A Tibetan Catholic Christmas in China: Ethnic Identity and Encounters with Ritual and Revitalization

This article explores the annual observance of Christmas, the largest festival of the year in a Tibetan Catholic village in Southwest China. I provide a short history of Catholicism in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands and explore the annual “performance” of Christmas by villagers. I frame the syncretism of the Tibetan Christmas festival itself, a mix of Catholic ritual with Tibetan influences, against other ethnographic observations of Christmas. A second topic addressed is the influx of both Chinese and foreign tourists and academics who visit the village to observe and take part in the festival. In exploring this issue, I examine the relationship between these visitors and local Tibetan villagers during the festival. I suggest this plays into a larger move by Catholic Tibetans in the region to utilize the state development and transformation of the region as “Shangri-La” to aid in promoting and developing their own unique identity as Tibetan Catholics.