spheres and in particular also the functions that social, religious, age and gender groups play(ed) in these processes and c) thereby in particular the importance of literary texts for a wide range of oral and performance traditions (in contrast to views, often based on isolated cases, assuming, implying or concluding that oral traditions, such as songs etc. were integrated into literary texts in a one-way direction).The results of the research project are published in various publications (among others two monographs, two collected volumes and over 20 contributions in the form of book chapters or articles).Selected publicationsKilinov, Gabriela, Christian Jahoda, Michaela Ferencov (eds) (2012) Ritual, Conflict and Consensus: Case Studies from Asia and Europe. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press.Tsering Gyalpo (2012) mNga ris sPu rangs kyi jig rten rtsa jugs rten brel glu sna bzhugs so [Auspicious Songs from Purang, Western Tibet]. Beijing: Mi rigs dpe skrun khang.Tsering Gyalpo, Christian Jahoda, Christiane Kalantari, Patrick Sutherland; with contributions by Eva Allinger, Hubert Feiglstorfer and Kurt Tropper (2012) Khor chags / Khorchag / Kuojia si wenshi daguan [Kuojia Monastery: An Overview of Its History and Culture]. Lhasa: Bod ljongs bod yig dpe rnying dpe skrun khang [Old Tibetan Books Publishing House].Jahoda, Christian, Patrick Sutherland (eds) (in preparation) Oral and Festival Traditions of Historical Western Tibet: Secular and Religious Performance in Spiti, Upper Kinnaur and Purang.