"How Should we Define Social Status? The Study of "Intermediate Groups" in Central Tibet (1895-1959)"

International audienceIf the Tibetan peasantry has largely escaped the historian's net, so too has practically the entire middle level of Tibetan society, to such a degree that its very existence has often been denied by writers. This astonishing lacuna is the result of a tendency to impose a medieval reading on Tibetan society and history that stresses the binary opposition between farmers and landlords and tends to obliterate nuances and groups who are external to this opposition. This contribution attempts to foreground the existence of such an "intermediate group" - merchants, the non-monastic intelligentsia and others - who had a prominent but largely unacknowledged role in Tibetan society