On the politics and the possibilities of participatory mapping and GIS: Using spatial technologies to study common property and land use change among pastoralists in Central Tibet

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 16, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 229-252

  Bauer, Kenneth ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT   (United States)

Author keywords

Cartography; China; Common property; Epistemology; Geographic Information Systems (GIS); Land use; Participatory mapping; Pastoralists; Politics; Tibet

Indexed keywords

AUTONOMY; CARTOGRAPHY; CONFERENCE PROCEEDING; EMPOWERMENT; GIS; LAND USE CHANGE; MAPPING METHOD; STATE ROLE;

ASIA; CHINA; EURASIA; FAR EAST; XIZANG;

EID: 63449109986     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474008101518     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (61)

1. Nyelam County Animal Husbandry Bureau (Nyelam AHB), 'Application for the construction of livestock shelters in Porong Xiang' (Nyelam County, Tibet Autonomous Region, PRC, 28 November 2003).
2. Tibetan terms are transliterated using the Wylie system, which renders Tibetan spelling using Roman characters. See T. Wylie, 'A standard system of Tibetan transcription', Harvard journal of Asiatic studies 2 (1959), pp. 261-7.
3. The Porong nomad estate belonged to the feudal lord (T. rje dpon) of this area. The Porong estate was situated within the district of Shekar (T. Shel dkar), which was administered by the province of Tsang, the seat of which was Shigatse (T. Gzhis ka rtse). Until China's assimilation of Tibet, Porong was a semi-autonomous political entity sanctioned by the central government of Lhasa. Porong was associated with a body of Buddhist texts and rituals derived especially from the Bodongpa school. See C. Ramble, 'The victory song of Porong', in K. Buffetrille and H. Diemberger, eds, Territory and identity in Tibet and the Himalayas. Proceedings of the ninth seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies (Leiden, Brill, 2002), pp. 59-84. The family of the Porong Jewön ruled the area for centuries and controlled a large number of nomad subjects who were bound hereditarily to this estate. See H. Diemberger, 'The people of Porong and concepts of territory', in Buffetrille and Diemberger, Territory, pp. 33-55. The Porong government was not a year-round, permanently stationed bureaucracy. Rather, the seasonal seat of this principality was located at a place called Drachen (T. Sbra chen), which means 'big tent'. The Jewön did, in fact, have a very large tent, which was the center of an annual summer festival during which the community's financial and political affairs were negotiated and settled.
4. Government records written prior to the 1950s are rare for three reasons: (1) village council and monastery texts were burned and destroyed during the Cultural Revolution; (2) the number of religious texts that were secreted out of Tibet is far greater than other kinds of writing, like government archives; and (3) pre-Communist documents pertaining to governance in Tibet have been systematically seized by the current government (and are presumably kept in archives in Lhasa and Beijing).
5. See J. Scott, Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985); I. Hodder, 'The interpretation of documents and material culture', in N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln, eds, Handbook of qualitative research (London, Sage, 2000), pp. 703-16.
6. See J. Harley, 'Maps, knowledge, and power', in D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels, eds, The iconography of landscape: Essays on the symbolic representation, design, and use of past environment (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 277-312.
7. See R. Chambers, Whose reality counts? Putting the first last (Avon, Bath Press, 1997); M. Brown and C. Hutchinson, 'Participatory mapping at landscape levels: Broadening implications for sustainable development and biodiversity conservation in developing country drylands', Aridlands news l(48) (2000); P. Brosius, A. Tsing, C. Zerner, eds, Communities and conservation: Histories and politics of community-based natural resource management (Lanham, MD, Alta Mira Press, 2005).
8. A few examples of participatory mapping efforts in China illustrate the variety of uses to which these techniques can be put. For instance, participatory mapping was deployed by the World Bank to incorporate public input into the design of transportation in the city of Liaoning, with a particular emphasis on gender issues like safety and lighting. See C. Bennett, Lighting up her way home: Using public participation techniques to improve urban transport project design in China (Washington, World Bank, 2007). Likewise, the Fujian Province Forest Department used participatory mapping to incorporate stakeholder views on a management scheme for resources in Nan'an County. See Y. Tan and T. Chi, 'Web-based GIS services in participatory forest management in China', Proceedings of the 2004 Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, IGARSS & IEEE International 7(20-24) (2004), pp. 4795-8. Participatory mapping also helped locate the places where pickpockets concentrated their activities in the southern city of Hangzhou: Maps were posted on an internet site, which allowed users to view, navigate, and add information about different 'hotspots' in the city. See YouMeiTI, 'Participatory mapping of pickpockets in Hangzhou, China', URL http://www.youmeiti.com/information/participatory_mapping_of_pickp. Accessed 15 March 2006. This latter example is pertinent to the discussion of the ways in which these techniques can be used to increase state surveillance even as they allow the assertion of individual and group agency.
9. See A. Waters-Bayer and W. Bayer, Planning with pastoralists: PRA and more. A review of methods focused on Africa (German Agency for Technical Cooperation, Division 422 Working Paper, Göttingen, Druckerei Kinzel, 1994).
10. See A. Marty, 'La gestion des terroirs et les éleveurs: Un outil d'exclusion ou de négociation?', Revue tiers monde 34(134) (1993), pp. 327-44.
11. See J. Ferguson, The anti-politics machine: 'development', depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1994); D. Rocheleau, B. Thomas-Slayter and D. Edmunds, 'Gendered resource mapping: Focusing on women's spaces in the landscape', Cultural survival quarterly 18 (1995), pp. 62-8; J. Kosek, 'Mapping politics', Common property resources digest 45 (1998), pp. 4-6; D. Hodgson and R. Schroeder, 'Dilemmas of counter-mapping community resources in Tanzania', Development and change 33(1) (2002), pp. 79-100.
12. T. Harris, D. Weiner, T. Warner and R. Levin, 'Pursuing social goals through participatory GIS? Redressing South Africa's historical political ecology', in J. Pickles, ed., Ground truth: The social implications of geographic information systems (New York, Guilford Press, 1995), pp. 196-222.
13. See N. Gonzalez, F. Herrera and M. Chapin, 'Ethnocartography in the Darien', Cultural survival quarterly 18 (1995), pp. 31-3; M. Chapin, Z. Lamb and B. Threlkeld, 'Mapping indigenous lands', Annual review of anthropology 34 (2005), pp. 619-38.
14. See B. Orlove, 'Mapping reeds and reading maps: The politics of representation in Lake Titicaca', American ethnologist 18(1) (1991), pp. 235-73; N. Peluso, 'Whose woods are these? Counter-mapping forest territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia', Antipode 27 (1995), pp. 383-406; J. Fox, 'Siam mapped and mapping Cambodia: Boundaries, sovereignty, and indigenous concepts of space', Society of natural resources 15 (2002), pp. 65-78.
15. See J. Fox, K. Surayanta, P. Hershock and A. Pramono, 'Mapping power: ironic effects of spatial information technology', Working Paper #63, Environmental Change and Vulnerability Series (Honolulu, East-West Center, 2003).
16. See B. King, 'Towards a participatory global imaging system: Evaluating case studies of participatory rural appraisal and GIS in the developing world', Cartography and geographic information science 29(1) (2002), pp. 43-52.
17. See P. Poole, 'Geomatics: Who needs it?' Cultural survival quarterly 18(4) (1995), pp. 1-77.
18. See P. Shah, G. Bharadwaj and R. Ambastha, 'Farmers as analysts and facilitators in participatory rural appraisal and planning', RRA notes 13 (1991), pp. 84-94; K. Lowry and N. Milner, 'Participating the public: group process, politics, and planning', Journal of planning education and research 16 (1997), pp. 177-87.
19. See B. Cooke and U. Kothari, eds, Participation: The new tyranny? (London, Zed Books, 2001); W. Craig, T. Harris and D. Weiner, eds, Community participation and geographic information systems (London, Taylor and Francis, 2002).
20. See D. Mosse, 'Authority, gender and knowledge: Theoretical reflections on the practice of participatory rural appraisal', Development and change 25(3) (1994), pp. 497-525.
21. J. Devavaram, 'Evaluation of a community-based buffalo project in Tamil Nadu', RRA notes 20 (1994), pp. 133-7.
22. See G. Lewis, ed., Cartographic encounters: Perspectives on Native American mapmaking and map use (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998); R. Ellen, P. Parkes and A. Bicker, eds, Indigenous environmental knowledge and its transformations (Amsterdam, Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000).
23. E. Povinelli, The cunning of recognition: Indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2002).
24. A. Pramono, I. Natalia and Y. Janting, 'Ten years after: Counter-mapping and the Dayak lands in west Kalimantan, Indonesia' (Digital Library of the Commons, 2006).
25. See C. Dunn, P. Atkins and J. Townsend, 'GIS for development: A contradiction in terms?', Area 29 (1997), pp. 151-9; J. Abbot, R. Chambers, C. Dunn, T. Harris, E. de Merode, G. Porter, J. Townsend and D. Weiner, 'Participatory GIS: Opportunity or oxymoron?', PLA notes 33 (1998), pp. 27-34.
26. See K. Basso, Wisdom sits in places (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1996); F. Harvey and N. Chrisman, 'Boundary objects and the social construction of GIS technology', Environment and planning a 30(9) (1998), pp. 1683-94.
27. See Harley, 'Maps'; Pickles, Ground truth.
28. See W. Mignolo, The darker side of the renaissance: Literacy, territoriality and colonization (Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press, 1995); M. Warhus, Another America: Native American maps and the history ofour land (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1997); M. Edney, Mapping an empire: The geographical construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997); R. Starling, 'Rethinking the power of maps: Some reflections on paper landscapes' Ecumene 5(1) (1998), pp. 105-8.
29. See D. Turnbull, 'Mapping encounters and (en)countering maps: A critical examination of cartographic resistance', Knowledge and society 11 (1998), pp. 15-44; M. Turner, 'Methodological reflections on the use of remote sensing and geographic information science in human ecological research', Human ecology 31(2) (2003), pp. 255-79; Brosius et al., Communities.
30. See J. Scott, Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1998).
31. See M. Foucault, Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977 (Brighton, Harvester, 1980); M. Watts, 'Space for everything (a commentary)', Cultural anthropology 7(1) (1992), pp. 115-29.
32. R. Rundstrom, 'GIS, indigenous peoples, and epistemological diversity', Cartographic geographic information systems 22(1) (1995), p. 45.
33. See A. Robertson, People and the state: An anthropology of planned development (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984); Paul Sillitoe, 'The development of indigenous knowledge: A new applied anthropology', Current anthropology 39(2) (1998), pp. 223-52.
34. Such knowledge (e.g., how to exploit a patch of land or assist a lamb's birth) is transferred between peers and between generations through action more than expressed through words, much less being written down. Instead, 'knowledge' is expressed and accessed for practical purposes in the moment of action, while carrying out production activities and deciding where to move animals and how to mediate boundaries. See T. Ingold, The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling, and skill (London, Routledge, 2000).
35. See E. Yeh, 'Tibetan range wars: Spatial politics and authority on the grasslands of Amdo', Development and change 34(3) (2003), pp. 499-523; E. Yeh, 'Green governmentality and pastoralism in western China: "converting pastures to grasslands"', Nomadic peoples 9(1-2) (2005), pp. 9-3.
36. K. Offen, 'Narrating place and identity, or mapping Miskitu land claims in northeastern Nicaragua', Human organization 62 (2003), pp. 382-92.
37. For example, the spellings and pronunciations of Tibetan place names have been rendered in Mandarin and are, in many cases, changed beyond recognition from the original appellations. For a discussion of statemaking and cartography, see Edney, Mapping; M. Escobar, 'Exploration, cartography and the modernization of state power', International social science journal 49 (1997), pp. 55-75; Starling,' 'Rethinking'.
38. See S. Aitken and S. Michel, 'Who contrives the "realquot; in GIS? Geographic information, planning, and critical theory', Cartography and geographic information systems 22(1) (1995), pp. 17-29.
39. See P. Ho, 'The clash over state and collective property: The making of the rangeland law', The China quarterly 161 (2000), pp. 227-50; E. Yeh, 'Property relations in Tibet since decollectivization and the question of "fuzziness"', Conservation and society 2(1) (2004), pp. 108-31; J. Sturgeon, T. Sikor, 'Introduction: Postsocialist property in Asia and Europe - variations on "fuzziness"', Conservation and society 2(1) (2004), pp. 1-17.
40. See Fox et al., 'Mapping'.
41. See S. Atran, In gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion (New York, Oxford University Press, 2002).
42. G. Creed, 'Constituted through conflict: Images of community (and nation) in Bulgarian rural ritual', American anthropologist 106(1) (2004), p. 68.
43. Samten Karmay describes Tibetan yul lha as local and regional territorial gods and goddesses whose worship predates the intensive introduction of Buddhism into Tibet. See S. Karmay, 'A comparative study of the yul lha cult in two areas and its cosmological aspects', in Samten Karmay, Y. Nagano, eds, New horizons in Bon studies (Osaka, National Museum of Ethnology, 2000), pp. 383-416. Territorial gods have a limited relevance outside their territory. Instead, participation in mountain divinity rituals implies integration into the community, thereby inheriting social and political obligations to maintain solidarity in the face of external aggression. See S. Karmay, 'The Tibetan cult of mountain deities and its political significance', in A-M. Blondeau and E. Steinkellner, eds, Reflections on the mountain: essays on the history and social meaning of the mountain cult in Tibet and the Himalaya (Vienna, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996), pp. 59-75; C. Ramble, 'Tibetan pride of place: or, why Nepal's Bhotiyas are not an ethnic group', in D. Gellner and J. Pfaff-Czarnecka, eds, Nationalism and ethnicity in a Hindu kingdom (Amsterdam, Harwood Academic, 1997), pp. 379-414. In contrast to the sacred mountains (T. gnas ri) that are the object of systematic religious worship (like circumambulation and meditation) in Tibetan areas, yul lha are more commonly the object of secular worship that seeks success in mundane activities. As such, the local mountain cult ritual tends to be focused on present life and this world. The annual purification ceremonies performed for yul lha are aimed at the reconstitution of the relationship between divinity, individual, and community and are closely associated with annual domestic production cycles, seasonal access to resources, human movements, etc. Such rituals are also recorded in other Central Asian pastoral society such as Mongolia. See C. Humphrey, 'Chiefly and shamanist landscapes in Mongolia', in E. Hirsh and M. O'Hanlon, eds, The anthropology of landscape: Perspectives on space and place (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 135-62.
44. See C. Ramble, 'Patterns of places', in Blondeau and Steinkellner, Reflections, pp. 141-52; C. Ramble, 'Gaining ground: Representations of territory in Bon and Tibetan popular tradition', Tibet journal 20(1) (1995), pp. 83-124.
45. M. Bloch, 'People into places: Zafimaniry concepts of clarity', in Hirsh and O'Hanlon, The anthropology of landscape, p. 67.
46. See E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A description of the modes of livelihood and political institutions of a Nilotic people (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1940).
47. See K. Dowman, The power places of central Tibet: The pilgrim's guide (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988); L. Epstein and P. Wenbin, 'Ganja and Murdo: The social construction of space at two Tibetan pilgrimage sites in eastern Tibet', Tibet journal 19(2) (1994), pp. 21-45; T. Huber, The cult of pure crystal mountain. Popular pilgrimage and visionary landscape in southeast Tibet (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999).
48. See M. Mills, 'The religion of locality: Local area gods and the characterisation of Tibetan Buddhism', in Thierry Dodin, Heinz Räther, eds, Recent research on Ladakh 7 (Ulm, Universität Ulm, 1997), pp. 309-28; Mona Schrempf, 'Taming the earth, controlling the cosmos: Transformation of space in Tibetan Buddhist and Bon-po ritual dance', in Huber, Sacred, pp. 198-224.
49. For example, the colloquial term for 'Buddhist' (T. nang pa) literally translates as 'insider.'
50. See D. Williams, Beyond great walls: Environment, identity, and development on the Chinese grasslands of Inner Mongolia (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2002).
51. Territorial cults are of a very ancient origin in Tibet and were an important part of the imperial religious cults in pre-Buddhist and early Buddhist Tibet. See S. Karmay, 'Mountain cults and national identity in Tibet', in R. Barnett, S. Akiner, eds, Resistance and reform in Tibet (London, Hurst & Co., 1994), pp. 112-20.
52. See C. Ramble, The navel of the demoness: Tibetan Buddhism and civil religion in highland Nepal (New York, Oxford University Press, 2007).
53. Huber, Cult of Pure Crystal Mountain, p. 60.
54. See T. Wylie, 'The Tibetan tradition of geography', Bulletin of Tibetology 2(1) (1965), pp. 17-25; B. Aziz, 'Tibetan manuscript maps of Dingri valley', Canadian cartographer 20(1) (1975), pp. 28-38; T. Huber, 'A Tibetan map of lho kha in the south-eastern Himalayan borderlands of Tibet', Imago mundi 44 (1992), pp. 1-15; T. Huber, 'When what you see is not what you get: Remarks on the traditional Tibetan presentation of sacred geography', in G. Smale, H. Gregor, E. Stutchry, eds, Tantra and popular religion inTibet (New Delhi, Aditya Prakashan, 1994), pp. 39-52; T. Huber, 'A guide to the la-phyi mandala: History, landscape and ritual in south-western Tibet', in A. Macdonald, ed., Mandala and landscapes (New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 1997), pp. 233-86; D. Martin, 'Tibet at the center: A historical study of some Tibetan geographical conceptions based on two types of country-lists found in Bon histories', in Per Kværne, ed., Tibetan studies: Proceedings of the 6th seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies (Fagernes 1992) (Oslo, Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture, 1994), pp. 517-32; C. Ramble, 'The politics of sacred space in Bon and Tibetan popular tradition', in T. Huber, ed., Sacred spaces and powerful places in Tibetan culture: A collection of essays (Dharamsala, India, Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1999).
55. See Huber, Cult of Pure Crystal Mountain.
56. See G. Tucci, The theory and practice of the mandala (New York, Samuel Weiser, 1970).
57. GIS data is commonly obtained in this way. However, scanned maps do not necessarily contain information that links the area represented on the map with actual points on the Earth's surface. In order to use a scanned map in conjunction with other spatial data, it is necessary to align - or 'geo-reference,' in GIS parlance - that map to a known coordinate system. When geo-referencing a map, one defines how the scanned map is situated in real world coordinates. Geo-referencing requires selecting control points on the scanned map that aligns with actual geographical locations, either by assigning geographical coordinates to these control points, or by linking each point to its equivalent on a projected map (in this case, the base map I had derived from satellite images). Once the control points are in place, a GIS tool applies mathematical algorithms to warp the scanned map to fit the base map as nearly as possible.
58. One interesting aspect of drawing a map is trying to correctly render scale - or the proportion of map elements proportionately sized in relation to one another. Scale may initially seem to be more universal. When we enter a space - whether a room or a landscape - most of us try to reckon the scale of it, compare it to our previous experiences, and relate the size of objects with ones we consider familiar. For example, we often ask how far things are or how much time it will take to travel to a specific place. But rendering the scale and relational features of a landscape on a piece of paper is no mean feat: It has been a perpetual challenge for painters who have tried and retried to depict spatial relations on two-dimensional canvases.
59. Mapping the location of boundaries entailed several preliminary operations: Paleographic transcription; orthographic and terminological interpretation; and toponym reconstruction. See F. Boas, Geographical names of the Kwakiutl Indians (New York, Columbia University Press, 1934); Basso, Wisdom. Then, through the process of digitizing, I created polygons representing pasture units. In this way, I recreated the outlines of past and present land administration. Some boundaries followed line of sight, others followed the various bends of rivers or the contours of ridges in the landscape. Digitizing in this way required locating - with acceptable precision - the features named in the boundary text and visually connecting them with the same features on the satellite image. While tracing lines on the computer, I toggled constantly between the Porong Boundary Text, the hand-drawn maps, satellite images, topographic maps, photo images, and, the Porong gazetteer that I had compiled.
60. For an analysis of how boundary adjustments impacted access to pasture resources in Porong between 1884 and 2004, see K. Bauer, 'Common property and power: Insights from a spatial analysis of historical and contemporary pasture boundaries among pastoralists in central Tibet', Journal of political ecology 13 (2006), pp. 24-47.
61. G. Rambaldi, D. Weiner, Third international conference on public participation GIS: Track on international perspectives (Madison, University of Wisconsin, 2004).