Labtse and the Reinscription of Sacralized Social Space
One of the most widely reported, yet ignored, Tibetan folk rituals concerns labtse. In westernliterature, the longest discussion of labtse is S. Hummel’s, which appeared in Anthropos some 30years ago. There Hummel discussed the symbolic significance of labtse from the perspective of Kul-turkreislehre. Most writings on the subject, both in China and the west, seem to have followed inthe same epistemological footsteps. Studies of labtse have been dominated by what we shall call the