Crafting a Tibetan Terroir: Winemaking in Shangri-La

This talk discusses a recently published book about how wine has transformed Tibetan land and lives. Set in the Sino-Tibetan border region renamed "Shangri-La" by the Chinese government for tourism promotion, Crafting a Tibetan Terroir considers how the deployment of the French notion of terroir works to create new forms of ethno-regional identities and village landscapes through the production of Tibetan wine as a commodity. In Shangri-La, a rapidly developing international ethno-travel destination, European histories and global capitalism are being reestablished and reformulated through viticulture, which has altered landscapes and livelihoods. 

From the introduction of vineyards by nineteenth-century French and Swiss Catholic missionaries to make sacramental wine, to twenty-first century commercialization, this ethnography documents the ways Tibetans are indigenizing modernity in the context of economic development on their own terms. It provides timely insight into China's rapid entry into the global wine market, highlighting the localized impacts of this emergent industry, which include transformation from subsistence agriculture to monocropping and intensified agrochemical use. It also addresses larger issues of international trade, suggesting that certain commodities—stimulants and intoxicants in particular—have long connected Europe and the Asia Pacific region, and that these connections are now being reconceived in fashioning new industries and identities.

About the speaker:

Brendan A. Galipeau is a Lecturer in Environmental Studies at Binghamton University. He previously served as Assistant Professor of Anthropology at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan from 2019 to 2024 and as a postdoctoral fellow in Transnational Asian Studies at Rice University from 2017 to 2019. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa in 2017 and MA in Applied Anthropology at Oregon State University in 2012.

Galipeau has been conducting research in Tibetan Southwest China since 2007. His research and publications broadly focus on environmental change and human relations with nature in Southwest China and Taiwan, with a particular focus on agrarian change, hydropower resettlement, and religious ecologies. His work has been featured in a variety of publications and media including Made in China, Journal of Agrarian Change, Human Ecology, Culture, Agriculture, Food, and Environment, National Public Radio, and the web publication The Third Pole. 

Crafting a Tibetan Terroir (University of Washington Press, 2024) is his first book.