‘To be included among people’: families’ perceptions of schooling and contingent negotiations in a rural Tibetan community in China

Abstract

State schooling is currently transforming Tibetans’ perceptions and everyday experiences in Western China. Based on interviews with rural Tibetan parents and grandparents, and using subjectification as an analytical concept, this paper argues that schooling, alongside socio-economic changes, powerfully shapes the subjectivities of Tibetan parents and grandparents. Against their own sense of exclusion due to lack of schooling, they justified their support of schooling with recourse to promises of state schooling for their children to ‘be included among the people’ through social mobility. Set in the context of the School Consolidation Policy(SCP), this study illustrates the ‘double directionality’ of this subjectification process where participants were made into as well as becoming certain kinds of subjects through navigations of their social arena. Trivialising the SCP’s challenging implications observed around rural China, participants supported schooling for the perceived better quality education under the SCP. Meanwhile, they were making contingent negotiations to ensure children learn Tibetan culture and language through school education as well as other mechanisms.