Paper short abstract:

This presentation reflects on vernacular literacy in Tibetan language among ritual experts (Bonpo) of the Baima people. It examines how monopolized accessibility to ritual texts grant Bonpo religious and social authority within the frame of "marginal Tibetaness".

Paper long abstract:

Baima is a group of ten thousands people living in western China that are officially classified as Tibetan. As it is the case for other minorities in the context of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands (Gros 2014), their identification is controversial: Tibetan scholars advocate for the "Tibetaness" of Baima (Upton 2000), whereas Baima themselves argue for their recognition as a separate ethnic group.

Baima speak a non-literary Tibeto-Burman language, which in its oral form is unintellegible to the surrounding Tibetan communities (Kirchova 2005). However, apotropaic, good-fortune, divination, and healing rituals performed by the local ritual experts (Bonpo) involve the reading and chanting of a corpus of texts that are written in literary Tibetan language.

Bonpo master their reading skills as an integral part of learning about specific rituals: texts are not independent from the performance but are taught and memorized as phonetic codes whose meaning remains largely obscure to Bonpo. The reading itself owns the evocative power of the sound of chanting and reciting, in such a way that the phonetic level empowers the ritual actions and overpowers the semantic dimension.

Based on fieldwork carried in summer 2018 in K. village, this presentation aims to reflect on the use of vernacular literacy in Tibetan language among ritual experts in a Baima community. It further argues that in the absence of formal education in Tibetan language and institutional religious establishment, the monopolized accessibility to ritual texts grants Bonpo religious and social authority within the frame of "marginal Tibetaness".