Saving Tibet? An inquiry into modernity, lies, truths, and beliefs

Social theorists have explored the ways in which quantification serves as an instrument of governance in the modern state, whether tied to concerns of population size and quality or to problems of social behavior. Biopolitics are as visible in the modern socialist states as they are in free-market democratic states, and they are perhaps nowhere more visible today than in the new global standards of "evidence-based medicine," wherein it is assumed that only quantifiable evidence can serve to establish policy, procedure, and outcome. When it comes to creating ways to "civilize" and organize their target citizenry through health development, Socialist China as relied on such technologies as much as have health development funding agencies from donor countries. In this article, I look at quantitative methods in relation to assumptions that morality can be severed from truth and that numbers are potentially morally neutral. This idea is tied not only to forms of modern subjectivity but also to the distinct ways in which certain linguistic and theoretical practices relate to provisional notions of "lying," "truth-telling," and ways of "believing." An exploration of the effects of attempts to quantify maternal behavior, morbidity, and morality in rural Tibet highlights the problem of morality within an environment in which numbers are never free-standing but, rather, are always presumed to carry moral messages, and in which domains that cannot be quantified serve as a primary basis for knowing truth. Through an exploration of rural Tibetan encounters with health development programs for safe motherhood, I provide a critique of quantification and return to questions about "belief" as a rubric that interrupts modern dichotomies of lies versus truths.