2017 Volume 26 Issue 4 Pages 187-196
The languages and cultures of the Tibetan people vary geographically and they are rapidly disappearing due to modernization. The authors focused on the milk culture (milk processing system and milk product usage), which supports the pastoral subsistence and accurately described the milk processing techniques to preserve the Tibetan culture, and analyzed the diversity and characteristics of the Tibetan population from the perspective of the milk culture. The purpose of this paper is to understand the milk processing system currently utilized by the Amdo Tibetan pastoralists in Qinghai province, China and to examine the recent changes to their milk processing system and its factors. Amdo Tibetan pastoralists have used milk processing techniques, such as the fermentation process, cream separation process, and the additive coagulation process. They have established the fermentation process as the central milk processing technique in which they churned fermented milk to make butter, and heated, fermented, and drained buttermilk to make fresh dried cheeses. The cream separation process and the additive coagulation process were used only temporarily. They rapidly transitioned to using the cream separation process to manufacture most milk products like butter and fresh dried cheese when the Chinese government introduced the cream separator in the 1980’s. They only kept the fermentation process to make sour milk out of raw milk. These recent changes in the milk processing techniques were most likely caused by the fact that sour milk was a staple in their dietary lifestyle and the huge reduction in labor when they switched to using cream to make butter instead of fermented milk. The technical innovation was externally influenced, then adopted or unadopted according to the will and choice of the local people, resulting in a transition of culture.
