Hybridity and Tibetan language in Sichuan, China

This paper presents the Sichuan case study: Zhanggu Primary School, a farming town school in Danba County of Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province. Section 1 describes the context of the town and the school.... [ view full abstract ]

This paper presents the Sichuan case study: Zhanggu Primary School, a farming town school in Danba County of Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province. Section 1 describes the context of the town and the school. This is done by analyzing discourses of education policy in the town and the school. Through this analysis I contextualize the hybridity and Tibetan language in Sichuan which is the subject of this study. This section is used as a basis for hybridity policy enactment processes of Tibetan language education policy actors – agendas – actions – artifacts, which is detailed presented in Section 2. Interaction of hybridity in discourses and discursive strategies in this school community is discussed in the final section. Focusing on the concern relating to Hybridity and Tibetan language in Sichuan, Sichuan’s Tibetan language education as research site, and discourse theory as analytical tool I also consider the language education policy trajectory over the last 20 years of economic and social change in Sichuan, including the impact of neo-liberalism and marketization on education policy for Tibetans.     

For this end, I intensively gathered archival, observational, and interview data. By using the data, this paper links the macro (governmental), mezzo (academic) and micro (individual) levels of Tibetan language educational discourses with discursive socio-cultural policy enactments and with the complexity of the power relations between Tibetans and the Han. I contend that the discursive processes can be captured with Laclau and Mouffe’s concepts, ‘the logic of equivalence’ and ‘the logic of difference’, together with other key concepts. The logic of equivalence organizes social reality in terms of opposing antagonistic chain, e.g. ‘Minority = backward versus Han = advanced’. The logic of difference resists the formation of such antagonistic chains and instead organizes social reality in terms of pure, naturalised, non-politicised ethnic, cultural and linguistic difference and diversity. These political logics provide a dynamic perspective on Sichuan’s Tibetan education policy discourses and practices. I am going to apply this framework to the analysis of data to see if it can produce better insights than previous approaches.