“Please Tell Them We’re Not Mongolian”Identity and History Among the

Dordo of Northeast Tibet

Gerald RocheDECRA Fellow,

Asia Institute, University of Melbourne

Mongolian Studies Open ConferenceAustralian National University

Nov 3, 2015

Ethnicity and Assimilation in China:The Case of the Monguor in Tibet

• ‘Between two Potatoes’: Minority Languages in Tibet

• Examines the predicament of a group of people caught between the Tibetan nation and the Chinese state.

• Dordo (a subgroup of the Monguor/ Tuzu)

Monguor

Rebgong, in the Guchu Valley.

Dordo

Manegacha Ngandehua

1,200km from Lhasa; 1,300km from Beijing; 1,400km from Ulaanbaator

Please Tell Them…• Shawo Tsering• Last traditional leader of the Dordo people. • Wrote a history of the Dordo in Chinese and

was involved with the writing of a history in Tibetan.

• Claimed that Dordo were descended from 13th century Mongols.

• Recanted.

The History of GomarBy Gendun Dondruv

WeChat, June 2015

“I could never consider Dordo people to be Tibetans. You’re not only not Tibetans, you’re not even people…. You’re worse than garbage… You Dordo are dog shit… You can’t read or write Chinese and you don’t know how to speak it. You don’t read or write Tibetan and you don’t know how to speak that either. You don’t know how to wear Chinese clothes properly and you don’t know how to wear Tibetan clothes properly either...”

Language Shift

… language shift appears to be underway among [Manegacha] speakers… more and more children… are growing up in otherwise [Manegacha] speaking homes and villages, but have Tibetan as their mother tongue. These children appear to be acquiring only passive knowledge of [Manegacha].

Fried 2010:11

Scaling Up

• 59 ‘doculects’• About 80% endangered to varying degrees

• What can the Dordo, and their rejection of their ‘Mongolian’ past tell us about the future of linguistic diversity in Tibet?

G.Roche@unimelb.edu.au. https://unimelb.academia.edu/GeraldRoche

• Roche, Gerald and Kevin Stuart (eds). 2015. Mapping the Monguor. Special Issue of Asian Highlands Perspectives. 36.

• Fried, Robert. 2010. A Grammar of Bao’an Tu, a Mongolic Language of Northwest China.

• Lcag mo tshe ring and Gerald Roche. 2013. Notes of the Maintenance of Diversity in Amdo: Language Use in Gnyan thog Village Annual Rituals. Studia Orientalia 113: 165-179.

• Roche, Gerald. The Vitality of Tibet’s Minority Languages in the 21st Century: Preliminary Remarks. Multiethnica 35: 24-31.

References and Contact