Laughter from the Grassland: Humour and Comedy in Amdo Tibet

Start date: 1 January 2013
End date: 1 June 2021
Funder: Internally funded
Primary investigator: Dr Tim Thurston

Description

This project seeks to better understand a wildly popular genre of Tibetan comedy and its influence on Tibetan engagement with modern life during the post-Mao period. Through its clever combination of traditional Tibetan notions of satire with a humorous form introduced by the Chinese government, these comedies hold out possibilities for distinctly Tibetan inflections modernity, based particularly in language practice.

Impact

2018 Timothy Thurston. “Language Ideologies as Metadiscursive Regime in China’s Tibet.” Inner Asia 20:199-218.http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/133922/

2018 Timothy Thurston. “A Korean, An Australian, a Nomad, and a Martial Artist Meet on the Tibetan Plateau: Encounters with Foreigners in a Tibetan Comedy from A mdo.” Journal of Folklore Research. 55(3):1-24. http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/127430/

2018 Timothy Thurston. “A Careful Village: Comedy and Linguistic Modernity in China’s Tibet, ca. 1996.” Journal of Asian Studies. 77(2): 453-474. http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/127428/

2017 Timothy Thurston. “On Artistic and Cultural Generations in Northeastern Tibet.” Asian Ethnicity. http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/127424/

2013 Timothy Thurston. “Careful Village’s Grassland Dispute: An A mdo Dialect Tibetan Crosstalk Performance by Sman bla skyabs.” CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature. 32(2): 156-181.