Building a Tibetan Xining

This chapter displays how Tibetans have generated an alternative urbanism that works within and draws from dominant sensibilities by channeling these sensibilities to create places with material and rhythmic intensities that make such places sensorially and socially available to Tibetan co-ethnics. Through practices both coordinated and uncoordinated, the chapter shows how Tibetans and their more-than-human companions have built a rhizomatic urban form that sustains Tibetanness amid the civilizing machine. The chapter first discusses how and why Tibetans channel their places within Xining City, a municipal territory in which practices of place are restricted by virtue of being located within territories that carry explicit and implicit normative dimensions. It then explores Tibetans' place-making practices in private interiors and in the shared corridors and yards of housing communities, and Tibetans' efforts to build religious structures in closely regulated urban territories. The chapter draws from ethnography and the works of the writer and filmmaker Pema Tseden to explore the role of animals and animal products in the city and Tibetans' negotiation of which animals and diets belong in what places.