Condensed Meanings: Redaction Dialogues on Ethnography in Occupied Tibet

In this piece composed of short stories and erasure poems written in dialogue with each other, we reflect on the (im)possibilities of ethnography amidst state-led erasure and threat in China's Tibet before and after 2008, when Tibetans began to openly protest both their political economic marginalization and heightened assimilation pressures in the wake of the "Great Develop the West" campaign (2000-) and the rise of president Xi Jinping's more authoritarian policies (2013-). The ongoing militarization of Tibetan regions and increasing pressures on local officials to "maintain stability" (Ch. weiwen) and promote Chinese-style "civilization" (Ch. wenming), have meant that the threat of socioeconomic ostracization, detention, and torture is now much more present and pervasive for Tibetan citizens. We draw on Makley's twenty-seven years of ethnographic research conducted as a white American anthropologist in Tibetan regions, and on Dondrup Donyol's experiences conducting ethnographic research as a native anthropologist there. We strove for an emergent and dialogic writing process by sharing and responding to each others' narratives. As a way to illustrate sites of erasure imposed by authoritarian rule, we deploy oppositional forms of redaction in unexpected ways (not just names, places and other identifying markers of persons), in order to intervene in locally influential Chinese-language state texts. This process, our history of close collaborations, and our very different positions as ethnographers of Tibet, yielded new insights and avenues for us in rethinking the nature and roles of ethnography under authoritarian erasure.