From salt discourses to biopolitical subjects: Livelihood transformation and paradoxical agents in rural Tibet

This paper examines the biopolitical contestation surrounding the local well salt in Yanjing (Tsha-Kha-Lho), Markham County, TAR, since the 1990s. Historically essential for local livelihoods, Yanjing salt has become marginalized under state-led iodized salt policies and revalorized under heritage tourism initiatives. Drawing on Foucault's notion of biopolitics and governmentality, and anthropological notions on the social life of things, this paper examines the contested value regime of salt and the concomitantly contested identities of people. On the one hand, state-led health discourses pathologized Yanjing salt and de-registered its market legitimacy for its lack of iodine since 1994, which provoked villagers’ rearticulation of counter-truths through cosmological faith, sensory experience, and communal memory, transforming denial into situated agency. On the other hand, the distinctiveness of Tibetan well salt provided fertile ground for heritage-making and tourism and gained state and local support, where salt producers strategically aligned themselves with development agendas that recast marginality into marketable authenticity. This dual movement reveals that both state officials and grassroot peasants involved in the value regime navigation of salt are “paradoxical agents” caught between developmentalist narratives and local pragmatism. The community–state dynamic enacted by the frictions on salt is neither one-sided dictatorship nor heroic resistance, but a form of negotiated autonomy where both sides seek to maximize mutual utility while sustaining a workable equilibrium. By conceptualizing salt as an active medium through which social relations are revealed, this study shows how commodities are reconstituted through shifting socio-political imaginaries of materiality, such that the identities of people and things come to mirror and mutually shape one another within evolving regimes of value and power.