Social class in Tibet | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 2018-12-01

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
Social class in Tibet

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SUMMARY
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There were three main social groups in Tibet prior to 1959, namely ordinary laypeople (mi ser in Tibetan), lay nobility (sger pa), and monks. The ordinary layperson could be further classified as a peasant farmer (shing-pa) or nomadic pastoralist (trokpa).The Tsang (17th century) and Dalai Lama (Ganden Podrang) law codes distinguished three social divisions: high, medium and low, each in turn was divided into three classes, to give nine classes in all. Social status was a formal classification, mostly hereditary and had legal consequences: for example the compensation to be paid for the killing of a member of these classes varied from 5 (for the lowest) to 200 'sung' for the second highest, the members of the noble families.
Nobles, government officials and monks of pure conduct were in the high division, only - probably - the Dalai Lama was in the very highest class. The middle division contained a large portion of the population and ranged from minor government officials, to taxpayer and landholding peasants, to landless peasants. Movement between classes was possible in the middle division. The lower division contained ragyabpa ('untouchables') of different types: e.g. blacksmiths and butchers. The very lowest class contained executioners, and (in the Tsang code) bachelors and hermaphrodites.Anthropologists have presented different taxonomies for the middle social division, in part because they studied specific regions of Tibet and the terms were not universal. Both Melvyn Goldstein and Geoff Childs however classified the population into three main types:
taxpayer families (tre-ba or khral-pa)
householders (du-jong or dud-chung-ba)
landless peasants (mi-bo)In the middle group, the taxpaying families could be quite wealthy. Depending upon the district, each category had different responsibilities in terms of tax and labor. Membership to each of these classes was primarily hereditary; the linkage between subjects and their estate and overlord was similarly transmitted through parallel descent. The taxpayer class, although numerically smallest among the three subclasses, occupied a superior position in terms of political and economic status.
The question of whether serfdom prevailed in traditional Tibetan society is controversial; Heidi Fjeld argues for a moderate position, recognizing that serfdom existed but was not universal in U-Tsang; a better description of the traditional Tibetan social class system, at least in Central Tibet, would be a caste system, rather than a comparison to European feudalism.