Tsering Bum

TSERING BUM, then a graduate student at Emory University, Decatur, Georgia, was approved funding in April 2019 to aid research on “Understanding Human-Wildlife Interactions: Multispecies Entanglements in Contemporary Tibet,” supervised by Dr. Peter Little. This ethnographic study examines the unintended social consequences of wildlife conservation among Tibetan pastoralist communities in Qinghai Province, China. Conducted over twelve months of fieldwork across two communities from 2019 to 2020, the research reveals how recovering populations of protected species such as brown bears and blue sheep are reshaping livelihoods, power dynamics, and cultural values. Conservation policies have created new forms of human-wildlife conflict while fostering unexpected alliances between different local groups of people. The findings show that pastoralists actively engage with scientific conservation practices to assert their role as legitimate environmental stewards, challenging narratives that depict traditional livelihoods as incompatible with modern ecological ethics. The study also documents how monastic-led cultural movements promoting non-violence toward animals have sparked community responses, including yak pageants that reaffirm the centrality of yaks to pastoralist identity. Through these entangled relations, nonhuman beings emerge as agents shaping social and political life in contemporary Tibetan pastoralist communities of China.