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The extended notion of law evoked by the concept of legal pluralism has been subjected to powerful anthropological critiques. Simon Roberts, among others, has argued that law should be kept analytically distinct from forms of negotiated order. His persuasive argument in favour of a link between law and government, however, shuts the door on examples of law which arise before, or apart from, government, but which are nevertheless not negotiated orders. Law, it is argued here, can be identified neither by reference to the negotiation of order, nor by reference to government. It is, rather, an intellectual system, identified by its expressive and aspirational qualities and its ideological claims to promote order and justice. In order to distinguish law from other ideological systems it is, then, necessary for the legal anthropologist to pay more attention to the significance of the legal form.

Despite half a century of Chinese governmental control Tibetan pastoralists on the grasslands of Amdo continue to engage in practices of feuding and mediation. This chapter describes the legal drama of the mediation process, comparing modern events with historic accounts and tracing the evidence of continuity and transformation. It describes an elaborate ceremony held to mark the settlement of a long-running feud, which appears to be a modern adaptation, by government officials, of traditional Tibetan practices. It transpires, however, on closer scrutiny, that this is an entirely new form of state-sponsored legal ritual. At the same time practices of mediation continue to be conducted according to the central principles of the historic processes. These occur unobtrusively, paradoxically often being discreetly supported by local government administrators, who are compelled to subvert official state policy on law and order in the interests of resolving local conflict.

Although China’s Tibetans profoundly mistrust the ideologies of the party-state, associating them with illegitimate practices of domination, protest and revolt are rare and effectively suppressed. This might be seen as quasi-colonial domination, the state securing subjection through the performance of paramount power, demonstrated by its suppression of the 2008 protests; or, it could be attributed to a form of indirect rule, by which local officials engage with local leaders to generate hegemonic consent. While both dynamics are present on the Tibetan plateau, ethnographic fieldwork among the Tibetan populations of Qinghai and Gansu provinces reveals that consent is primarily generated by local officials who negotiate a form of local order with religious and tribal leaders. Ignoring the ideological demands of their superiors, they engage constructively with the expectations of the Tibetans about how order should be maintained and, in doing so, subvert the state’s ideal of uniform and unitary sovereignty.