Today's session is all about Mr. Ball.
Zooming in from Switzerland. And he's going to talk about something very interesting about the mental environmental
issues concerning rituals and whatever is left over from sort of rituals.
He is currently a senior postdoctoral researcher at the lab of Cultural and Social
Anthropology in the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Losen,
Switzerland, and received his PTSD in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin Medicine.
In 2017. The general subject of his research, sacred trash and personhood, well, in the near future, I hope, also turn into a full fledged book.
There are few articles that already shed some light on his research, which is also based on what?
And everything else. Go.
We'll talk about that. Go ahead. Hello, everyone.
Thank you, Daniel and Isabella, for inviting me to this Torg series hosted by Tibetan Studies at Oxford.
And thank you for everyone listening in. And today I will explore the relationship between sacred trash trash talks and the personhood.
So the development of tourism as a top priority of local governments has led to friction between Tibetans and Han Chinese,
ethnic Tibetans have long regarded the snowcapped mountains of eastern Himalayas as personal vacation of deities who have
the power to protect people as long as their warships with actions that includes the bestows of material offerings.
The recent burgeoning of Chinese economy has enabled numerous Han Chinese tourists, not only warship this month, India is allowing Tibetans,
but also later the environment with plastic waste high the perform a cosmopolitan imaginary of sacred and ethnic subjectivity,
while consuming this imaginary through activities such as taking photos and depositing their own material offerings.
This cost consumption has created conflict regarding how to define these objects,
a conflict that can be eliminated through the understanding of what constitutes trash.
So within this context, the friction between Tibetans and Han Chinese manifests itself in two different understanding of
what constitutes a moral approach to the environment and thus what constitutes a moral good person.
On the one hand, the Tibetan idea of mountain deity or mountain person's mountains are sacred and
sentient beings have been revived along with the discourse of environmentalism.
On the other, the notion of untouched and veiled mountains have gained popularity along with the growth of tourism and consumerism.
So one type of good person maintains a reciprocal relations with mountain persons through a ritual action of leading objects as offering mountains.
Another good person enters into hierarchical relationship shapes with mountains by consuming the objects of the mountains,
a consumerism framed as the performance of a car.
Cosmopolitan appreciation of Tibetan ethnic subjectivities.
Both activities generate excess objects in the mountain landscape, but interpretation of these objects are politically and morally divergent.
So this talk used the term trash talk to show how talk of waste and personhood reveals the complex relationships
between Tibetans and Han Chinese under conditions of mass tourism and its associated park problem and waste.
What characteristics do these forms of trash talk have and how does some.
How do they shape people's understanding of forms of personhood that are generated in the space between mountain persons and consumer persons?
So to understand trash talk, it is important to compare the customs of Tibetan and Han Chinese who visited the eastern Himalayas.
The Tibetans, they collect Marriotts from mountains and maximise benefit for their families.
They travel long distances. Your family units are multitenant groups.
They carry as much as as much food, bedding, silk scarves, prayer flags and incense as they can.
Tibetan guest house owners usually gave discount rates or accommodate these travellers for free on
the condition that the travellers take prayers with the hosts made with them to the sacred sites.
By contrast, Chinese, they are usually individuals or groups assigned by travel agents based on age, profession, hobby or common origin.
So they are well equipped with bottled water, oxygen. Hailers walking sticks and clothes is made of waterproof or cold resistant fabric.
So no benefits from Ménard making exchanges with Tibetan hosts.
No discounts from. They only have discounts from booking agents or reduced group rates to integrate.
Great. The comparison is a comparison of the rural versus the urban.
The numbers Tibetans and Han Chinese also fluctuate in different patterns.
For the Tibetans throughout the year and they come regularly, the peak attendance is in a year of RAM or mountain person of this region called colour.
Literal translation as the white Mahdist knock out was born in the year of Ran.
So travel at the birth year multiplies the merits, making batoff and also Tibetan visits a significant atom's times in their lifecycle.
For example, births, wedding deaths. Han Chinese Hiver.
Their peak attendance time are the legal holidays.
For example, National Day, holiday, winter or summer school breaks and yearly vacations for retirees are usually at warmer months.
So talks of waste abounds in both groups for the Tibetans.
The offer garment's of their own or their family member or friend has sensory receptors through which the mountain person may hear, see,
touch and feel the presence of the Devault team in a hope that this garment's will encourage the mountain person to respond to devote his requests.
The Tibetans talk amongst themselves about how their sacred sites are being trashed by Han Chinese,
who leave behind everything from plastic water bottles to nylon socks,
forms of dry powder or pollution or disruption, social order that Tibetan claims will offend the mountain persons.
Conversely, the Han Chinese arm themselves against unsafe drinking water with plastic bottles.
Talk about Tibetans being problematic in terms of their hygiene and
untrustworthiness because of the suspicion that they are charged higher prices than
the Tibetan visitors behind talk of loggi involved loggi is the Chinese word for waste involves characterisation of Tibetans as lazy welfare writers,
beneficiaries of state ethnic policies and receivers of favouritism, education, birth and other fields.
Even as the Han ignore the marginal position that Tibetans have had collectively occupied in the course of state supported development in China.
This forms of talking about each other may seem mundane in a manner, yet they mask powerful ways of creating and maintaining inequalities.
So Emily McKee coined the term trash talk to examine a socio economic political
orderings produced through aggregate hard religious trash and multiethnic societies.
McKay suggests that trash talk between ethnic groups normalises,
searching distinction through labels of dirty and disorderly and also naturalised as links between dirty people and the need to remove or reform them.
In this Torg Adopt McKees term trash talk in order to analyse the social, economic and political understanding.
Tibetan and high tension surrounding trash.
Mendelson's amplifiers McKees concept to compose specific forms of waste as a material foundation for from which such trash talk emerges.
I also juxtaposed talks of what constitutes trash.
Side by side with what constitutes good person.
Using interviews with key informants to illuminate the way these two questions inform and create each other.
In doing so, I call attention to the complex role of trash talk in shaping into ethnic tensions,
which I argue centre around the definition of personhood that oscillate between poles of mountain persons and consumer persons.
The division between Tibetan hosts and Han Chinese tourists may seem to boil down to the sacred oppressor's.
The secular and some may consider their trash talk is precisely about the dualism.
Martin Mills into US three first elaborated Tripa.
He called it trip as a Tibetan concept, meaning pollution and disruption in social order.
Tibetan hosts are identified as dripper cut.
Certain behaviours of had tourists, including shouting at sacred sites where water mountain duties leave, buying more than they can consume.
Ignoring bodily gestures to show humility when making offerings to deities,
high end tourists often talk about unclean habits of Tibetans, including per body hygiene,
use of our future drinking water and littering secular distinctions that are meant to define Tibetans as the opposite of the modern and clean Han.
But if we automatically imposed a imagined Spanaway of secular Han and to sacred Tibetan inequalities,
income earning opportunities in a new tourist development are disguised.
Trash and trash picking are crucial issues for Tibetans whose income is dependent upon a continuous influx of tourists, high and tourists.
After all, come to Tibetan areas of viewing them, expecting to see the supposed pristine pollution free and sacred world that they can consume.
Abstract concepts such as Japan is embodied through daily experience.
Therefore, it is important to examine the actual waste management in East Himalaya and to understand
the ways that West intersects with and shaped the daily lives of local residents.
The details of inequalities are meaningful and useful in that they may transcend the imagined boundaries of the Tibetans and Hutchins'.
So tarazed Hawkeye examines social transformation trash into a trash talk.
And from environmental material to into a social and political.
So I have three sections. So first, I lay out the waste management infrastructure of Shangri-La.
And the second I talk about used garments as not trash and sacred sites.
And then lastly, I talk about redefining morality through trash and personhood.
So the area I did my research is called Tibet Ditching Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture.
It was incorporated into PRC 1957. Since thousands.
The tourist become a tourist site under the West Development Project.
In the past few years. And the Belt and Road Initiative, this place again, new popularity.
And the name was Brown. The 1933 Lost Horizon.
And James Hilton's fiction. And it was made into reality.
So the Han Chinese come here to appreciate the fantastic views of Ben and Tom and escape air pollution and stay stress associated with urban life.
And they consume the local culture.
So by 2016, for this town, Shangri-La, 50000 local population received 19 million tourists and earned fourteen point one billion in revenue.
So the high volume of tourists has generated a constant stream of plastic water, potholes, tin cans,
wastepaper and other objects, creating solid craft, solid waste crisis for the vulnerable highland ecosystem.
Nature tourism. It is an exploitation of the notion of nature by capital and other Tibetan people in the hand dominance Chinese society.
But the pressing issue now is this solid waste crisis. And what I see from research about three factors are shaping the waste crisis.
First one is the municipal solid waste system beyond the capacity of a mid-sized city because of the large volume of tourists.
So the sanitation workers here, they are on the eight hour shift and they are alert to any possible waste.
But the waste pains on the streets are always overflowing, saying to us and tough nine kilometres south of the city and the built at landfill,
but cannot proceed and process waste produced and in other regions.
For example, you bomb and which is the main tourist attraction.
Due to a section on Paper Road, the second factor, the far more waste management sector lacks a government run sorting system.
Instead, more than a dozen family run workshop across the city.
Process metal, glass, paper and car parks and plastics from construction.
Waste home in electronics and food, hospitality businesses.
But they are unstable.
Interviews with them shows that quite a few of them, they're planning to abandon their workshops to join their relatives in Cremin,
which the capital city of Union, and because of a slight decline in tourism.
The third factor is the rural tourist attraction sites become the vacuum of waste management,
and it becomes a case by case, a negotiation between the local villagers and the local government.
And yet these rural areas are usually held as sacred sites and they are less connected.
So which produce kind of high transportation? These.
So specific sites, as you both allege, it, has only 140 people.
Quite remote. And for example, the children attend schools six hours away by motorbike.
And the closest village yet, it is closest village to the mountain person.
That is a couple I mentioned before. So it has 30 tax households and usually made into home hotels.
Food services were also provided.
And the small village received more than 10000 tourists and programmes in twenty fifteen since 2009, mainly tourist cooperation.
A car MTC. So they took bank loans to invest in infrastructure and stuff, training for the low cost in Tibetan Ubon in 2016.
For every tourist to enter this village.
You have to pay a fee of two hundred and forty seven yuan, about forty U.S. dollars.
So the MTC provide sanitation services and the they are able to offer three regular staff.
And they're not local, but they are Tibetan and they're responsible for removing solid waste from the mountain passes.
And the tourists are each charged 25 grand or four U.S. dollars as garbage tax as they enter this village,
which the hotel owners would refund to the tourist.
Yet so there are conflicts emerge between the MTC and the villagers,
and the MTC said they are still in debt because of large sum invested in investing in infrastructure, which made the mass tourism impossible possible.
And the reborn villagers that they are just working really hard on the hospitality.
They received nothing from the ticketing revenue and the waste were not transported at all.
So this dilemma persists. And then in the end, the MTC agreed to pay 10000 grand per household or fifteen hundred U.S. dollars,
a one time fee a year to cover the cost of waste disposal.
So each horse must provide labour to pack empty recyclable plastic plastic water bottles for shipment in the company's trucks.
And they're also household must gather recyclables from waistbands to three mountain and set up on a three mountain pass that lead to sacred sites.
So the MTC were able to sold recyclables to dealers in the city and the village.
Villagers can earn extra income by collecting and packaging, but you villagers had to struggle for a fare payment and just lots of collection.
And the packaging wouldn't solve the problem of not transportation.
So actually, a lot of the garbage are stuck in this area, although they are sorted and packed perfectly.
So here you can see the three pictures are actually obtained from friends and they are actually from just this past year.
So you can see the garbage are carefully sorted, packed, but not transported out.
It it's unclear whether MTC would have more sanitation staff or pay the villagers to do more frequent
collection or they pay to cover the transportation with within these struggles about Western infrastructure,
a waste conflict emerged between villagers, tourists and MTC about the nature of used garments deposited at the sites along the mountain pass.
So programmes and local villagers have long offered used garments at sacred sites in order to ward off pollution,
a form of harm that can be produced by demons hiding the trees and waters of local rain.
MTC wanted to try a attract.
Han Chinese tourists has marketed this practise as something quite different, an activity akin to accumulation blasting through material offering.
So M.F., you'd work two hours fifteen. The hand tourists confused at first at the by the piles of used garments they saw at the mountains,
but quickly learnt from their tour guide or other Han Chinese that as long as they offer something of their own, they would receive blessing.
Hence, tourists add scarves, bracelets, hats and even shoes to the powers of used garments they encounter in hope that their prayers will
be received by the local deities and a mother teaching her sound that offering used garments.
The two deities was a respectful behaviour and not a form of littering.
Some hand tourists came to appreciate the nature, beauty and encounter a local culture that they assumed is imbued with a pure and religious quality.
Others saw this as part of their patriotic activities. Trips are usually awarded to them by their employers.
They also expect to experience a somewhat religious journey seeking to earn merits and accumulate blessings.
They also enjoy offering these garments, Mary Douglas said.
Dirt is ometer in the eyes of the beholder.
Tibetan locals regard as sacred trash or used garments to be discarded or to the order to avoid bad fortune has become the treasure for Han tourists,
who sometimes take them home as souvenirs. As you can see here, there are necklaces on that.
Moreover, the local governments, the Chinese state adopted the strategy of making that which is Tibetan appear sacred,
exotic and religious in order to stimulate the growth of tourist consumption.
This strategy, including the crafting a narrative spiritual Tibetan locals who possessed knowledge that is sacred and are known to the secular Han.
However, from the perspective, Tibetan lokos people lived in environments that is filled with dangerous influences from demonic powers,
and thus they must conduct daily activities to ward off cosmic pollution.
A form of Japan without the Tibetan belief in power of sacred trash.
Hence tourists, local government and researchers will not understand the cosmic pollution and its accordant remedies.
And it would instead see only a solid world of social worlds of consumption, development and cultural practises.
By contrast, Tibetan lokos programmes understand cosmic pollution from demonic powers as real and fractioning threats that
overcome through interactions with used garments within the field of view bonds with mentioned infrastructure.
This competing coacher interpretation become highly personal dilemmas, even while promoting the practise of government offering amongst her tourists.
The tourism development authorities in Nepal insist that local Tibetan trash collectors must remove excessive accumulation of garments.
Are old powers that are beginning begin interrupt this combination waste crisis and culture interpretation of trash slash,
not trash have become a common concern in a daily talk amongst people in Ubon.
So illustrated in this vignette. I want to say to show you how the daily talk works and how these ideas of trash affects people's everyday lives.
So in the local one, local Ubon villager, Jorma was waiting to be assigned a section for her family to pick up trash and she
was recently divorced and a local llama told her to do everything to avoid Dripper.
A member was given to her and another member was given to a section of the mountain pass.
So her number matched with the number associated with a section close to the mountain top where sacred sites were many to pick trash.
They're meant to remove what could well be other people's offerings to deities and a mountain person, Caracappa.
Those offerings items are what I call it now, not trash.
Removing them would break. The linkage between Devault teeth and montre person not only bring harm to the deportees,
but also transferring the harm to the person, we removed the offering Drolma and her cousin Bakht.
They're close friends in the village to swap sections.
They feared that by picking up trash that was not trash, they would cost Rippa or cosmic pollution.
So this fear producing cosmic pollution leading to avoidance of contaminating Japan originates in a material of not trash.
That is the kind of material that compress, that cut, compress,
that is the category of offering to deities shapes how deities mediates the social relations between people and the environment.
Used garments used to belong to specific Tibetan owners and had certain significance to them,
such as a scarf blessed at a temple or garments once wore their family.
The material was unique because of personal connexions made through through it.
The latter thinks that things have agency fear and feelings.
So object oriented understanding of material requires us to ask how do things assemble and around which matters of concern.
So I focussed on how use garments cause fear of cosmic pollution and how things in general have affected power.
So furthermore, the waste management officials exploit it, this used garments in the rapid expansion of tourism in secret sites.
So they keep the capped garments on partially to attract more tourists.
Is the trend, for example, in neighbouring province, the entire mountain was covered with used garments and prayer flags.
On the sacred sites. So the politics appearance kind of created this can oversized representation of sacred sites.
The sites were filled with colours, symbols and Tibetan script in the hope that these features will generate tourist money.
Quote, We are putting a capitalist spin on the Tibetan religious practises and making them the source for profit, unquote.
So this is comes from 2015 interview with a local government official.
We must understand used garments through a different lens, through the deep Tibetan kosmo economics.
That is, Tibetans believe the landscape is crowded with demand, express spirits and harm coming from the mountains.
Water, trees and local community territory and cetera.
People by economics change with them through making material offerings to examples of parents whose children died before coming of age.
The parents hand their used garments of their deceased children on the mountain pass to encourage
deities to guide the young spirits through the dangerous landscape crowded with frightening beings.
Before they were in reincarnated 49 days after bodily death.
Hence, these used garments cannot be classified as trash objects in the waste management policies.
Rather, used garments represent fear of protection against cosmic pollution and thus
must be understood as actors that take part in the making of divine worlds.
Used garments are Ladley medicine because of their social potential to mobilise people to conduct social change.
Dissatisfied with commodification. Sacred sites and mountain culture.
A group of local young Tibetans has begun to appreciate new and hidden sites exclusively reserved for Tibetan cosmic economic activities.
Only items left by local Tibetans, such as traditional robes in Tibetan styles,
can be found in this new sacred sites, according to organise and volunteers.
Deities can recognise this kind of used garments better than the now traditional call.
This worn by hand tourists and therefore using their sites will deliver more effective protection against cosmic pollution.
So the concept of used garments as noun trash also redefines the criteria by which a person is considered good,
injecting the question whether one is able to recognise the same power inherent in used garments as part of the Tibetan struggle for fair development.
The theme power of youth garments includes wear the garments can mean and do on two levels.
So waste management, indigenous personhood communities that are can be trash have been used to as reflections of ethical personhood.
For example, Gay Hawkins analysed American Beauty,
saying that plastic bag floating in the film represents the wastefulness of middle class American life and values,
with objects announcing a can of degraded personhood on the level of indigenous personhood.
The idea of a good person representing a sacred native culture can be also be the result of capitalist development of that culture.
The Martha Coplan followed the social life of things and started the water pact
in Fiji Islands and becoming the Fiji brand of bottled water and evokes nature,
Howth purity and remote indigenous origin. So for two decades, in a Tibetan area of renown,
local governments and tourist companies have deployed discourses of Tibetan environment as sacred nature without contamination.
And Tibetan culture as unsullied by market competition.
Talk of Nature has remade the relationship between religious agents, internment and increased social differences through economic means.
However, Tibetans have not been passive recipients. They have created their own form of trash talk really to relate it to self fashioning.
And I will share one Kaif informant named Tenten here.
So in his late 50s and in the height of his career as government consultant.
So between 2011 and 16,
Tenzin was the prop proponents so supported of tourism in Tibet to a person with a considerable doubts amount about that process.
He was first a government employee, led a team of designers in a mountain pass,
and then he told stories of mountains and water deities conquering demons and protecting local villages.
The design firm was supposed to turn this historias into a coacher project with multilingual interpretive storyboards,
placed Amarnath amongst a mountain pass. But contract fell through and the storyboards were never erected.
Instead, in those selected the sacred sites, large waistbands were set up to collect plastic,
refuse an overflow of offerings to the deities, to most villagers.
The project's failure was due to a lack of investment.
But for dentine, this failure was due to hand ignorance of local culture, of use of used garments offering as not trash into A16 interview.
He made the following remarks. How can these used garments as large be largey?
They are people. People remember their loss by putting garments.
Their garments disappear. People still alive. Not all cance garments are here and there.
They become anonymous, empty and non-human. A kind of departure occurs.
We talk about the quiet gene environment. Do we care about quenching people?
We don't. I'm disappointed. I consulted with my great uncle about the abdomen of the mountain deities colour.
Harpo and others recorded their stories. I looked for possible locations that the abdomen of the mountains.
I found some. I asked my nephew to take pictures for me.
I wrote up stories and published them in as a pamphlet. We want to make this new places a required for all the tour guides, but not really.
We want people to know the mountain as spiritual. You can see in these new places deities of abdomen far away from the busy tourist mountain pass.
Several sets of used garments have already been present. They are the handmade garments crafted by local Tibetans.
They won't be there forever. They disappear. Not like the nylon garments that turn into Larche.
Of course, we picked locations while hidden in the woods suitable for us Tibetans, the mountain people.
Unquote. So Clinton was frustrated about the hands ignorance of more than human perspective.
That is the whole inability to see used garments as people on the mountain, as living being in Tibetan areas.
Not everyone can name all the deities, but all are custom to the idea that the mountains are recognised as living and lively.
And that's necessary for humans to interact with them because of the fear of cosmic collusion in such M&A for social world.
Punishment from contaminating pollution may come in various forms,
including the lost money and successful family relations or marriage or even death whenever they can.
People gather enough money to launch a pilgrimage to visit greater duties in the temples of famous mountains and cities.
Such travel help not only travellers themselves, but also their relatives to stay away from pollution danger.
From this perspective, removing used garments as if they were waste could cancel the work of the travellers,
causing many people to lose protection against pollution. So Denton's answers are human on a human moral environment,
brought together the physical and the mental environments, which, according to him, is the task of a good person.
He said used garments are people rather than Larche and Larche is waste, unpleasant quality, and it was used wisely.
Also any other metaphor and context and discursively powerful and largely cannot compete the
meaning of used garments as something set out by a good person to fight against pollution.
Because used garments are the core of various everyday practises that sacro sexualised the landscape.
They become people rather than media or a representation earth.
Some people use garments are people in part because they demands that humans take responsibilities for both physical and mental environments.
Moreover, then incense showed the understanding of being a good person in Vosshall,
failing responsibility to care for Mountain and its people use garments amongst the mountains.
People are not just cheche a good person as one who understands the trash problem.
Transform himself or herself and participates in creating solutions for from a modern human perspective.
Talk of trash not only involves being a good person in relation to waste, it also involves cleaning up the waste that humans left behind.
So in conclusion, this talks ARMPAC relation between talk and not talk of trash and personhood amongst Tibetans and Chinese in the context of waste.
Because of the sites where tourists waste accumulates are held secrets.
The categories, both waste and personhood, are challenged and defeated, destabilised.
First, used garments gather in this sacred sites,
in part because home tourism authorities advertise such offerings as activities to acquire blessings.
However, according to local custom, used garments are what Tibetan people place in the environment in order to ward off
pollution and to achieve protection within newly established tourist infrastructure,
use garments, gather and grow and become objects of solid waste management and need to be removed.
Yet removing used garments as loggi pollution or waste is actually removing the garbage that people
have established between demons and and themselves in order to avoid Chapas cosmic pollution.
Hence, the local refusal to clean up this, not trash, appears as a refusal to participate in the modern waste management.
Second, the idea of what constitutes a good person changes over time.
And some Tibetans have transformed from being prominent of tourist development to being sceptical about this process.
The trash problem offers opportunity for Tibetans to tackle personhood at its core and ultimately purchase
them to develop a new view that used garments are people they embrace are now more than human perspective.
A renewed personhood by introducing ordinary objects such as used garments as people, entities that are active and even proactive.
So the significance of used garments also play a crucial part in renewing traditional
knowledge of local TTR sacred mountains and the culture of cosmic pollution.
From this perspective.
We can see that efforts to solve the local waste problem solely within the framework modern waste management are less effective than a proud project.
It is that local culture experts are currently taking the ethics of.
The theme power of used garments, the ideas about what makes a good person best.
The track trash and a working them into daily sanitation teaching for Tibetan programmes and Han Chinese tourists alike.
Solutions that keep sacredness at a centre stage rather than off stage seem to be
more effective in solving the dilemma surrounding personhood and secrett trash.
This is the instructive case comparable to culturally sensitive with management around the world.
So talk of trash emerged with the rise of tourism as Han Chinese assume and consume the timeless sacredness of Tibetan culture.
At the same time, local Tibetans have developed new ways of talking about cosmic pollution, such as the human moral environment.
And it used Garment's as not trash to guide themselves through daily negotiation
that oscillates between poles of mountain persons and consumer persons.
So these are the dialectic between an inner yearning for environment made pure against
cosmic pollution and the drive for accumulation within the new labour market.
That is China. That's on top.
Thank you. Great.
Thank you.