Crafting a Tibetan Terroir: A Conversation with Brendan Galipeau
In Crafting a Tibetan Terroir: Winemaking in Shangri-La (University of Washington Press, 2025), Brendan Galipeau takes readers to the Sino-Tibetan border region rebranded as ‘Shangri-La’ by the Chinese Government to promote tourism. Drawing from his ethnographic research in the area, he shows how wine has transformed Tibetan landscapes and livelihoods. With grapes originally introduced to locals by French and Swiss Catholic missionaries in the nineteenth century for making sacramental wine, today’s commercial wine production reflects how Tibetans are indigenising modernity and engaging with economic development on their own terms.
Dechen Pemba: There is a very evocative quote from your introduction that has stayed with me: ‘Drinking wine can be like tasting history, and doing so may summon memories and sensations. Wine can evoke feelings about place, weather, land, and human relations. Wine may speak to politics and global relations between nations and cultures.’ How did you come to Tibet and the topic of viticulture?
Brendan Galipeau: I came to study viticulture in the Tibetan areas of northwest Yunnan sort of by accident. I first began travelling to the region in 2007 as an undergraduate student in Environmental Science while taking part in a two-month ecological and cultural field studies program in northern Thailand, southwest China, and Tibet. I returned to the region the following year to work for a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) and then again in several other capacities over the ensuing years. I heard about and saw vineyards and grape growing on that first trip and several times afterwards, but I didn’t really become thoroughly interested in the topic until 2011, when I was conducting research for a master’s thesis on the impacts of dam resettlement on a Tibetan farming community living along the banks of the Mekong River.
At that time, as I was conducting interviews and surveys about household economies and agriculture, it became clear that grapes and viticulture were rapidly changing people’s livelihoods and traditional agropastoral modes of living. This was how I came to study viticulture and wine, first, for my dissertation and then for the book. The more I dug into this topic, the clearer it became that the contemporary viticultural economy was tied up with questions and concerns about colonial histories, human relations with land and climate, contemporary politics, etcetera. So, it was the issue of wine and what was happening on the ground in the region that taught me how to utilise wine as an analytical tool, as exemplified in the quote you mention above.
DP: Yours is the first scholarship I have encountered that focuses specifically on Tibetan Catholic communities in Kham. This diversity within Tibetan identities is truly eye-opening, especially through the lens of wine production. It’s also clear from your book that you developed deep and lasting relationships with local communities during your fieldwork. Beyond the fact that their religion is not Buddhism, was there anything that surprised you about these communities or that challenged your preconceptions of Tibetan people?
BG: The communities and households within and around Cizhong (茨中)—where much of my fieldwork took place and where, as you noted, I formed close and lasting connections—are as fascinating and complex as much of the broader northwest Yunnan region. While most families in these villages self-identify as Tibetan, some consider themselves to be Naxi, Bai, Yi, or Han Chinese. When you ask elders about the roots of this multi-ethnicity, they explain that in past centuries most families in the area were Naxi, but over time, more Tibetans migrated into the area, intermarried, and slowly the region came to be known more as Tibetan. This blending is evident in festival attire, home decorations, and even in the local Catholic church, where Tibetan influences appear in visual elements, translated Bibles and hymnals, and the use of Tibetan language in prayers and songs (Galipeau 2018). One major remaining vestige of this Naxi heritage is that, architecturally, houses are clearly a combination of Tibetan homes in Buddhist communities upstream along the Mekong, where I also spent much time, and Naxi homes downstream. In Cizhong, the lower walls of homes are painted white—a Tibetan trait—but the roofs are arched rather than flat like most Tibetan homes in the area and are constructed using wood rather than rammed earth. Catholic and Buddhist families living side by side is just one part of the complex hybridity of cultures and ethnicities that reside in this part of Kham, which was very surprising when I first visited given that just a few kilometres upstream towards the county seat of Dechen, communities (also all now growing grapes) are much more homogeneous in terms of traits such as architecture, language, religion, etcetera.
DP: You describe winemaking in Shangri-La as a form of ‘indigenising modernity’ and your work shows the local people adapting to and engaging in this process. Could you tell us more about this concept and why you chose it as the lens through which to understand this imported practice?
BG: This concept was originally proposed by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, and I took it up as exemplary of what was occurring with wine and viticulture in southern Kham due in part to academic genealogies. In graduate school at the University of Hawai`i, I worked closely with Alex Golub, a student of Sahlins who would often recommend readings by him. I also find his writings on capitalism in China, Asia, and the Pacific particularly useful and important. I was especially struck by the idea of ‘indigenising modernity’ when reading the work of geographers and anthropologists Sarah Turner, Christine Bonnin, and Jean Michaud in their book Frontier Livelihoods (2015). Their analysis captured precisely the kind of adaptation and cultural change I observed taking place around wine production. In this book, they discuss how Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands in southern Yunnan Province are engaging with state economies and capitalism through activities such as cardamom cultivation, alcohol production, and other forms of local enterprise—finding ways to grow both within and beyond the structures of the Chinese and Vietnamese states on their own terms. As I explain in my book, ‘indigenising modernity’ can sometimes become a form of resistance to markets and states (as in the case of Buddhist environmentalists and fungi collectors). For me, understanding local people’s livelihoods through ‘indigenising modernity’ also allows for flexibility and hybridity in coping with states and markets for indigenous Tibetans. This is partly why I found the concept useful, given all the contradictions and shifting parameters and methods within the wine economy in southern Kham.
DP: While locals exercise a certain degree of agency in winemaking, the final chapter—exploring how individuals and communities resist aspects of modernity—was especially powerful. It appears that the colonial histories of the region are, to some extent, replicated in both the state-driven and the corporate-driven wine landscapes. Are local environmental efforts stemming from Buddhist ethics doomed to fail?
BG: I might be too much of an optimist, but I don’t believe failure is a fait accompli nor imminent. When I first began spending time in this region, ‘conservation’ was becoming one of the prime industries alongside tourism due to the presence of transnational and domestic environmental NGOs. I thought it was an exciting time and place in which to be working precisely because these conservation projects were invested in collaborating with ethnobotanists and others in similar fields in the cultivation of local knowledge and community participation. In 2008, a state crackdown across Tibetan areas in China removed all financial and physical resources for Buddhist environmentalism. This caused a loss of footing for the movement. At least initially, this vacuum allowed viticulture to grow rapidly, driven by the state-supported Shangri-La Winery and accompanied by increased agrochemical use.
Since I completed the fieldwork for the book and in more recent years, the viticulture economy has diversified, and Shangri-La Winery no longer holds a real monopoly on grape growing. With the expansion of more foreign-influenced wineries, winemakers’ priorities are more aligned with Buddhist world views about mountain deities, ecology, climate change, and other matters. Most do seem to view wine now as a product that should be made using sustainable practices. Inspired by the region’s vast and evocative landscape, there is a strong desire to preserve this environment so that wine production can continue in the long term. However, while foreign influence over Chinese state practices may be more sustainable in the long term, this doesn’t mean these sorts of collaborations don’t come with their own forms of conflict and potential to create marginality for local Tibetan communities—a situation that I examine in detail in the book.
References
Galipeau, Brendan A. 2018. ‘A Tibetan Catholic Christmas in China: Ethnic Identity and Encounters with Ritual and Revitalization.’ Asian Ethnology 77(1–2): 335–70.
Turner, Sarah, Christine Bonnin, and Jean Michaud. 2015. Frontier Livelihoods: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
