HICCS 2025

Title:
From Bards to Bearers: How the inspired tellers of the Gesar epic experience heritage recognition in China

Abstract:
The Tibetan Gesar epic, sometimes promoted as the longest epic in the world, was inscribed on the UNESCO list of the representative ICH of humanity’ in 2009. Since then, a tremendous amount of human and financial capital has been devoted to ‘safeguarding’ the tradition with particular emphasis on the divinely inspired bards who perform it. A significant part of this is the official identification of ‘authentic’ bards. In the process, these men—and they are almost all men—have changed from being drungken ‘bards’ to jyundzinpa ‘bearers’ or ‘inheritors’ (Ch. Chuanchengren 传承人). The identification comes with new responsibilities, restrictions, expectations, and benefits. Based on conversations and interviews conducted in Qinghai Province’s Yushu (玉树) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture collected between 2018 and 2024, this paper examines efforts to “safeguard” (保护) the epic of King Gesar. Using inspiration narratives of bards, and the personal narratives of government workers tasked with identifying “authentic” bards, this paper examines the process used to identify the divinely inspired bards in Yushu, and the consequences and effects of recognizing them as “bearers” or “inheritors” of the world’s longest epic. I begin by introducing the inspiration narratives that these bards tell about how they came to perform the epic. These narratives are based in traditional Tibetan ways of understanding human interactions with a world inhabited by a variety of natural and supernatural beings. With careful use of quoted speech and intertextual links with other narratives of supernatural encounters, these narratives become the basis for their reputation as a bab drung, an inspired bard, and help to attest to a bard’s authenticity to a Tibetan audience. Next, I examine how these same narratives are used as part of the process of recognizing bards as ‘bearers.’ I show how this seemingly minor discursive shift bringing these bards into ontact with competing ways of understanding authenticity, and with new discourses of preservation and transmission. Some bards have gained government jobs and stipends and have been able to reach new audiences. But the focus on inspiration also limits the sorts of interventions that government workers have sought to implement. Together these discourses, and interventions, shape the presents and futures of these bards individually, the communities that traditionally formed their audiences, and their epic itself.