Who, What, Why: Xiao Schutte Ke on Tibetan pastoralists and citizen science

Xiao Schutte Ke developed an interest in languages and cultures as a child in Hubei, China.

Yet, she notes that it was not until she studied with many Pacific Islander peers as an exchange student at Australian National University that she gained an understanding of anthropology. “These classmates came from communities that were the research subjects of classic anthropology books, like those written by Bronisław Malinowski and Margaret Mead. However, these students and professionals deploy anthropological knowledge towards humanizing minority cultures and defending community land,” she says.

She took language and linguistics classes for fun as a sociology undergraduate at Peking University in Beijing and discovered linguistic anthropology as a graduate student at Duke University. Now a sixth-year doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, she also works with environmental anthropologists and is affiliated with the EnviroLab, led by associate professor of anthropology Nikhil Anand.

Schutte Ke says she has “lived the life of an educational nomad since I was 17,” in contrast with her parents, whose families have lived in the same city for three generations. She says that studying Indigenous Tibetan pastoralists—nomadic livestock herders—has helped her understand her parents better, as both groups “refuse to be displaced and have cultivated a symbiotic relationship with a place.”

For her dissertation, Schutte Ke is working with pastoralists in the Amdo region of Tibet. She is examining their relationship with scientists conducting research on the Tibetan Plateau, looking at whether citizen science and curiosity toward wildlife can aid in the formation of rapport and alliances among people from different ethno-racial backgrounds, she explains.

In this analysis, she followed three types of activities among pastoralists. The first was documenting traditional ecological knowledge. To this end, Schutte Ke got up with her host family at 5 a.m. to ride a motorbike one or two kilometers away with that day’s herder—the father or grandfather.

He would release the sheep from the pen, return home for breakfast, and move the sheep a few times in the day for grass, water, and sun. “The sheep owners often command the herd with proficiency and care, and they recognize the specific face and body of every single sheep, which I find is an amazing skill,” Schutte Ke says. Sheep, yaks, and horses are more like companions or luxury goods rather than food products, she says.

Second was practicing citizen science, engaging the community in research in the high mountains, where pastoralists place infrared cameras to track wildlife and count antelope or blue sheep during seasonal patrolling trips. Lastly, she examines the social roles and collaborations between pastoralists and scientists—such as Chinese conservation biologists—on their joint field trips.

A linguistic throughline anchors her analysis. The Amdo Tibetan mother tongue “is very, very crucial for pastoralists to communicate with each other on their home terrain, to locate a specific sheep or a specific yak miles away,” she says. Schutte Ke also analyzes how Chinese-Tibetan-English multilingualism complicates the relationships between pastoralists and scientists.

Schutte Ke, who identifies as queer, says that as an undergraduate she was “moved by what I later recognized as intersectional solidarity,” while attending a talk that touched on non-Tibetan lesbians standing with gay activists who were facing police harassment during HIV/AIDS community education events in the Tibetan city of Lhasa. It was then that she began taking Tibetan language classes.

At Penn, Schutte Ke took the Pastoralism and Mobility course with lecturer Dotno Pount in the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations, which she says “made me realize the general public has many misunderstandings about nomadism and pastoralism.”

In her research, she has seen the citizen science practiced by Indigenous pastoral and rural communities sidelined, while citizen science is valorized in urban settings. She says in the past decade, 96% of research papers on the Tibetan Plateau were produced by Han Chinese authors from China-based research institutions—a higher figure than two decades ago.

“What kind of social relations allow for increasing scientific research, and how does scientific research impact social relations?” asks Schutte Ke, who proposes that the relationship between Indigenous communities and outside scientists is inadequately explored.

Schutte Ke says the diversification of plateau research is important, especially for neighboring countries whose climate is connected to the Tibetan Plateau—known as the “Asian Water Tower” as it is the source of freshwater for around two billion people who live downstream in Asia. Research on climatology, glacial science, and zoology would be impossible without the help of local Tibetan communities, she says, many of whom are open to working together with outside scientists to understand and better sustain the ecology of their homeland amid climate change.