People Who Sell a Holy Place Piece by Piece

Economic Development in Contemporary Tibet and the Space of Popular Belief

Abstract

This paper examines the space of folk religious practice re-formed in the central part of Amdo, which is undergoing transitional modernization under state-led development.

The “Development West” project on the contemporary Tibetan Plateau started in 2000 and has continued now for over 16 years. As part of this project, the infrastructure network comprising huge dams, the power network supplied by hydroelectric power stations, highways and airports, the Qinghai-Tibet railway, and the 3G broadband networks are now widely covering the Tibetan rural communities. The complex of modernity spread by this state-led development has had an extensive influence on the holy places in Tibet that were previously isolated from society by being located in inhospitable natural environments. Such entangled situations where religiosity and modernity are deployed intricately in the physical space of a holy place cannot be sufficiently grasped by a traditional Buddhism-centered approach, which has analyzed the structure of the holy place by examining the cosmological framework given to the natural space.

In this article, after acknowledging the fundamental fact that the holy place is a physical space, I examine how the structure of the holy place that was materialized by interpreting “natural space” as “pure land” is influenced by a market-oriented modernity that pervades the holy place from the outside.