Public lecture: Prof. Max Oidtmann (LMU), "The Qing State and Tibetan-Buddhist Societies: New Paradigms for understanding historical changes in northeastern Tibet in the 17th-19th centuries" (30.11.2022)

The Department of Sinology welcomes all students as well as everybody who is interested to the first public lecture of the winter semester 2022/23. The lecture will be held on Novmeber 30th 18:00 in Übungsraum 17 (Philosophiegebäude) by Prof. Dr. Max Oidtmann (LMU Munich) on "The Qing State and Tibetan-Buddhist Societies: New Paradigms for understanding historical changes in northeastern Tibet in the 17th-19th centuries".

Abstract

How did Tibetan Buddhist societies change after "entering the map" of the Great Qing State (1636-1912)?

In the last decade, new sources (and new approaches to sources) have forced a reconsideration of the influence of the Great Qing State on local societies across Qing-administered Inner Asia (Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang, etc.). Whereas previous scholarship primarily focused on the expansion of the Qing state across Eurasia, recent scholarship has begun to spend more time trying to understand how Qing rule was sustained over the long term and how different communities interacted within each other in the context of the "pax-Manjurica." So, what was happening? And why might Qing-period social changes be relevant today?

This presentation will explore a particular contact point between the Qing state and Tibetans: the new colonial "subprefectures" established across the Sino-Tibetan borderlands in the 1700s.

In the late 18th century, the arrival of Qing colonial magistrates in the borderlands presented new opportunities for Tibetan litigants to resolve conflicts. Although reluctant to get involved lawsuits, Qing officials soon found themselves dragged into a variety of matters ranging from natural resource disputes among Tibetan laypeople to large scale feuding between monasteries over issues such as the appointment of abbots, pilgrimage, and rights over property—both animate and inanimate, belonging to the estates of reincarnate lamas. Qing-supervised jurispractice in Amdo not only resulted in the creation of a new “Tibetan” code derived from Mongol law and other indigenous practices, but also generated a large body of decisions and compacts, composed in both Tibetan and Chinese, that profoundly shaped the organization of indigenous society in Amdo.