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Burying Gold, Digging the Past: Remembering Ma Bufang Regime in Qinghai (PRC)

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Dealing with Disasters

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Disaster Anthropology ((PSDA))

Abstract

Floods occurred in 2000s near a contemporary mining site in a Tibetan village (Qinghai, PRC), evoking local uncomfortable memories of soldiers plundering gold under the brutal rule of the Hui Muslim warlord Ma Bufang in 1930s. The entanglement of this fragment of local history with recent mining exploitation in the area takes center stage of this paper. By giving prominence to the spatial dimension of events over their temporal organization, it demonstrates that past trauma and present fears of the local Tibetan community are inscribed and kept alive in the landscape through precarious relationships of relatedness and alienness among the villagers, the revengeful autochthonous deities, and roaming foreign ghosts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Valentina Punzi

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  1. Valentina Punzi
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University, Athens, Greece

    Diana Riboli

  2. Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Pamela J. Stewart

  3. Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Andrew J. Strathern

  4. Department SARAS (Storia Antropologia Religioni Arte e Spettacolo), Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Davide Torri

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Punzi, V. (2021). Burying Gold, Digging the Past: Remembering Ma Bufang Regime in Qinghai (PRC). In: Riboli, D., Stewart, P.J., Strathern, A.J., Torri, D. (eds) Dealing with Disasters. Palgrave Studies in Disaster Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56104-8_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56104-8_11

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-56103-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-56104-8

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