Inadvertent Brokers: an Ethnography of Tibetan Development Workers
Gillian G. Tan, University of Melbourne
This paper is about brokers, those people who ‘stand guard over the critical junctures or synapses of relationships which connect the local system to the larger whole’ (Wolf 1956, 1075). More specifically, it is about the Tibetan fieldworkers of international organizations who serve as brokers of development framed within a modern China. The paper will describe how, for these development brokers, translating policy is fraught with more than linguistic difficulty; implementing projects is limited by internal conflicts, and helping local people plan their versions of development is simultaneously uncomfortable and liberating. Yet the brokers are themselves affected by their everyday engagements with development and this paper will also detail their perceptions of their new roles, their changing circumstances and lifestyles, their aspirations, and the personal dimensions of cultural interaction. The paper assumes that development concerns a clash of cultures that is constantly negotiated by people ‘in the middle’. In doing so, it follows in the tradition of brokers - caciques, big-men, kijajis and enterprising elites who have used their positions for personal benefit. Such literature has contributed to a deeper understanding of the intricate relationships between a focus on power and its peripheral communities, while concentrating on how enterprising individuals fill the communication and conceptual gaps that exist at various levels of interaction and negotiation.
