Tshe dpal rdo rje, with Rin chen rdo rje, G Roche, and CK Stuart. 2009. A Tibetan Girl's Hair Changing Ritual. Asian Highlands Perspectives Volume 5. Xining City: Plateau Publications. ACCLAIM This is a remarkably careful study of a little known Tibetan coming-of-age ritual as still practiced in rural Amdo, Qinghai Province, China. Structural analysis is complemented by a case study based on observations, interviews, recordings, and authentic folklore material in the original language. Pictures, tables, and a glossary complete the work. This is field anthropology at its best. ---Juha Janhunen, Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Helsinki The achievements of this book are many: it is analytically rigorous, rich in contextualized detail, and fascinating in subject matter. The authors' diverse backgrounds and strengths are manifested throughout this truly collaborative work which follows a major rite of passage in the life of a thirteen year-old Tibetan girl. For all scholars of Tibetan culture and society, and for any student of ethnography interested in learning how to thoroughly document a ritual, this book will be of great interest and lasting use. ---Mark Turin Director, Digital Himalaya Project & World Oral Literature Project, University of Cambridge This is an important contribution to Tibetan ethnography. The study is based on careful fieldwork, analysis, introduction, and translation of relevant myths and literary compositions, and comprehensive description of core components of Tibetan community life. The value of the work is that the study of a distinctively Tibetan women's ritual is accurately and fully presented in its own context. It is a unique record of an endangered tradition. ---Paul K Nietupski, John Carroll University This study has great value in examining in detail the coming-of-age ritual of girls in a single Tibetan village, thus providing a window through which to better view and understand community-based life, which is soon to change in the face of China-wide modernization. ---Huadan Zhaxi, Humbolt University PREFACE The most fundamental aspects of Tibetans' lives have gone unnoticed and undocumented in the Western academic literature which, in part, reflects the striking lack of local Tibetan voices in Tibetan studies in the West. This important work begins to remedy this lamentable situation. Contributing to a growing opus of English-language ethnographic studies produced by Tibetan graduates of the English Training Program (ETP) in Xining City, Qinghai Province, China, the authors provide a rare view of the complex practices among Tibetans in rural southeast Qinghai associated with the hair-changing rituals that announce the sexual maturity of teenage girls. The hair-changing ritual was once widely practiced in the Tibetan farming and semi-pastoralist communities of eastern Amdo, the region now divided among the rural counties of China's Qinghai and Gansu provinces. It was arguably the only major rite-of-passage that put girls front and center; there was no equivalent rite for boys. Yet its significance for Tibetans seems to have largely escaped the Chinese and western observers who wrote about the region from the early twentieth century on. As this study makes clear, these practices are about much more than just girls and their hair. In fact, in the days-long rite of passage, the preparations and festivities engage a whole cosmological nexus of fortune, purity, fertility, sexuality, and exchange, recruiting the participation of men and women across the community and entailing future (mutual aid, kinship, and affinal) relationships among them. As such, the hair-changing ritual strikingly demonstrates that gender and kinship relations are not marginal concerns but core aspects of all Tibetans' social lives in these regions. ... ---Charlene Makley