The Pangdatsang Family of Tibet

Rapga Pangdatsang

The history of the Pangdatsang family comprised half of my PhD thesis in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan (2001): "Arrested Histories: Between Empire and Exile in 20th Century Tibet." In the span of one generation, the Pangdatsang family went from being a regionally-powerful family of traders to the wealthiest family in all of Tibet, only to fall from grace both in the exile community as well as in Tibet as part of the People's Republic of China. The exhilarating but tragic story of this family is an important part of twentieth century Tibetan history as part of world history--including the rise of a Tibetan bourgeoisie, modern ideas of education and nation, governance in Tibet in between Dalai Lamas, and Tibet's relations with British India, Republican China, and the People's Republic of China. My telling of the story centers on the middle of the three Pangdatsang brothers, Pangda Rapga, dreamer, intellectual, and politician, and draws heavily on his personal diary and library as one of my sources alongside writings and reminiscences about him (and the family) by contemporaries and relatives, British imperial archives, and Tibetan language biographical and historical writings of and from this period. My research on this family is organized around the concept of "social death," or, the calculated fall from grace and prestige of the Pangdatsang family as an intimate history of twentieth century Tibet.

Status: research is mostly completed for this project, having first begun in 1995! I have numerous published articles on the Pangdatsang family:

  1. “Sa spang mda’ gnam spang mda’: Murder, History, and Social Politics in 1920s Lhasa,” in Lawrence Epstein, ed., Khams pa Local Histories: Visions of People, Place, and Authority, Proceedings of the Ninth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002, pp. 103-126.

  2. “In Rapga’s Library: The Texts and Times of a Rebel Tibetan Intellectual,” Les Cahiers d’Extrême Asie 15, special issue on Tibet, 2005, pp. 255-276.

  3. “Empire Out-of-Bounds: Tibet in the Era of Decolonization,” in Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue, eds., Imperial Formations, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2007, pp. 173-209.

  4. “On Social Death: The Spang mda’ tsang Family and 20th Century Tibetan History,” in Festschrift for Elliot Sperling, Edited by Gedun Rabsal, Roberto Vitali, and Nicole Willock, Dharamsala: Amnye Machen Institute. 2015.

  5. “Imperial but Not Colonial: British India, Archival Truths, and the Case of the ‘Naughty’ Tibetans.”  Comparative Studies in Society and History 59(1), 2017, pp. 68-95.

  6. “Detail as Evidence: On Family, Empire, and Political Dissent.” In The Intimacy of Dissent, Tobias Kelly, ed., American Ethnologist website, April 2019.

  7. “The Intimacy of Details: A Tibetan Diary of Dissent.” In Tobias Kelly, ed., The Intimacy of Dissent. London: UCL Press, 2020, pp. 151-171.

  8. “Disinheriting Social Death: Toward an Ethnographic Theory of Impermanence,” in Cameron Warner, Heidy Geismar, and Ton Otto, eds., Impermanence: Exploring Continuous Change Across Cultures, London: University College London Press, 2022.

Links for these articles are under “articles” or ‘online essays” section of this webbsite (or please send me an email if you cannot access them and would like a copy). In addition to these articles, I collaborated with Tenzin Dickie on individual biographies of family members on the Treasury of Lives website ( http://treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/Rapga-Pangdatsang/13521 ). The book manuscript is in progress The working title of the book is Political Life and Social Death: A Tibetan History of Exile and Loss.