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1 INTRODUCTION Tibet, Trade, and Territory You do not come to Euphemia only to buy and sell, but also because at night, by the fires all around the market, seated on sacks or barrels or stretched out on piles of carpets, at each word that one man says—such as “wolf,” “sister,” “hidden treasure,” “battle,” “scabies,” “lovers”—the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters, treasures, scabies, lovers, battles. And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to keep awake against the camel’s swaying or the junk’s rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles, on your return from Euphemia, the city where memory is traded at every solstice and at every equinox. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Diversions The temporal rhythms of cities are marked not just by seasonal changes but also by variations in trading practices. In the transition from autumn to winter in Lhasa, the tourists who buy trinkets from the marketplace vendors that are common in the height of summer begin to peter out until they are almost completely absent. The luxury hotels grow quieter. There is a momentary, almost palpable pause, and soon nomads from rural Amdo and Kham—other Tibetan-speaking regions on the plateau—begin to appear in the streets for trade and for pilgrimage, purchasing household items like blenders and blankets and sometimes bartering small trinkets for yak meat. It was during one of these transitional moments, right before the city plunged into a deep winter—bitterly cold at night but clear and sunny during the day—that I began my fieldwork for this book. I was sitting indoors with Lobsang, an older man in his seventies who traded Tibetan wool and Indian foodstuffs between Lhasa and Kalimpong in the 1950s. The house was dark and comfortable, and he seemed relaxed talking about the past, even in the tense political atmosphere of China’s Tibet Autonomous Region (tar). I felt like the interview was going well. Lobsang remembered quite a bit about his life, and I took notes on the kinds of items he traded, names for old systems of measure- 2 • introduction ments, and the towns he passed through with his mule caravan. Toward the end of our discussion, I glanced at my list of interview questions and asked him if he could draw me a map of what he remembered of his journey from Lhasa to Kalimpong. He looked at me, puzzled. “I can’t do it.” I said that it was all right and handed him a piece of paper, trying to reassure him that it really didn’t matter what the map looked like. I told him that he didn’t have to know how to draw a map, but perhaps he could just show me how he got from place to place, or simply mark down any landmarks he remembered. He looked uncomfortable. “It won’t be correct,” he said. A Tibetan friend who was sitting with us told me quietly in English that Lobsang was probably hesitating because he didn’t go to school, because he never learned how to make a proper map. “But that’s the point!” I replied. “It won’t be a proper map.” I told her that Lobsang’s map would eventually be one of several maps that I could use to represent traders’ “alternative representations” of the region, or their “geographical imaginings,” . . . or something like that. Confusion abounded. Lobsang shook his head. “I can’t do it.” It was soon clear that I had made him embarrassed. My face felt hot and I cringed, realizing that I had made some sort of naive ethnographic faux pas. I quickly switched the subject. Asking traders to draw cognitive or mental maps was one part of the original methodology for this book. This request was, I thought, going to provide an unusual contribution to the field of anthropology; in addition to other frequently used methodologies such as participant observation, snowball sampling, and semistructured interviews, I planned to ask traders to provide rough drawings of their trade journeys, thus demonstrating how their spatial representations of the trade route differed from those depicted on “real” cartographic maps. After all, Barbara Aziz, one of the earliest anthropologists to research Tibetan socioeconomic issues, did the same with villagers from Tingri, in central Tibet, in the 1970s. She asked traders to create drawings...

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