Introduction

The varied political entities in Kham exhibited forms of authority and legitimization that can in themselves be regarded as exemplifying different conceptions and formulations of sovereignty. Yet it is doubtful that an autonomous history of places could be written independently of the distant centres of power. The question then becomes: how are Tibetan and Chinese governments’ respective visions of sovereignty translated in practical terms and in the lives of the people inhabiting these borderlands that progressively lost their own centrality and integrity? There is no straightforward answer to this question, but it can inform a more nuanced approach to the entanglement of local, national, and global political economies at the frontier. The chapters in this section emphasize forms of agency and local responses to past and present changes. A micro‐sociological approach and attention to life trajectories of some key individuals help us to understand the lived worlds and the subjectivities of the actors engaged in – or caught in – the upheavals of the time, their fears, hopes, and projects alike.