https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295753119/satirical-tibet/

Shannon Ward: In the Introduction, you discuss zurza as a uniquely Tibetan genre of humour. Can you say more about how you first discovered zurza as a genre? Do you remember the first Amdo Tibetan satire you heard? And, how did you as a researcher gradually come to understand continuities in how Tibetans identify zurza across artistic practices and media forms?

Tim Thurston So, I’m an inveterate language learner. I love learning languages, and trying to understand the social worlds with which they are intertwined. Being curious about language is about 95% of my research method. It’s in the process of learning language that I start to pay attention to different grammar structures, but also to the terminologies and classification systems that are part of their world. I first heard the term zurza in an interview. I was sitting in a public space on a university campus in Ziling, and talking to a young man who enjoyed the comedies. And he talked about how each one “did zurza.” About one or more “social problem(s).” Prior to this, I had been really focusing my research on the social problems angle. But hearing the word then helped to make sense of something. In the verb-final Tibetan language, it literally meant “to eat” (za) the “sides” (zur). Not so much an individual verbal practice, it was an approach to communication that privileged indirection as a way of articulating critique. I started paying attention, I realized that I was hearing it again and again in interviews. When I listened back to previous interviews, I saw that it also had been used there, but I hadn’t really caught on to it yet. Initially, I thought it was something pretty specific to the comedies I was researching for my dissertation, but then I heard a rapper use it. And another person used it to refer to forms of traditional poetry, and I realized that it was much more significant than I had initially thought.

Shannon Ward: Your book provides a remarkable account of Amdo as a distinct cultural region within Tibet, supporting efforts within Tibetan studies to show the nuances of identity amid changing social, economic, and political conditions on the plateau. Through your diachronic approach to the dynamic practices of satire, you show the adaptability of Tibetan cultural producers. At the same time, many of the satires themselves articulate essentialized views of Tibetan language and culture. Can you say more about how this tension between essentialization and adaptation plays out in identity formation through zurza?

Tim Thurston: Folklorists sometimes refer to folklore as “the stories people tell themselves about themselves.” I think of the texts in this book as the “modern stories Tibetans are telling themselves about their (ideally) modern selves.” These texts are both a funhouse mirror and a prism. They (exaggeratedly) reflect Tibetan society back on itself, but also refract it, separating different points out for audiences to examine and consider. In this way, the comedies and rap songs examined in the book are sort of prescriptive: they simultaneously say “this is who we are” and “this is who we should be.” This always involves both adaptation to emerging policies and priorities, and essentializing statements about “who we are.” There’s a degree of Herzfeld’s “cultural intimacy” in this: the sort of embarrassing and the backward parts of ourselves that unite our identity.

In the context of the People’s Republic of China, this question about the place of Amdo is an important part of it. The state identifies all of these people as Tibetan. Anthropologist Charlene Makley and historian Gray Tuttle have shown that the Tibetan word bod (བོད།) and the Chinese term zangzu (藏族) that we would translate as Tibetan refer to unique projects of identity making. The Tibetan bod traditionally only referred to people from Central Tibet, and not from Amdo or Kham, but is now used for all Tibetan. The Chinese Zangzu, meanwhile, is a state classification that includes a variety of groups, some of them quite different. At the same time, written texts and oral traditions suggest a recognition of shared identity. In versified oral traditions ‘black-haired Tibetans’ mgo nag bod མགོ་ནག་བོད། or ‘red-faced Tibetan’ (གདོhང་དམར་བོད།) were common noun-adjective formulae for performers (including in Amdo and Kham) to use in their songs and speeches. Comedians, rappers, and other artists are naturally navigating this. Many are fervent nationalists. And so, while their life experiences, humor, the stories they compose, and their language practices are very much based in local knowledges and experiences of people in Amdo, but their ultimate goals involve saying something broadly about the Tibetan nationality or ethnic group.

Shannon Ward: Your chapters demonstrate the evolution of zurza in new media forms, which are closely connected not only to the availability of new technologies, but also to political and economic goals such as urbanization and development that emanate from the Chinese state. Can you say more about how you see Amdo Tibetans navigating the availability and evolution of media technologies, amid constantly changing political agendas that may frequently shift between promoting and censoring zurza?

Tim Thurston: So zurza itself was never really promoted or censored, not least because it never really rose to something the State or its representatives really recognized as something worth governing. But I would say that the support for Tibetan language media and the space for social critique expands and contracts at different moments. Across these moments, however, it is generally accurate to say that the bigger one gets, the more important it is to adhere to the Party line. In Amdo in the 1990s and early 2000s, mass media (radio and television) were just about the biggest game in town. Comedians and other performers were keenly aware that they had to set just the right tone. They had to entertain with stories that were realistic but not quite real. They had to promote the State’s policies, but also wanted to embed their performances with important social critiques that might not always align with the State’s priorities. Zurza are the flexible set of practices and approaches to humor through which Tibetans can approach an issue obliquely rather than directly. In this way it provides artists with precisely the skills and the toolset necessary to navigate and accommodate shifts in policy, changes in media preferences, and the evolution of Tibetan concerns in these contexts. It allows comedians in the 1990s and early 2000s to promote a form of Tibetan nationalism, based largely in language purism and cultural preservation, while also fitting State demands. But it also empowers hip hop artists to critique young urban Tibetans who do not know their culture, to playfully rework folksongs into hip-hop beats, and to critique unrealized visions of their predecessors. It continues into the present, when people take to livestreaming and video sharing platforms to share any variety of entertainment.

Shannon Ward: Especially in your discussions of hip hop, you have shown how zurza serves to valorize the Tibetan language, but also how it can articulate linguistic purism. How do you see zurza potentially affecting the ways that Amdo Tibetans conceptualize and use language in their everyday lives?

Tim Thurston: The way I see it, these hip-hop artists and the comedians before them wanted to valorize and center Tibetan language in the nationalist project that has emerged in Amdo across the post-Mao period. Language has a complex place in China. The Chinese state is bound by constitution and the basic principles of Marxism to support officially recognized “minority nationalities” to “develop” and “promote” their own language. Additionally, the government has, over the last 70 years, developed extensive Tibetan language mass media apparatus as well. Cynically, we might say that Tibetan media is primarily for propaganda and spreading the news, but there is also some space for entertainment programming as well. But despite this support, language is also closely monitored. We sometimes hear that Tibetan singers have been arrested for singing or speaking about Tibetan language, or that Grassroots Tibetan literacy classes are sometimes closed by the government. Too direct an approach is not necessarily safe. What zurza does is allow people to promote language (and language purism) through example, through humor, without directly saying it.

Shannon Ward: In recent news media, much is being reported about Tibetan children’s decreasing access to their language and culture, especially given the rise of mandatory boarding schools that run almost exclusively in Mandarin. Being raised apart from family members can take away opportunities for children to experience Tibetan artistic practice in everyday practices like watching tv and streaming videos from smart phones. How do you see young people’s ability to connect with and produce zurza potentially changing in this new political context?

Tim Thurston: This is a great point. Intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge is under threat from a variety of sources. Some students now go to school in inland urban centers like Beijing or Chengdu. But to my understanding, most of the schools are still in periurban Tibetan communities with almost entirely Tibetan student bodies. Students in these schools often live in dorms during the weeks (or as many as two or three weeks at a time) and then go home on the weekends. In this way, they have at least some opportunities to engage with Tibetan language and culture. Without meaning to downplay the tremendous impact of removing teenagers from their homes, intergenerational support structures, and contexts in which cultural transmission happens, one of the bigger concerns for many young parents I have met is about modern media, and this appears to be independent of the boarding schools. Young people, they say, prefer watching Chinese cartoons, and listening to Chinese music. With all the changes to the fabric of Tibetan life, and to Tibetan language competences in the region, it shouldn’t be surprising that some older comedy performances will not resonate with students who lack the lived experience of herding livestock, of first using a telephone, or of the oral traditions sometimes parodied in comedies. Similarly, there is good reason to believe that the uniquely Tibetan aspects of zurza may indeed begin to fade with the gradual cultural and linguistic shifts. But whether loss of language can wholly supplant some of these characteristics and practices, and the concept of eating the sides entirely remains to be seen. Certainly, the skills of indirection, humor, and entertainment remain as relevant as ever.