gins 2014) have defined Amdo, the northeastern area of the Tibetan plateau that now falls within the Chinese provinces of Qinghai, western Gansu and northern Sichuan, as a geopolitical middle ground squeezed between Chinese and Tibetan polarities and shaped by the political, linguistic and cultural influences of Beijing to the east and Lhasa to the south. They have accordingly labelled it a frontier zone, where linguistic, cultural and religious hybridity and marginality prevail, in comparison with the assumed wholeness of Chinese and Tibetan centres. Roche (2015, 1-4) insightfully argues that this Sino-Tibetan frame cannot account for the complexity and variety of communities who have been living for centuries in this area, and that it is fundamental to shift the focus back to local agency. Clusters of communities have been interacting over history and have distinctively shaped their local identities beyond the ethnic and linguistic macro-divides that were imposed by the Chinese state's classification of minority populations. On the other hand, western academia's attempts to describe processes of cultural and linguistic change solely in terms of the Tibetanisation of these groups erase diversity in favour of the idea of the Tibetan absorption of local identities (Roche 2015, 13-14). Beyond the academic frame, a Tibetan civilising project oriented toward Tibet's peripheral populations, aimed at stretching Tibetan political, linguistic and cultural influence to the marginal territories, reveals a long-term Tibetan agenda of assimilation (Huber 2010, 2011; Jinpa 2014). The creativity of vernacular religion allows a space for expression that promotes local agency and highlights its specific social and historical context. At the same time, belief narratives redefine local instances of contemporary identities, alternative to those proposed by the Chinese state, into configurations of the Amdo kaleidoscope of cultural and linguistic identities. Although the prescriptive role of institutionalised Buddhism echoes the power of the state in its attitude of standardising and normalising religious beliefs and practices, and casts its shadow of disapproval onto heterodox systems, local M