Women Building Social Capital

In September 2018 in southeast Amdo, Tibet in western China, women from different households whose tents are pitched on a common rangeland work together with sheep's wool to create decorations for an upcoming festival. The close proximity of their tents is possible because they share rangeland in common, and this proximity enables them to work together at a variety of tasks throughout the day. If, in contrast, each family pastured its livestock separately, then the fences and long distances between different families' tents would be an obstacle to cooperative labor. In this image, note the fabric and guy lines of one family's tent in the foreground and the black silhouette of another family's tent in the background, with no fence separating the two.