How Zhang zhung Emerges in Emic and Etic Discourse and is Ever at Peril of Disappearing Again in the Same (original) (raw)

2018, Ancient Civilisation of Tibet and its Inheritance —— Proceedings of First Beijing International Conference on Shang shung Cultural Studies

If evidence is weak, fragmentary or opaque, such as it rather notoriously is in our study of Zhang zhung before the tenth to eleventh century CE, from a heuristic and methodological point of view, the biggest obstacle in research may well be what we wittingly or unwittingly thought we knew, such as may be apparent in our explicit or implicit hypotheses, starting assumptions, personal biases or preferences and the like. The discussion on Zhang zhung, much like that on so-called ‘early’ Bon, stands to benefit greatly from distinguishing clearly which source or register of data is being accessed. For example, late Bon or Buddhist religious historical narratives on Zhang zhung; references to Zhang zhung in Dunhuang sources; or ‘pre-Buddhist’ archaeological remains from (larger) Western Tibet, deemed to pertain to Zhang zhung, are not necessarily concerned with the same ‘Zhang zhung’, nor do they always resound from the same culture-historical registers. I shall argue that each of these major domains of data first needs to be discussed from its own contexts of use or occurrence and, if applicable, with a view on its emic or etic narrative framings. This way we can avoid rather ubiquitous anachronisms and the pitfalls of conflating what au fond may be only loosely or dis-connected or even incommensurable. Just to be absolutely clear on the matter: I do not start from the assumption that any of the mentioned domains necessarily are incommensurable—far from it! But we should not assume that they are otherwise before we have thoroughly examined and appreciated (also) potential disconnects. In my analyses, I start from the assumption that fully narrativised religious histories, to a much larger degree than we have been willing to accommodate, tend to be creative and inventive in their narrativisations of facts and events, and, more often than not, are not primarily concerned with events and chronologies, but also, and usually more significantly, with narrative vectors that reveal various ideological investments, factional framings & identities, and the like. I furthermore assume that so-called ‘invention of tradition’, in a Hobsbawmian/Rangerian sense, is not the exception but rather the rule: traditions that have survived for an extended period of time usually are ‘traditions of invention’. Therefore, in genuinely Popperian spirit, especially when data are scarce and hard to come by, we should systematically scout for dissonances and disconnects, later historical overlays and reinventions, before historicising and, perhaps naively, correlating evidence from possibly dis¬parate domains and from various religious or academic registers of narration. For these intents and purposes, I shall here survey some of my findings over the past few years of research on Bon and Zhang zhung. My research has specifically focussed on data from periods that are closely contemporaneous to the earliest events that, when it comes to releasing reliable facts on Zhang zhung, tantalisingly border on being underdetermined. I sincerely hope that these preliminary and admittedly fragile findings may contribute to an ongoing, constructively deconsctructive discussion on Zhang zhung and ‘early Bon’. Henk Blezer Leiden University Amsterdam Free University