Use of case study and qualitative method

By comparing different ways of researching religious change, case study method was found most effective and plausible in accessing data and creating new and pertinent understanding of the dynamics of religious change in contemporary Tibet. There are three reasons for undertaking case study approach. Firstly, case study method is generally acknowledged enabling researchers to “retain holistic and meaningful characteristics of real-life events” which cannot be obtained from theory or a large- sample study (Yin, 2003: 2; Flyvbjerg, 2006; Baxter, 2010). Secondly, different from large-scale quantitative research which has been widely used in examining religious change in the field of religious studies, a case study approach aims to provide a detailed focus on the underlying social processes within a particular context. The third reason concerns the practical aspect. There is little readily-used source of survey data on Tibetan religion. Case study is more practical and easier to handle for generating first- hand data.

Rather than multiple case studies, I adopted single case study for three reasons. Firstly, my primary case study area Jiuzhaigou is a revelatory case which is one of the first explorations into contemporary Tibetans’ everyday religious practices and belief. As I stated in chapter 1, this provides grounded information onto once obscure and biased understanding of Tibetan people’s religious practices and beliefs. Secondly, even though Jiuzhaigou is not a typical community in Tibet in the sense that it is one of a few Tibetan communities that is richer than other Tibetan places and developing tourism, it is because of its frontier location to tourism, modernisation and hanification that has accelerated Jiuzhaigou’s religious change and makes religious change easier to identify. The dramatic change makes Jiuzhaigou an ideal case for capturing the relationships between religion and modernisation in Tibet. Thirdly, for minimising the misrepresentation, Anbei was chosen for providing context for comparison and various sources of data have also been adopted.

As I stated before, Tibetans’ religious belief and practices cannot be well detected by simply counting the numbers and calculating the percentages. Qualitative approach was set as the central approach to my thesis. Recently qualitative method has experienced general renaissance in studies on religion after long term dominance of quantitative

method. However, as discussed in Chapter 2, much research on secularisation and religious change has mainly taken a macro-scale, quantitative approach. This method potentially provide general understandings of large scale shifts and relationships between variables, but are less effective at explaining the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of particular phenomena. One of its limitations is its incapability of interrogating the small scale social- cultural phenomena and providing highly nuanced, dynamic and detailed nature of human practices and meanings. Thus, quantitative method is of limited use for exploring the key issues of interest for this thesis, which involve issues of religious belief and the meanings of religious practices and religious spaces. Overall, qualitative approaches have more potential to elucidate the meanings, processes and relationships that are of importance for this research (Marks, 2004: 219).

Specifically, this research adopted an ethnographic approach which combined in-depth interviews and observation/participant observation as methods of data collection. This choice was made because this study needed the researcher to spend time immersed in the everyday life of people in the research sites, investigating their life routines, everyday religious practices and the meanings of the religious (see Section 4.3 for a more detailed discussion of these specific techniques of data collection and how they were deployed).

In Chapter 3, I provided a brief introduction to the primary case study site, Jiuzhaigou. I was partially inspired to conduct doctoral research here based on prior research experience that I had gained in this area. I first developed an interest in Jiuzhaigou during fieldwork in 2009 for a master’s dissertation project on general impacts of tourism on religion (which did not go deep into the research questions I explored in this thesis). Before that I had never been to Jiuzhaigou, even though my hometown, Maerkang County, the capital county of Aba Prefecture, was very “near” Jiuzhaigou (it takes about 7 hours to drive from Maerkang to Jiuzhaigou). Prior to 2009, Jiuzhaigou was only known to me as one of the most important tourist sites in China. There is a widely known saying in China complimenting the beauty of Jiuzhaigou’s lakes: “There is no need to see waters when you come back from Jiuzhaigou”. It means once you had seen Jiuzhaigou’s lakes, you would not want to see other bodies of water, which will be less beautiful. After two periods of fieldwork in 2009, it was not only Jiuzhaigou’s beautiful waters that had caught my attention, but also the local people’s ambivalent feelings toward culture preservation and economic development that generated a sense of research curiosity. It is this curiosity which has been suggested by Phillips and Johns (2012: 190) for its efficiency in generating “new ideas and lines of enquiry” that has driven me to conduct my doctoral research and to be an “explorer” (see 2012: 188-207) on the familiar and strange land of Jiuzhaigou (it was strange because of my previous limited knowledge on Tibetan religion and culture and Jiuzhaigou). As a Tibetan

researcher, I felt an urgent need to shift the research focus from the ancient traditions, texts (although of course I acknowledge that they are always very important part of Tibetan culture) to the contemporary situation of Tibetan society and culture. Reflecting what Tibetan people are currently doing and thinking is as significant as wandering through historical materials and sacred texts. Thus in my PhD research, I decided to significantly extend and deepen my investigation and to keep on exploring the current situation of Tibetan religion, an integral part of Tibetan culture. My master’s research (an investigation which I now realise was quite rudimentary compared to the more theoretically and empirically ambitious project I have completed here) only touched on a small portion of the dimensions of religious change. A number of questions and intriguing issues were waiting to be addressed, such as the meanings of various religious spaces for local people and tourists, the embodied religious practices, the relationships between everyday religious life and non-religious life, the ways in which local people of different generations and genders confronting the economic modernisation, negotiating religious needs and economic demands, adapting their tradition. Research in Jiuzhaigou, I felt, could provide a broad in-depth and fresh insight into the contemporary social-cultural condition of Tibet.

Bearing in mind the issues I mentioned above, the final formation of my research aims and questions had been accomplished through rounds of negotiations and amendments during the processes of literature review, fieldwork, data analysis and writing up. During fieldwork, I found that monastery and home were the two most important religious spaces for Jiuzhaigou people. To provide greater clarity, I chose to give particular attention to these two types of space in my research design. As I elaborate in Section 4.2.3 and 4.3 I specifically built an intergenerational perspective into the research both through my sampling of respondents and my approach to designing interview questions. However, the authenticity issue (which I discussed theoretically in Chapter 2) is a theme that emerged saliently in the fieldwork and the process of data analysis. In the first fieldwork, the minority-majority ethnic issue arose and was further assured by a number of literatures on China’s minorities and their development. Thus, although some of the issues discussed in Chapters 5-7 were anticipated prior to the research, there were also unanticipated themes and dimensions that emerged.