Dr. Fernanda Pirie
18-10-2006

Fernanda Pirie is an anthropologist specialising in the Tibetan region at University of Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. Having conducted fieldwork among Tibetan populations in both India and China, she is undertaking a comparative study of non-state legal processes in the Tibetan region and the experiences of state legal control. A practising barrister in London, before turning to anthropology, Dr. Pirie’s research interests are also extending to the London Bar and its role in the production of justice in the UK.

IMPERMANENCE OF POWER:
VILLAGE POLITICS IN LADAKH, NEPAL AND TIBET
The article was published in 2005   J. Bray (ed.), /Ladakhi histories: local and regional perspectives,/ Leiden: Brill, 379-94.

The cold winter evenings of darkest January in the remote Ladakhi village of Photoksar are largely devoted to the business of keeping warm. In my host family we spent long hours sitting cross-legged on dirty goat skins, hands outstretched towards the yaks’ dung stove or a pile of smouldering, face-blackening sheep’s droppings while draughts blew the heat, along with the smoke, straight up through a hole in the roof. Over the weeks we settled into a pattern: the mother in charge of the stove assisted by the son’s wife, the father sitting in the warmth on the other side of it, the grandfather and grandmother, usually joined by the eldest son, around the other fire, myself teaching English to a younger son under the light near the stove. But as soon as guests walked in we would all leap up and re-arrange ourselves to give the newcomers the seats by the stove and one of the men would join them to pour tea and barley beer (chang). The basis of a dral-go1 (gral go) was being formed.

If ever we hosted a party, a common event in the winter, a full line would form around the walls, starting at the stove. The dral-go is the line of seats or dancers into which Ladakhis organise themselves on every social occasion. Each new guest knows where to sit, depending on his age, but first fights to sit just lower than appropriate as his peers try to force him higher.

Much has been made in the literature on Ladakh of the social stratification that is apparent in the dral-go.2 The lamas (bla ma) take the highest seats followed by the skudrag (sku drag), upper classes, and the drongpa (grong pa), commoners, with the garba (mgar ba), mon (mon) and beda (’be dha), the outcaste blacksmith and musician families, at the bottom. The skudrag were the dominant class during the era of the kings but although their power has almost entirely been abolished and there are attempts to remove the impure stigma attached to the outcastes, the social hierarchy is still widely observed today. It is particularly prominent in Leh where the upper classes are well represented.

In most villages, however, the vast majority of people are drongpa. A village of 50 households might have one Lonpo (blon po), a member of the aristocracy, and a couple of mon and garba families.3 In Pho-toksar, with 200 inhabitants, there are no upper class and no outcaste families. Unless there are lamas or important guests present, three

VILLAGE POLITICS
Village men take the upper seats in the dral-go. Highest is the onpo (dbon po), the astrologer. Second is the amchi (am chi), the practitioner of Tibetan medicine, and next sits the goba (’go pa), the village headman. Below them people take their places in either the women’s or the men’s line solely according to the year of their birth. Differences in wealth, between older and younger sons, between richer and poorer households, between full and dependent households, khangba (khang pa) and khangu (khang bu) are ignored. The dral-go imposes an order on every social occasion but it is based on the universal principles of age and gender, thus indicating substantial equality between individuals and their households.

The practical importance of this equivalence amongst the drongpa has tended to be overshadowed in the literature by the prominence of the social hierarchy. Some writers (Dollfus 1984; Phylactou 1989) have seen it reflected in the spatial hierarchy of the household. Others have examined its modification in the modern urban setting by new forms of status (Erdmann 1983, Gutschow 1998, Srinivas 1998). However, the social hierarchy and the former power of the aristocrats which it reflects only represent one small part of the social and political order of the Ladakhi village. Equally dominant are counter-hierarchical principles. In this paper, I will examine the way these principles manifest themselves in contemporary Ladakh and their impact on power and social organisation. My primary material was gathered during fieldwork in Photoksar, a relatively remote village of 40 households in the Lingshed area, but I will relate what I observed there to historical and comparative material from the wider Ladakhi and Tibetan regions.

Village organisation
The dral-go, by indicating equivalence between individuals, also represents an equality between households within the village. There are larger and smaller, richer and poorer houses in Photoksar, but such differences are not readily acknowledged and do not confer social status on their members. Each household is treated the same as far as village obligations and privileges is concerned. Between khangba and khangu there is a difference in status. The khangba retains the greater part of the resources. It is the place of surplus production,4 able to host the chos-sil (chos gsil), religious events, and to pay the major taxes. Only the khangba provide the goba and the membar (mem bha5), his assistant. But I was surprised at how ready older generations are to move to the smaller khangu, even though it lacks the resources to host prestigious social events until I realised that the move implies no loss of individual social status. The dral-go maintains the social equality.

Within the household there are differences between the men, who go to village meetings, and the women, who do not; between the older members, who have greater responsibilities, and the younger; between the oldest man who has a special role in relation to divisions of property, and his juniors. But day to day these differences are only expressed weakly amidst a host of different roles, duties and expect-ations. Some work is gendered but most household tasks are shared and even the grandfather will leave his seat in the dral-go to go round the stove to help with the cooking if the need arises. Household organisation is characterised by a fairly equal division of tasks according to gender, habit and agreement. Although only the men attend village meetings, women express their opinions freely on any subject in the household and men discuss the proceedings with them in some detail. Authority and superiority are expressed to a minimum degree.
When it comes to village politics a similar tendency to avoid entrenched status and hierarchy is evident. Although they enjoy social status the onpo and amchi have no superiority in political matters and exercise no special influence during village meetings. The nominal head of the village is the goba. He is the representative of the village vis-à-vis outsiders. He organises meetings, ensures everyone is aware of the onpo’s directions concerning the timing of agricultural events, and is responsible for settling disputes. However, it is not a post which is considered to require special individual qualities. It operates as a village tax which rotates between all full households like the obligations to organise festivals. The posts of the four membars, his assistants, also rotate. Any man can and every household must take its turn. Moreover, the post involves time-consuming work, expense and is unequivocally seen as a burden rather than a privilege. Power is balanced by responsibility.

Given the temporary nature of the goba’s position, one might expect de facto leaders to have emerged in the village. There is some respect for elder men but one grandfather complained to me that he no longer had influence because he was getting old. Of course, some men talk more than others at meetings, and some are more respected than others, but this type of influence is never expressly acknowledged. When describing the events of a meeting, for example, they always report that ‘we’ decided this or that. There is no obvious social capital, indeed some individuals positively resist the acquisition of power and influence. The amchi in Photoksar, for example, is educated, clever and highly regarded but, when his term of office as goba was over, he strongly resisted attempts I saw to continue to involve him in the resolution of disputes. It was someone else’s turn, he would protest. On another occasion his son tried to throw his weight around by being physically aggressive to the school teacher but his father disciplined him severely for this behaviour. Any instinct to gain individual power is effectively quashed.

So how are village decisions made? All important or innovative decisions are taken at the village meeting, a forum attended by all the adult men, the yulpa (yul pa). It is the yulpa that are the political authority of the village, taking decisions about the village taxes, the festivals, overseeing the water rotation and making new rules. They also act as ultimate arbiter in disputes, when a case is serious or the goba has been unable to resolve it. They impose fines on those who have been involved in fighting and ensure that all arguments are resolved with a ceremonial restoration of good relations. At the meeting a vote can be taken, one from each household, if necessary, but in practice consensus is almost always reached. Any man can attend and speak, as an individual rather than as a representative of his household. An ideology of unity and agreement pervades the activities of the yulpa. People describe the meeting as involving ‘everyone’, though only the adult males attend. Those who attend always report what ‘we’ decided and the written agreements that record their decisions always refer to the fact of agreement. The political and judicial authority of the yulpa in the village, therefore, is legitimated by the ideology of unity and agreement.

The social hierarchy
Despite the emphasis on equality found in the village, if members of the upper classes ever visit they are incorporated into the dral-go in senior positions. On one occasion some friends trekked out to visit me in Photoksar and I was surprised to see the lowliest horseman given high status in my household as a member of a kasdar family, a title bestowed by the Dogras on their tax collectors.6 It is not so long ago that these classes wielded real power and enjoyed extensive land holdings. The Alchi Lonpo was responsible for the Photoksar area, which meant raising taxes for the king, and the villagers talk about their fear of his power. Photoksar, like other remote villages, was quite far removed from the source of this power but most villages in central Ladakh had their own kalon (bka blon) or lonpo families. Their power remained well into the 20th century, many of them acting as officers in the Dogras’ administration after the conquest of the 1840s and before Indian independence.

Nevertheless, almost every village I enquired about in central Ladakh had established a system of goba by rotation at some point during the last century.7 Under the Dogras, when centralised taxes were burdensome, villages tended to select one goba for a period of years, a man who could deal effectively with the kasdar and his demands. But since taxes were abolished after Indian independence, most villages changed to a rotation system. In more than one place, including Photoksar, they explained this in terms of the difficulty in finding a ‘good man’, someone who would not abuse the power of a permanent post. The former ruling families no longer have any official status in the internal politics of their villages. In Alchi, where the goba is now selected by rotation, the Lonpo told me that, ‘now the people can do what they want.’ They still come to him to settle their disputes and even invited him to be their goba but he refused because of the burden that post would have entailed, he said. What was offered was a different form of power from that previously enjoyed by his class. The goba has a power that is matched by responsibility and controlled by the yulpa. In the 170 years since the Dogra invasion a system has therefore emerged in which autonomy over village affairs is held firmly within the village and positions of power rotate along with the taxes.

Visible here, then, are two principles. Firstly, there is an anti-hierarchical force in a myriad of social forms and practices which counters the development of social stratification and permanent political hierarchies. Secondly there is a rotation of power so that it cannot concentrate in any single individual or group. Counter-hierarchy and the impermanence of power characterise Ladakhi village politics.

VILLAGE POLITICS
The Tibetan region
Remarkably similar elements are to be found elsewhere in the vast Tibetan region,8 suggesting that the Ladakhi phenomena cannot be explained simply as a reaction to the regional experience of the region’s own political processes and government. In lower Mustang, as noted by Charles Ramble (1993), almost all villages recruit their headmen and allocate other duties and positions of responsibility either by household rotation, by common consent or by lot. In one particular village, Te, the headmen are appointed annually by means of an elaborate game. All the villagers gather together and form into three groups, each group nominates a member of another and the selection is confirmed when two nominations happen to coincide. A large element of randomness therefore determines who sits at the top of the political hierarchy for the following year and wields, in the case of that village, real power. Mustang was also a kingdom in the 15th century and was subsequently ruled by local dukes. However, as Ramble says elsewhere (forthcoming: Ch 11), ‘the gradual reduction of the power of the dukes revealed a capacity for horizontal communication and a capacity for coherent political action among the non-noble ‘subjects’ that hinted at a well-established tradition of democratic civil society’.

Philippe Sagant (1990) discusses three communities in Amdo and Nepal. The Tromo of Chumbi, in Nepal, selected their chiefs every three years in a process that began with nominations but in which the final determination was made by lot. Among the Sharwa of Amdo, Sagant found that the leaders of their many dangerous expeditions were initially nominated according to prowess: as singers, story-tellers, mediators, winners of races and competitions, qualities which were seen as being gifts from the gods. But the final choice was made by lot. In Nyi-Shang, the Marangi choose their headmen from among the youngest adult men in the village, again by lot. Their political system, he found, incorporated ideas of rotation, of equality between clans and ages and their headmen did not wield effective power9.

These various societies thus have different systems for selecting their leaders, but what is common is that an established hierarchy and ascribed statuses play no part. Rather, there is an element of randomness in the selection of those who are to wield power and in all cases the appointments are impermanent. This produces a diffusion of power among an ever-changing group of leaders. Even in the Dalai Lama’s centralised administration in Tibet with its hierarchies and competition for status and power, we find some strikingly similar elements.10 The system of reincarnation, for one, allows for continuity of the office without the concentration of power in any family, lineage or place, at least in theory. Geoffrey Samuel (1993:152) summarises his overview of the region by saying that there is a tendency within institutions to avoid giving power to one person, for example through the appointment of two men, one lay and one monastic, to many official (dzong-pon) positions. Ter Ellingson (1989: 217-8), examining a large number of gonpa (dgon pa) constitutions, found that they carefully defined and controlled the power and authority of monastic office holders, which resulted in “the deconcentration and distribution of authority”. Although the gonpa constitutions generally defined the qualifications necessary for selection to office, certain high ranking individuals—such as the abbot of the Bonpo monastery of Man-ri—were chosen by lot or, as in the case of the Junior Tutor of the Dalai Lama, by putting candidates’ names into dough balls (as noted by Ramble 1993).

What some might see as selection by chance is often explained as the work of the gods. This is the case among the Sharwa, the Tromo and the appointment of the Bonpo abbot and Dalai Lama’s tutor.11 However, this is not invariably the case. For example, Riaboff (1997:116) reports that the Zangskaris explicitly deny that any political power is derived from the local spirits.12 In Mustang, as we have seen, an elaborate game chooses the village headmen, and elsewhere selection is straightforwardly by lot or rotation. The authority of the chosen leader is therefore legitimated in very different ways, but each system has a common outcome: the randomness, diffusion and impermanence of power. The gods show their favour but may—even must—change their minds the following year. The game has to be repeated annually. Individual qualities and human decisions cannot determine the location of power. An external force, even if it is only a list of household names, intervenes to change and redistribute power.

VILLAGE POLITICS
Ladakh in historical context
The underlying principles of equality and the impermanence of power that I have found in village politics in Ladakh are therefore echoed by similar features elsewhere in the Tibetan region. However, throughout most of its history, the small governing class that dominated Ladakh operated on very different principles, as indeed did that of the bureaucratic and hierarchical Lhasa regime. In Ladakh all land was nominally owned by the king. With the assistance of the kalons and lonpos, he waged wars, raised taxes, controlled trade and enforced labour obligations for both transport and battle. Local princes were made into ministers and aristocrats were elevated from commoner families, creating an endogamous ruling class. A permanent imperm-eable hierarchy, the one that is still recognised today in the dral-go, was created. But how and why did this emerge, and is it possible to detect any of the principles now apparent in village organisation during this period? To consider these questions it is necessary to examine the experience of government from a local perspective.

The Ladakhi kingdom was established in the tenth century by a Tibetan family that had formerly wielded power in central Tibet but moved West after its collapse, and managed to unify a number of principalities that existed in the region.13 In Photoksar my informants referred to an earlier time of fighting between villages, of aggressive raids when they had to gather in a walled area and defend themselves with sling shots. In this period, they said, one of the village households was the head and provided a chief with real power in the village who could order the others around. In these uncertain times a strong leader with power to give commands was obviously needed in order to organise the defence of the community. Little is known about the princedoms that preceded the monarchy, but their chiefs were probably selected on the same basis. A local leader, that is, was allowed to emerge in order to unite the area and defend it against aggression and encroachment. A similar phenomenon marked the political power of the Sanusi of Cyrenaica, as described by Evans-Pritchard (1949). Bedouin society was originally organised along tribal lines without any overall political power, the only centralised body being the Sanusi religious order. However, at the time of the Italian invasions of the early 20th century the people needed political leaders to organise the whole area and resist the aggression, and looked to the Sanusi to fill this role.

The earliest Ladakhi kings, by contrast, were outsiders. The chronicles, as noted by Petech, record that Ladakh was bequeathed to one of them by his father but suggest that he also had to effect conquests in the region and only succeeded in established an empire by forcing the local rulers to pay tribute to him. These kings went on to build gonpas and defend the area against attacks from Kashmir, Central Asia and Tibet, but initially the kings’ power was imposed on the area from outside by virtue of their military superiority. In Photoksar the villagers speak of the kings’ power as marking the coming of peace in the region. They continued to provide labour for the kings’ wars, but this point marks the end of inter-village fighting, according to their historical narratives. At some point, the villagers removed the power of their local leader. The excuse was that his family had been responsible for bringing small-pox into the village, but it is also highly likely that they simply did not need a strong leader any more in peaceful times. Then came the power of the Lonpo, a local man appointed by the king, though his family was later granted lands closer to the Indus and moved their residence to Alchi.14 However, he still remained nominally in charge of the Photoksar-Lingshed area, and was responsible for collecting taxes for the king. The villagers remember the harshness of his rule and the retainers who wielded big sticks to enforce his orders. Having got rid of their internal leader, the Photoksarpa therefore found that a Lonpo was imposed on them as a ruler by the king. Like the coming of the king’s own rule to Ladakh, which was established by virtue of military superiority, and unlike the elevation of the Sanusi to power by the people themselves, the Lonpo was imposed on them from the outside.

However, the kings’ regime did not remain solely dependent on the sanction of force for its authority. As many writers recognise, very few regimes can survive on this basis alone, and leaders need to be seen to exercise a legitimate form of authority.15 In Ladakh, the kings achieved legitimacy for their rule as the bringers of peace and as patrons of the gonpas. Tibetan myths concerning the early kings link them with divinity or divine qualities (see, for example, Haarh 1968) and, as Riaboff (1997: 110) and Schwieger (1997) have noted, both Ladakhi and Zangskari kings claimed descent from and attributes of 14 The current Lonpo told me that his family only stayed in Photoksar a short while after the appointment and the move to Alchi was 20 generations ago during the time of Gyalpo Dragspo who held power in the area in the early 15 century.th
15 As Abner Cohen says (1974: Ch 5) the power behind authority is always a composite of the political, the economic, the ritual and the moral.

Early Tibetan kingship. However, by the time the Ladakhi kings came to the area, Buddhism had already been introduced and over the next centuries it developed separate structures of power and influence, ultimately looking to the monastic centres of Tibet for religious authority. The kings became monastic patrons, while also taking a central role in the New Year and Spring rituals, which were not under the control of the monasteries (Ribbach 1986: Ch 7). In central Tibet the Dalai Lama was, first and foremost, a religious leader, uniting ritual with secular authority.16 The Ladakhi kings, by contrast, were only indirectly ritual chiefs and guarantors of prosperity.

Over the centuries the kings institutionalised their authority by acquiring social superiority and conferring similar status on a small, endogamous ruling class of kalons and lonpos. However, the social hierarchy did not penetrate the whole of society, remaining just deep enough to legitimate the authority of the small ruling class. We can suggest reasons for this in functional terms. Quigley (1993: Ch 6), for example, while recognising the ideology of purity in the Hindu caste system, also sees it as a response to the problem of power in a tribal society where there is mobility, political instability and an economy which produces an agricultural surplus, so allowing for specialised professional classes. Caste supports the authority of the rulers and overcomes the tendency for society to fragment into kin groupings. Ladakh’s agricultural surplus was almost entirely subsumed by the gonpas and, for ecological reasons, it evolved a relatively stable society with limited mobility. An extensive hierarchy was not, therefore, needed for social control.

However, we can also suggest that there was always an underlying resistance to the establishment of hierarchy and the entrenchment of power. Kings and rulers might have come to be accepted as the bringers of peace, monastic patrons and protectors of the religion, their taxes may have been seen as necessary to wage wars and defend the region and the upper classes might have been acknowledged as their representatives.

Nevertheless, within the relative stability of the Ladakhi kingdom the dominion of more localised rulers was not accepted. It was another matter in what can be presumed to have been the more unstable territories beyond it. Here rulers like the kings of Zangla (whose domain extended to just four villages) established themselves as the primary lords of the earth, closely protected by the local spirits (Riaboff 1997). Within the Ladakhi kingdom, however, the people were not willing to offer permanent superiority or power to local leaders. Ritual specialists, like today’s onpos, enjoyed social status without political power.

So, to what extent were the rulers during the kings’ era accepted as authorities by the villagers in Ladakh? Did they carry out any form of administrative government beyond waging wars, raising taxes and controlling trade? The Alchi Lonpo told me that his ancestors ‘gave the law’ (khrims gtangs) in Photoksar and settled their disputes. After his family moved their residence to Alchi, closer to the centre of power, people would still come to them for mediation from the whole region, he said. However, their main duties were as one of the king’s ministers and their contact with the remote villages was limited. Later Ladakhi kings did carry out some social administration in the region. When Cunningham visited Ladakh in the mid 19th century, he found a judicial system in the capital. The kings had law officers assisted by elders and there was some ceremony to the legal proceedings (Cunningham 1854). However, it does not seem as through there was a body of law that was imposed at local level, nor that the justice system was easily accessible from the remoter areas. In other words, there was no established system of social control.17 We can surmise that in Photoksar the villagers continued to make their own decisions about internal matters concerning agriculture, the distribution of resources, festivals and to settle disputes much as they do now. Other villages may well have been more closely dominated by the power of the upper classes but the rule of the king’s administration was principally about wars, trade and taxes, and penetrated very lightly into local affairs.

The relationship between the people and their rulers in Ladakh was therefore an uneasy one. The aristocracy enjoyed social superiority but imposed their power through the threat of force. The kings had come from outside but acquired legitimacy and social superiority as peace bringers and religious patrons. Society was stratified but an ideal of equality is still to be found. The Ladakhi chronicles record that Jamyang Namgyal, who ruled in the late 16th to early 17th centuries, ‘equalised rich and poor three times’. As Petech remarks (1977: Ch 17 A very similar position is visible in Tibet where the Lhasa regime exercised widespread economic control and asserted judicial supremacy but allowed considerable autonomy to regional lords (Samuel 1993: 62-3; Goldstein 1971: 171-5). The Sakya government, too, encouraged local dispute resolution while asserting itself to have ultimate judicial authority (Cassinelli and Ekvall 1969: 92, 122, 166; Dawa Norbu 1974: Ch 4; Goldstein 1971 IV), this statement appears to have been copied from the Tibetan chronicles which attribute the same activity to King Mutri Tsanpo (798-804). It probably records some tax reform but almost certainly reflects a Ladakhi ideal of kingship. The good king uses his power to ensure equality among his subjects. Within the villages the people probably retained a large measure of control over their own affairs and did not allow local hierarchies to develop. Following the decline of aristocratic power, during a period of light central control, it was these organising principles that came to the fore within village politics.

Change in contemporary Ladakh
Since Indian independence, a different form of central control has been exercised in Ladakh. Interference in village affairs remains light and officials and the police are rarely seen in the remote villages. The State laws which abolished polyandry and primogeniture in the 1940s, for example, had no practical effect for many years and are still not acknowledged in remote villages like Photoksar. The central law courts are seen in the villages as a rather unsatisfactory resource for dispute resolution but not as the ultimate source of justice in legal matters. Everywhere people talk of the need to resolve disputes nangosla (nang ngos la), inside the community. The power of the goba was said by some of my Leh informants to be declining. “Formerly he was ‘everything’. Now he is just a minor revenue official,” said one. This may be true officially but in practice power over village administration, the water rotation, the organisation of festivals and all religious events, many property disputes, family break-ups and all fights and quarrels, remain subject to the authority of the village meeting and the goba, as its representative. This is true, not just in Photoksar, but as a rule throughout villages in central Ladakh. I asked about dispute resolution when discussing the new panchayat system with the former Leh goba, for example. “It is not part of the official panchayat duties,” he said, “but the panchayats will have to settle disputes. They have to be sorted out within the village.” Maintaining order remains a matter for internal control.

The State and local governments are now more concerned with development and the distribution of benefits within the region than taxing its inhabitants. Most villagers regard government departments and the host of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that work in Leh as an important source of money and other benefits. However, in Photoksar at least, the development activities of NGOs are not always welcomed. Those who encourage villagers to carry out programmes of development themselves, or to change their behaviour in some way are firmly—though passively—resisted. The people refuse to recognise the authority of the development workers as specialists who can tell them how to live their lives, even when this is directed at obtaining benefits they expressly desire. A more explicit attempt to impose central control in the villages was made by the Ladakhi Buddhist Association at the height of its powers during the agitation for autonomy in the early 1990s. It set up it own administrative and judicial structures in the form of local committees and tried to ensure that ‘a person of authority, competence and initiative’ was elected as headman (van Beek 1996: 323). However, the attempt to exert control from the centre was unsuccessful and has now largely been abandoned.

On the other hand, the availability of benefits from government departments and NGOs has caused some villages to change their goba system. Even before the introduction of the panchayat form of government in April 2001, many villages had realised the benefit of selecting a goba who knows how to deal with officials for an extended term of office. However, there remains a striking reluctance in many places to implement such a change. In Alchi and elsewhere they told me that even though this system would be good for the development of the village they could not find any man sufficiently trustworthy as well as capable and willing, to undertake this role. The Lonpo, for his part, had refused. In other villages it has been a difficult and protracted process. The goba’s job is still marked by responsibility, as well as power, and the villagers remain reluctant to let power concentrate in a single set of hands. In the villages where they have allowed leaders to emerge, the results have sometimes been unhappy. NGOs invariably channel money through elected village committees which give significant power to those who are elected as their officers. Unlike the goba’s power, these posts are not marked by burdensome responsibility. Inevitably, it is men who are already used to dealing with the centre—because they have education or government jobs or are from upper class families—who obtain these positions and some have used them to wield power and influence in their villages. Factionalism and power struggles have resulted in places.18 In Photoksar a rather different and subtle form of conflict arose during my fieldwork. Like many remote villages, Photoksar does not often enjoy the presence of the teachers and medical assistants who are paid to work there. I therefore encouraged a local man, who had just passed his Class 12 exams, to apply to become a teacher in his own village. Discussing this in a village meeting the people at first seemed enthusiastic about having ‘one of our own’ to be a teacher. But, a few weeks later, I heard that someone had made a complaint about him to the education authority on an incomprehensibly trivial basis. The villagers did not offer me any explanation but a Western development worker thought this type of behaviour, apparently a form of jealousy, was actually par for the course. She said that it is common for the first people who reach positions of status in the modern administration to face hostility in their home villages. Such appointments disturb the embedded order of village equality. If Photoksar is to have a teacher, a position which brings a certain status, then some people would rather accept an outsider than accord superior status to one of their own.

We can, therefore, still see two organising forces within modern Ladakhi village politics: on the one hand, the people retain control over social and political organisation and are reluctant to recognise any centralised or external authority; on the other they do their best to resist the establishment of hierarchies and the concentration of power. These forces may sometimes conflict, as in Photoksar, and the new material interests that have emerged in the modern economy are testing them severely elsewhere. However, they are proving remarkably resilient over time, as might be expected of principles found so widely throughout the Tibetan region.

Notes:
1 This is often pronounced ‘bral-go’ in Photoksar. There are wide variations in Ladakhi pronunciation and I transliterate Ladakhi terms used in Photoksar according to the local dialect of that region, with the Wylie transliteration in brackets after the first usage.
2 See, in particular, Kaplanian 1981.
3 The aristocracy account for around 2% of the population, the outcastes around 8% and the drong-pa the remaining 90% according to Gutschow (1998: 62). Aziz (1974) found similar proportions in the Dingri region of central Tibet.
4 As Mills (2000:20-21) points out.
5 This word is probably derived from the English and the spelling is as found in village documents.
6 The Dogras conquered Ladakh between 1834 and 1842 and subsequently ruled the region as part of the princely state of Jammu & Kashmir.
7 These included Lingshed, Nyeraks, Yulchung, Wanla, Khanji, Kaltse, Nurla, Hemis Shukpachan, Likir, Saspol, Mangyu, Phyang, Snyemu, Matho, Sakhti, Shara.
8 I am referring to all those areas, including Amdo, Kham, Bhutan, Mustang and other parts of Nepal, generally known as ‘ethnographic Tibet’, where the people are Tibetan in language, religion and culture.
9 This account is derived from Walsh 1906.
10 See, for example, Goldstein 1973.
11 It is this aspect of these systems that is the focus of Sagant’s article.
12 I regard with some scepticism her statement that the worship of the spirits, itself, affirms their power. As in Photoksar, they may, been deeply implicated in physical fortunes without being connected in any way with temporal power.
13 The historical information is largely derived from Petech (1977).
14 The current Lonpo told me that his family only stayed in Photoksar a short while after the appointment and the move to Alchi was 20 generations ago during the time of Gyalpo Dragspo who held power in the area in the early 15 century.th
15 As Abner Cohen says (1974: Ch 5) the power behind authority is always a composite of the political, the economic, the ritual and the moral.
16 Similar examples have been noted in Bali (Geertz 1980) and Fiji (Hocart 1969).
17 A very similar position is visible in Tibet where the Lhasa regime exercised widespread economic control and asserted judicial supremacy but allowed considerable autonomy to regional lords (Samuel 1993: 62-3; Goldstein 1971: 171-5). The Sakya government, too, encouraged local dispute resolution while asserting itself to have ultimate judicial authority (Cassinelli and Ekvall 1969: 92, 122, 166; Dawa Norbu 1974: Ch 4; Goldstein 1971).
18 I have discussed these issues at length with local NGOs.

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