© 2012 Dlo08

Last Thursday, April 5th, I gave a talk on the self-immolations at my school, followed by a Q&A. I was a bit nervous. How does one begin to try to make sense out of such a powerful yet painful act, without sensationalizing, to people who don’t know much about Tibet in the span of one hour?

To create better understanding for these acts, I began with quick information on what the political climate in Tibet looked like before the self-immolation of Tapey in 2009, the first one in Tibet. I briefed the audience with the 2008 uprising that started in Lhasa and spread across Amdo and Kham, the mass arrest of Tibetans that followed, the increased surveillance, the massive clampdown on Tibetan communities, and its effects on individual bodies and minds.

I quickly went over the number of self-immolations. The number of monks, nuns, lay people, deaths, survivors. I showed the audience pictures of these individuals but asked them to take a moment to realize that these 33 people were living, breathing individuals – normal individuals trying to live their lives.

Since most of these acts were carried out by monks and nuns, I wanted the audience to get an idea of what they could have meant for the Tibetan communities in general. I tried to explain the importance of monastics, the institution and individual monks and nuns, to the Tibetan communities. That they served as, among many things, keepers and protectors of the Tibetan culture. Monastics are where the Tibetan spirituality and culture is lived, practiced, shared, and encouraged with the communities. They are places of empowerment, where Tibetans can be Tibetan. For these reasons, the Chinese state views the monastics as threats. They are also threatened by the lack of control and authority it has over the monastics, despite the harsh policies and clampdowns.

But who were these individuals?

Due to the constraints on time, I decided to do a personal profile of two, very different individuals, of the self-immolaters. Lama Soepa and Tsering Kyi.

Lama Soepa was a reincarnate Tibetan monk and a teacher. He was a respected leader in his  community of Amdo, Golog. He cared for and worked towards the social and spiritual welfare of his community. He was also the first to leave a testimony, an audio message, before he self-immolated on January 8, 2012. I had the audience read his message in writing before I began my talk. The audience and I went over parts of what he said:

“I am sacrificing my body both to stand in solidarity with them in flesh and blood, and to seek repentance through this highest tantric honor of offering one’s body. This is not to seek personal fame or glory.

I am giving away my body as an offering of light to chase away the darkness, to free all beings from suffering, and to lead them – each of whom has been our mother in the past and yet has been led by ignorance to commit immoral acts – to the Amitabha, the Buddha of infinite light. My offering of light is for all living beings, even as insignificant as lice and nits, to dispel their pain and to guide them to the state of enlightenment.

I am taking this action neither for myself nor to fulfill a personal desire nor to earn an honor. I am sacrificing my body with the firm conviction and a pure heart just as the Buddha bravely gave his body to a hungry tigress [to stop her from eating her cubs]. All the Tibetan heroes too have sacrificed their lives with similar principles. But in practical terms, their lives seemingly ended with some sort of anger. Therefore, to guide their souls on the path to enlightenment, I offer prayers that may lead all of them to Buddhahood.”

After this, I reminded them again of what the monastics meant, in very different ways, to the Tibetans and the Chinese state.

Tsering Kyi was a 20 year old Tibetan girl, an exceptional student at her school and the first, along with her sister, in her family to get a modern education. She and her family were nomads. The nomadic way of life has been systematically attacked, and more, for the last few decades. In one of the articles on Tsering Kyi, her relative mentioned how she often enjoyed laying on the grasslands watching the stars at night as the winter approached. As I said this, I unconsciously pictured the moment and felt a rush of emotion at how real Tsering Kyi was. I held my emotions back and asked the audience to imagine your way of being slowly being taken away from you and your family, and being forced to live a whole different way not by choice. What would you do? How would you feel? The audience seemed to ponder along with me.

So what would cause a person to self-immolate?

I told the audience it’s hard to guess what their personal reasons were. The only people who came close to telling us were Lama Soepa and Jamphel Yeshi, who self-immolated in Delhi on March 26, 2012 and left a letter addressed to fellow Tibetans that was later found in his room. The audio by Lama Soepa and the letter by Jamphel Yeshi both express deep pain, suffering, and also power. But how can we begin to understand this power?

I briefly highlighted the magnitude and the consequences of political protest in Tibet. The arrest, torture, and possible death. That under arrest, the state controlled your body, and did what they wanted to do with it. They could even choose to end a life.

I told the audience honestly that it is hard to speculate why these individuals choose self-immolation but some things could still be read in these actions. In the moment of the act, these individuals were taking back the authority (from the Chinese state) over their bodies, their mind, and their speech. They even took control of their own death. That this is where you can locate their power even under repressive state control.

I went back to showing them the maps of the self-immolation’s and protests in Tibet. Most of these actions have taken place in Amdo and Kham. Both are claimed and divided by China as Qinghai, Sichuan, and Gansu. In modern maps, only Utsang is shown as Tibet (Tibetan Autonomous Region). Kham and Amdo have been sucked into greater China. However, these protests and self-immolations have made their marks, so much so that their bodies, in my opinion, have symbolically carved Tibet out of China, and reclaimed theirs, and our, homeland as Tibet and Tibetan.

I showed the Lhakar movement video for the audience to understand that there are movements inside Tibet that highlight Tibetan agency and power. That the state may occupy the overall structural power in Tibet but it did not mean individual Tibetans did not have power and resist.

I ended the talk with what the audience can do. I began by first telling them to educate themselves about Tibet by simply reading and gave helpful websites. Than I asked them to visit standupfortibet.org to find out what actions, including calling their representatives, they can take to get those voices from inside Tibet heard.

It is not always easy to talk about such a topic, but it is important, however, to talk. And to do it as honestly, without sensationalizing or romanticizing, as possible. Because our job as carriers of those voices demand that we try our best to remain as honest and as true to those voices in the moment that they spoke.

© 2012 Dlo08

Sorry for the long long silence. My life’s been hectic but here’s a short update on what I’ve been up to.

Work:

After finals month at school, I flew off to Dharamsala, India to begin the preliminary work for my research. Thus, the long silence. Being back in Dharamsala only after a year feels weird, things are pretty much the same, but not in some sense. It’s the first time I’m visiting Dhasa as a researcher but that’s something only I’m aware of. Dhasa, through the lens of my anthropology training, has now become my research field. In between seeing friends, sharing meals, drinking nasty kingfisher beers, and actual interviews, I’ve been processing and mulling over my research questions to realize they weren’t as open ended as I had hoped them to be. But I guess that’s why they call it preliminary work.

Lhakar Academy:

Lhakar Academy 2012 Graduates

At the same time that I’m here, the second Lhakar Academy has also been taking place. I’ve visited several times to meet up with some old friends, who are now trainers, and made some new ones, participants, along the way. Let’s just say that this years participants are a bunch of passionate hard hitters that know how to put their passion to constructive work. It was a nice change of pace; I had been occupied all year in reading about the lives and passions of people in print that I was in dire need to be around real people with real passions. I mean papers are all insightful and stuff but I needed some real people contact.

Play:

Opening GCM Games.

Then there was the Gyalyum Chenmo Memorial Gold Cup (GCMGC) football games, GCM for short. This year’s games took place at Upper TCV (Tibetan Children’s Village) and Lower TCV. On my previous stays in India, I had heard many stories, good and bad, about the infamous GCM games and this was my first time witnessing it. At the opening ceremony and the final game, I had never seen so many Tibetans gathered around one game. To be completely honest, I’m not a football, or any sports for that matter, fan. But the GCM games were different. I got that sense of feeling that most football fanatics in the US get from watching the final football game, with half time and all. You know, that BIG-DEAL feeling…that I somehow sort of tied in with a sense of nation at the GCM. I thought that this is what it may feel like when Tibet wins independence and we’ll watch the Tibetan national football league play off against teams from different regions of Tibet.

Considering everything that has been taking place and continue to take place in Tibet. I thought the GCM, with respect to those inside Tibet, were a good/fun way to rejuvenate as a community. To feel a sense of togetherness over shared excitement and joy over games to invigorate us mentally, physically, and psychologically as a community to face more hardships and opportunities that will come on our path to nationhood.

Here’s my brief update. Hope to gain more experiences in the coming days. Hope you guys are also having an eventful Lhakar!

It’s been about three weeks since I got back from my summer vacation/research in Dharamsala, India. After getting my laptop fixed from the monsoon woes, the first thing I did was to check my Facebook, only to be pleasantly surprised by Facebook’s new story on Lhakar Diaries.

Facebook has a new editorial section called Facebook Stories that do stories on “People using Facebook in extraordinary ways.” The Facebook editorial staff had noticed the high level use of the word Lhakar and had found our Facebook group Lhakar Diaries. After looking into the word “Lhakar,” they had found our blog Lhakar Diaries interesting and informative enough to want to do a story on our blog.

So about a week ago, while browsing through my Facebook newsfeed, I was extremely excited to see Facebook’s editorial on Lhakar Diaries called “Lhakar: Taking a Moment to Be Tibetan” by Alexandra Townsend (the Tibetan translated version). The editorial story features one of our own regular contributors and guest poster Lodoe Laura. The story explores the different ways in which we as Tibetans and individuals struggle with and express, in different ways, who we each individually are as Tibetans.

While in a conversation about the use of Facebook amongst Tibetans with Dechen Pemba, she mentioned another Facebook group called “Bo Kyed Tsang Ma” (Purely Tibetan). All posts in the group are required to be written by Tibetans in Tibetan, the primary aim of Bo Kyed Tsang Ma is to encourage and allow Tibetans to actively use Tibetan. Although questions of inclusivity came up, echoing Tsering’s sentiments in FB stories, in regards to Tibetans who do not know how to read and/or write Tibetan (the same argument could be had in regards to Lhakar Diaries, although we encourage the Tibetan language, the main medium in which LD has been written thus far has been in English because of our backgrounds in being born and/or growing up in the West), we both agreed that Facebook has changed the way Tibetans from different walks of life, whom occupy different level of status in our society, communicate.

Facebook has allowed diverse groups of Tibetans (whether living inside or outside, monks or musicians, lama’s or lay people, artist or activist, scholars or students, organizations or individuals, or all of the above) to meet as equals. It has leveled the playing field as far as communication. Reincarnate Lama’s use Facebook nowadays. Lama’s are usually treated with reverence by ordinary Tibetans/Buddhists; however, on Facebook they meet lay Tibetans, and vice-verse, as equals, and have an easier time partaking in casual to serious conversations. I thought it was pretty cool when I could “like” Arjia Rinpoche’s (can’t find him on FB anymore [?]) pictures of cute animals or his thoughts on the Dharma.

From what I’ve seen, Facebook has contributed to bringing our community in the diaspora and inside closer by making communication fast, easy, open, and equal.

© 2012 Dlo08

ICT recently posted “Tibetans in the Chinese Communist Leadership” by Bhuchung K. Tsering on their blog. I became especially interested in this part of the blog-post:

It was interesting to see that way back on March 16, 1953, there was an “Inner-party directive drafted for the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party” on “Han Chauvinism” that said the following:

“Judging from the mass of information on hand, the Central Committee holds that wherever there are minority nationalities the general rule is that there are problems calling for solution, and in some cases very serious ones. On the surface all is quiet, but actually there are some very serious problems. What has come to light in various places in the last two or three years shows that Han chauvinism exists almost everywhere. It will be very dangerous if we fail now to give timely education and resolutely overcome Han chauvinism in the Party and among the people. The problem in the relations between nationalities which reveals itself in the Party and among the people in many places is the existence of Han chauvinism to a serious degree and not just a matter of its vestiges. In other words, bourgeois ideas dominate the minds of those comrades and people who have had no Marxist education and have not grasped the nationality policy of the Central Committee. Therefore, education must be assiduously carried out so that this problem can be solved step by step. Moreover, the newspapers should publish more articles based on specific facts to criticize Han chauvinism openly and educate the Party members and the people.”

It looks like that observation has not been followed up with implementation of a solution for even today, one of the factors that have exacerbated the situation in Tibet is the rise of Chinese nationalism. I hope the 18th Party Congress and the subsequent Chinese leadership will look at this issue seriously.

Han chauvinism, in other words, Racism, seemed to have been the big issue in 1953. It’s too bad that this report only highlights a small fraction of the officials that felt this way then.

I’ve been reading Ann Stoler’s book, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power” and it has been making me think a lot about the role of the State in creating and/or encouraging cultural attitudes, such as racism, through the implementation of laws. Although Stoler’s archival ethnography focuses more on how these legislation affected the intimate lives of mixed children and their white/native parents with a focus on women at that time; for the purposes of this post, I want to center this discussion on the State.

Race, from the European lens, was historically situated in making sense of free slave labor justified by the moral civilizing missions in the colonies. Misunderstood notions of race became defined, reasoned, justified, and legislated through categorical explanations (Eugenics, rigid Caste system under the British, Hutu/Tutsi solidified under Belgian rule, and etc.) of non-European peoples under colonial/imperial control. Simply put, these racial categories allowed for domination and control, through inclusion and exclusionary legislative practices, of who had rights and who didn’t. These categorical differentiations also became, what Ann Stoler calls, the colonial “common-sense.”

Looking back at the above information in quotes and reflecting on all the policies that followed and continue now in Tibet and other “minority” areas, show how Racism was not only state sponsored (teaching both the Chinese and Tibetan population about the “Marxist” ideology and the need to update themselves of their lifestyles that reflect backwards “Traditions”) but encouraged “common sense” (state propaganda on resistance from the Tibetans or any other “minority” groups).

The reason I bring this up is to highlight the historical significance of how racist attitudes can and continue to be made into law that would allow for the normalization of racist thought. I place importance on how these attitudes (the idea that the Tibetans need their help, don’t know whats good for them, need to be taught the Marxist ideology) became normal/a given fact/common sense. The Chinese State not only made Racism possible through official legislation but encouraged the cultivation of present racist languages, attitudes, and feelings–in other words, racist Culture–among individuals who identify as Chinese (this includes “minorities” who have also internalized the racist “norm”).

This is why it seems completely normal for Chinese citizens for the State officials to issue notices restricting the movement of Tibetans and Uyghurs by enforcing they report themselves in Beijing. Or when it is ok for Hotels in China to refuse specific ethnic groups. Or the racist attacks on the Japanese allowed by the State by Chinese citizens right now. While the State restrict the movements of its “ethnic” groups, it allows for its citizen to carry on an inclusion and exclusionary practice that they understand as “normal” based on Race and Class.

This is how a thought, feeling, or opinion made into law becomes no longer a thought but gets constructed as a Fact or common sense. In other words, Han Chauvinism or Racism was and continues to be legislated by the Chinese State.

© 2012 Dlo08

(Background on how to read the post: [as can be seen in the comments section to a reader] I was hoping to highlight how certain false information, through propaganda and etc, can be constructed to become a Truth, or in cases of irrelevant information can be prioritized. The post was meant more to explore the CCPs construction of truth-making on Tibet and also anyone who writes on Tibet in either creating a Truth or prioritizing certain truths, in order to, or shy away from, emphasizing the political Truth of Tibet.

Which then creates a certain cultural norm, within the scholarship or anything on Tibet, of what “truth” to follow. Right now, the hot topic that overshadows all seems to be the Environment and/or development. The problem isn’t environment or development as the subject, in fact it’s important, but it becomes a problem when it’s used to directly and indirectly shut down all discussions on Tibet that aren’t all somehow related to the environment or development and etc.)

“A lie repeated a hundred times becomes the truth.”

– Chairman Mao

Mao is famously known for the above quote. How are certain “truths/knowledges/facts” created? A lie can be turned into the truth so long as you repeated it, according to Mao, a hundred times.

As a Tibetan, I am sure most of you can relate when I say, I’ve had the “Tibet was never part of China” history, full MC-style, battles with more Chinese than I’d like to remember. The amazing part of all this is how convinced most of these Chinese individuals, even the most well meaning, are about the truth of their historical version of China’s Tibet.

So, how then do you begin having a dialogue with these different individuals when—according to them—you don’t even know the truth about your own history?

The discussion then is not, and it never was, about what the truth is, but whose truth triumphs over the other. So then the question becomes, how is a truth constructed in the first place?

About a week ago, as one of the administrators for Lhakar Diaries blog, I was skimming over some new comments that were awaiting approval for the posts “Remembering Tsewang Norbu [one of the earlier immolators] on Lhakar” and “My Pledge,” and I became puzzled. Here is a screenshot of the commenters, comments, their IP address, and what appears to be fake email addresses:

Click to enlarge.

Usually the administrators do not censor comments so long as they’re not spam or hate comment based on race/gender/class/creed etc.

As I looked over the comments carefully, I noticed the similarities in the vocabulary and sentence structure. The comments, all written on the same day, were made only minutes apart from each other. It was clear someone was trying to run a smear campaign aimed to diminish Tsewang Norbu’s significance. Nonetheless, I decided to look up the IP addresses:

Both Anonymous & Dawa seems to be the same person and the IP address traces this person to be in Miami, Florida. Tenzrn’s IP traces to Seoul, South Korea. Yokham’s IP traces to Toronto, Ontario-Canada. Although Tenzrn and Yokham’s IP addresses trace to two different countries, interestingly, yokham made his/her comment 6 minutes after Tenzrn. Not to mention the similarities in the writing styles.

So what does this say about these, or same, individual/s? It is clear that this person/s is trying to inject this information as truth, and hoping the administrators would publish it to further disseminate this information in the cyber world in the hopes to possibly turn this information into a Fact or Truth.

Why then, am I publishing this person/s comments when I could have easily marked it as spam and delete it? Why give this comment some airtime?

While looking over this and noticing the weirdness and irrelevantness of the commenters information, it made me think about how this person/s had actually tried to disseminate a random comment in a now popular blog (at least I think LD has become popular) read by young Tibetans, in an attempt to construct a truth.

Tsewang Norbu

Whether the content of the comment about Tsewang Norbu is true or false is clearly irrelevant to his immolation that led to his death.

What’s important however, is the attempt by these comments to change/minimize our views of Tsewang Norbu and to construct a new cultural behavior/feel/truth to how we as Tibetans should view him.

It’s an attempt to reframe his personhood in a negative light. To produce a new truth, a tainted one, to reconstruct the narrative on Tsewang Norbu from that of positive to negative and to diminish the significance for what he stood for when he immolated.

© 2012 Dlo08

Just when it felt like all news on Tibet was getting sadder, Shapaley dropped “Tsampa” this Wednesday on Lhakar.

Tsampa by Shapaley

In the middle, he says:

The Tibetan spirit will always remain. You can threaten us, but we keep on doing our thing. I’m sorry, you can’t stop us!!!

This was just what I needed to hear to bring up my morale and remind me again who we are as a people. That our spirit “will always remain.” The spirit of Lhakar is epitomized in this video.

Shapaley and Exiled Prophet

Shapaley (Karma Norbu) and Exiled prophet (Tenzin Wangchuk) team up in this stylistic video with Shapaley in his swag Jean Jacket and cameo’s of Exiled Prophet with his “Made in Tibet” bar-code black slick T-shirt with NYC serving as the backdrop. They dance, sing, rap, and eat Tsampa while dropping lyrics that pull my spirits high up and I nod along with all the love that’s being transmitted through this song and video.

Lhakar is a threat to China because it is rooted in us Tibetans feeling proud of who we are as a people—expressed, asserted, and lived in multiple different modes—which threatens their legitimacy over Tibet as their territory. China has dominated the channel/narratives on Tibet since the invasion but Lhakar has provided a platform for previously existing and new forms of mediums that empower the Tibetan identity (materially, spiritually, psychologically, and/or physically) to exist together ideologically as a cooperative. This is how Tibetans inside and outside take back the narrative on Tibet from China.

Lhakar is successful precisely because it is voluntary. It is about individual Tibetans taking their own initiatives to empower the self and the whole.

Shapaley, dressed in his NYC chic jean get-up, makes this clear. It doesn’t have to just be about, or limited to, wearing the Chupa. It’s about digging deeper, finding out what it is that moves the individual and collective, in empowered directions, that embraces the multiplicity of our identities as Tibetans, born and raised in the diaspora and/or Tibet, who are living, breathing, struggling, defining, re-defining, fighting, defying, learning, and teaching in ways that enhance us as a people.

© 2012 Dlo08

(Background on how to read the post: [as can be seen in the comments section w/ few edits]

My post attempts to look at Hillman’s “academic” paper (who Journalists and the likes turn to as “experts”) to deconstruct how his narrative on Tibet supports China’s version of Tibet as not an “occupied territory.”

It argues for the importance of the current and past history of Gyalthang (an example of History 2s) in order to counter China’s history of Tibet (History 1), which is legitimized by academics such as Hillman who’s writing supports claims by China, and further recolonize Tibetans in other scholarly or print works on Tibet.

The idea was to try to deconstruct one piece, Hillmans, to reflect a larger trend in the academic and print media community at large, and specifically on Tibet, in how their discourse/ narratives/ writings justify China’s colonial occupation and other existing forms of imperialisms and colonialisms in the world.

I was trying to engage Hillman’s article to go deeper into HOW he comes to assume Tibet as “China’s Tibet.” In other words, I tried to analyze his writing to try to understand how he takes Tibet as part of China as a given, and reproduces that assumption through his own work, by examining things such as, assumptions on the geographic boundaries of China on Tibet as a given, reflection on Gyalthangs economy from China’s point of view (developing and modernizing the Tibetans) rather then examining these development from the local point of view.)

On July 30^th, 2010, Ben Hillman–a Senior Lecturer at the Crawford School of public policy, Australian National University–wrote an article called “China’s many Tibets: Diqing as a model for ‘development with Tibetan characteristics?’” (2010). He details the economic success, through the government-funded tourist industry, of Shangri-La, a Tibetan town in Kham, as a model that the Chinese authorities can follow for “China’s many other Tibets”. However, in his eager attempt to support his argument for Shangri-La as a successful model, Hillman fails to acknowledge China’s historical role in that region, the popular resistance that occurred before and during the time period he covers, or further analysis of local involvement in the tourist industry.

In this post, I will closely scrutinize Hillman’s work with a postcolonial critique. My analysis will attempt to fill in the historical silences his analysis lacks to counter his flat representation of Shangri-La, which, I argue, further contributes in reproducing the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC)–and therefore, popular global understanding–popular narrative of itself as developing Tibet for the better. Also, the lack of description on the experiences of the local people of Shangri-La, I argue, reproduces the flawed assertion of universal mono-historical-narratives (Chakrabarty, 2008[2000]) and conceals the existence of continuing colonialisms (Stoler & McGranahan, 2007).

Woman wearing traditional Gyalthang dress in Gyalthang-Shanri La, Kham

Whenever I hear or see the word Gyalthang, now called Shangri-La, I am instantly reminded of my late grandfather. He passed away over a decade ago in India. However, before his death, he had the opportunity to return to his birthplace and hometown of Gyalthang, Kham. Upon his return from Gyalthang, Kham back to India, he had asked me to become a doctor, so that I could go back to Gyalthang in the future to help my extended family and the local Tibetan community. My memory of Gyalthang is steeped in the few stories my grandfather told me when I was little about its beautiful landscape. Gyalthang, in my grandfather’s memory was geographically located in Kham, Tibet. His memory of Gyalthang as being in Tibet was imprinted as a given in how I have always placed Kham geographically.

My grandfather’s memory of his homeland, along with other forms of local memories and perspective, reflects what Chakrabarty calls “History 2(s)” (2008[2000]:66-65). Chakrabarty describes History 2(s) (reflecting multiple histories and experiences; the idea of “local/non-western/Batang/Gyalthang/Ngari-history”) as different ways of being that are “antecedents to [modern European concepts of] capital,” what Marx would call “precapital” (non-European native systems of exchange before as not “capital.”) (Ch2). He argues that History 2s counter (European) universal notions of History, called History 1, which is the base for the past “that is internal to the structure of being of capital,” (ways of being understood only in economic terms) (66) whose “epistemological claims are [also] taken to have moral implications” (imperial-colonial claims to moralizing-civilizing missions that often take form in development projects.) (Keane, 2007:10).

In other words, History 1 supports the mono hegemonic historical narrative that places the past and the present in an evolutionary model (i.e. primitive-developing-developed) with (European notions of) “capital” as its prerequisite. Chakrabarty argues, “History 2 is better thought of as a category charged with the function of constantly interrupting the totalizing thrust of History 1” (2008[2000]:66).

For the purpose of this post, I argue that the PRC’s narrative on Tibet, and Hillman’s article, fits the category of History 1. Hillman’s analysis, as echoed by the PRC, lacks local experiences of the time frame he writes about (History 2). To demonstrate this further, I deconstruct Hillman’s article and critically engage the histories of local experiences he leaves out.

In Hillman’s introduction, he begins by placing Tibetans—who live in the Kham region—outside the geographic boundary he, and China, identify as “Tibet.” He writes, “[j]ust over half of China’s ethnic Tibetans live outside [Tibet Autonomous Region] in territories that have been incorporated into the Chinese province of Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan” (2010:269). Right away, Hillman geographically places “half of China’s ethnic Tibetans” outside of Tibet. He also fails to expand on what he refers to as “incorporated.” Hillman continues by highlighting Diqing (Dechen) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (DTAP) in Yunnan, where Gyalthang/Shangri-La is located, and says it was established as such in 1957, but again fails to explain why DTAP had to be “established” (272).

Diqing (Dechen) Tibet Autonomous Prefecture

Hillman’s unwillingness to question when these territories became “incorporated” or when specific locations were “established” makes it clear that he does not question China’s geographical notion and narrative of Tibet, History 1. Foucault warns against rejecting these notions automatically, before fully interrogating them. Instead, he advises that “the tranquility with which [these notions] are accepted must be disturbed” (1994[1966]:30).

To disturb Hillman’s notion of Tibet (and the general Chinese population), and specifically, Gyalthang, I ask the following question: What was happening around this time period that territories where Tibetans lived were being “incorporated” into other Chinese provinces while places such as DTAP were being “established”? To engage this question I turn to histories that reflect local experiences of what took place, History 2(s).

The PRC did not come to power until 1949; by 1950 the People’s Liberation Army (PLR) had entered the regions identified by locals as Kham and Amdo, and were “incorporated” into greater China (McGranahan, 2010:45). It was also around this time that locals such as my grandfather, in these areas, clearly identified and aligned themselves with the government in Lhasa under the Dalai Lama’s administration (38). Prior to and after the “establishment” of DTAP in 1957, Gyalthang fought violent uprisings against the Chinese—whom they saw as intruders when they realized they were being “incorporated”—as early as 1952 (67) with continued resistance from the attacks brought on by the Cultural Revolution (Kolas, 2008:270) and into the mid-90s. In fact, Hillman points out “[a]s many other Tibetan areas, Diqing was a ‘closed’ area due to central government concerns over political and social stability in ethnic minority border regions” (272). Although he does not explain why central government had “concerns,” he states, “outsiders were not permitted to travel there without permission” (272). With the following information, one is able to interpret that there was a power struggle between local Tibetans and PLA troops that reflect the “concerns” Hillman mentions.

However, it is not physically possible to move whole provinces. How then, did Kham and Amdo become part of greater China? Here, again, I am reminded of Foucault’s question regarding the constructiveness of things (1994[1966]:30). How, for example, did Hillman (and others who takes these newly constructed geographical boundaries as a given) come to identify places in Amdo and Kham as, and existing within the context of, China’s Yunnan, Qinghai, and Sichuan?

One way geographical identities can be transformed is through the construction and employment of what Ann Stoler calls “Colonial categories” (2002). According to Stoler, “the power of categories rests in their capacity to impose the realities they ostensibly only describe…classification here is not a benign cultural act but a potential political one” (8). The only way to construct Amdo and Kham’s landscape as China, and not Tibet, was to impose new categories that situated Amdo and Kham within greater China. The Chinese colonial administration was able to achieve this through the process of mapping, naming, and renaming of Tibetan places (Tsomu, 2012). “Mapping,” according to Kolas “is one of the most important methods utilized by states in their efforts to reconstruct ‘place’ according to the spatial scale of state territory” (2002:268). The classification, controlled and maintained by the Chinese colonial administrative and military practices, of Amdo and Kham—towns, villages, and cities—as Qinghai, Yunnan, and Sichuan is how China geographically reconstructs these two Tibetan provinces as being part of greater China and “‘displacing’ indigenous [Tibetan] constructions and ‘replacing’ them with [Sinicized] state constructions” (268).

Hillman’s silence on the history of resistance, History 2(s), surrounding the time period he covered in Gyalthang, denies the local experiences and memories of resistance. His silence also masks and justifies China’s colonial past and present, History 1, in that region. This, I further argue, supports the reproduction of universalized narratives (the concept of grand narratives that homogenize histories; “world history/Asian/Western/Chinese/Indain/Tibetan-History”), History 1, and justifies present existing colonialisms (Stoler & McGranahan 2007).

While Hillman does not acknowledge China’s historical role in the construction of Kham and Amdo as greater China, he does, however, acknowledge the “violent protests [that] erupted across,” what he calls, “Tibetan China” in March 2008 (276). Yet, to support his argument, that the socio-economic-political stability of Shangri-La is due to its government-funded developmental success, Hillman states, “[t]ellingly…no major social unrest [in March 2008] was recorded in Diqing” (276). But there were, in fact, several protests that took place in Gyalthang County. It was considered “major” enough by the Chinese authorities to deploy over 10,000 Chinese military troops to the region, and was closed off and put under heavy surveillance along with other neighboring counties (TCHRD, 2008:53 & 68). This was despite Gyalthang’s “skyrocket[ing]” tourist economy in 2007 (2010:274). The uprising across Tibet, including Gyalthang, demonstrate that despite History 1’s attempt “to subjugate or destroy the multiple possibilities that belong to History 2… [t]here is nothing, however, to guarantee that the subordination of History 2s to the logic of capital would ever be complete” (65).

Hillman’s attempt to attach little importance to the significance of the 2008 uprising across Tibet and in Gyalthang County once again ignores the actual lived experiences and aspirations of individual Tibetans who risk their safety to protest against the state whom they still view as foreign and unwanted. I would further argue that the act of public protest against the state for its unwanted status by Tibetans in Gyalthang and elsewhere is a performative act of reclaiming the Tibetan space back from the Chinese authorities that occupy that space.

The postcolonial critique, that History 1 (those in power; Colonizer)—mononarratives that produce and reproduce those power dynamics—makes sense of History 2 (the subjugated, Colonized, operating under History 1’s power) through its own epistemological lens (History 1/Colonizer/ “Modern” notions of agency, capital, development, etc.) and dominates History 2 structurally (socio-economic-cultural-systemic control). Although Hillman does not engage with this critique, the local experience of resistance against Chinese attempts to control their ways of being demonstrates the struggle between History 1 and 2. During the Cultural Revolution, Gyalthang experienced, along with the rest of Tibet and China, the purging of the “old culture” and witnessed the destruction of its sacred monasteries (Kolas, 2008:268). PRC, operating on the Marxist notion of being, could not make sense of the “old culture(s)” and considered these ways of being, History 2, as irrelevant, and caused the destruction (materially and psychologically) of indigenous Tibetan notions of the sacred.

By the mid-90s, the local authorities in Gyalthang transformed it into Shangri-La (Hillman, 2010:270). This success is due to the efficient marketing of Gyalthang as the actual Shangri-La of Hilton’s “Lost Horizon” (272)(for more on the image of Shangri-La, see Lopez, 1999). It is not surprising to learn that the popular tourist locations in Shangri-La happen to be the sacred spaces that Tibetan Buddhist pilgrims had visited even before the introduction of its marketing (273). Interestingly, the meaning of sacred structures, such as monasteries, viewed as irrelevant and potentially spaces of resistance during the Cultural Revolution is transformed, at least partially, in Gyalthang’s Shangri-La.

The colonial PRC’s logic—rooted in the Eurocentric Marxist notion of “production”—partially transforms monasteries from its local Tibetan context (its meaning and functions) to places that can produce material “capital” (in the Marxist sense). In Gyalthang, sacred spaces are marketed as the main attraction for foreign tourists and it has contributed to the economic success of Gyalthang. The sacred, in this context, has found an economic function for the communist/colonial logic, relevant enough for it to be considered for investment—government aid in the reconstruction of monasteries in Gyalthang (274). The reason why I emphasize the “partial-ness” of this transformation is to highlight that “History 2, may be under the institutional domination of the logic of capital and exist in proximate relationship to it, but they also do not belong to the ‘life process’ of capital. They enable the human bearer of labor power to enact other ways of being in the world—other than, that is, being the bearer of labor power” (2008[2000]:66).

Gandan Sumtseling Monastery

In “Tourism and the Making of Place in Shangri-La,” Kolas takes a different approach to the success of Gyalthang than Hillman to explore how Tibetans at both official and local levels are taking advantage of Gyalthang’s success to take back and reclaim “Tibetan spaces” (2008). Despite the existence of political resistance by Tibetans that reject China’s colonial presence in Gyalthang, there are Tibetans who do work within the colonial system to try to transform it to their favor—Bhabha’s mimic men come to mind (1994[1984]). Kolas argues—in line with Keane’s emphasis on local forms of agency (2007)—that local Tibetans are aware of the polarizing images of themselves as the exotic and/or backwards (Said 1978. Trouillot 1991) in popular imagination of non-Tibetans. However, as Kolas’s work shows, they are able to utilize and market the exotic image of themselves, Shangri-La, to structurally benefit and empower their community.

Colonial policies at the local level affect communities differently (Steimmetz, 2007). Gyalthang serves as a good example for how “native policies” can be influenced at a local level (271) and used as an agent of empowerment. While I acknowledge the local capacity by Tibetans to assert agency within the colonial system to empower at a local level—debunking the assumption that the colonized are not active agents in their subjectivity—Gyalthang, and Tibet at large, is nonetheless colonized. I argue that efforts in Gyalthang that operate within the colonial policies should not be viewed as collaborating with the colonial authorities, but rather, as Bhabha notes, mimics (the refined and assimilated) who understand and use the limited roles given to them to empower and–or become a threat to the colonial authorities (the current Lhakar movement being a prime example).

In conclusion, my postcolonial critique of Hillman’s analysis on Gyalthang 1) emphasizes that it has not historically identified itself  as “China’s Tibet,” and 2) is reclaiming its indigenous space as Tibetan through its successful tourist economy. In addition, I hope my argument, with Gyalthang serving as my casestudy, highlights the importance of histories, History 2, that are often silenced by sweeping homogenizing generalizations by History 1, which contribute to constructed truths that oftentimes champion imperial and colonial interests. Gyalthang, in my grandfather’s memory, looks different from the present Shangri-La; however, Hillman’s partial portrayal of this present version of Gyalthang does not acknowledge the local experience of the tourist economy which, when examined at a closer range, diverges from the official Chinese narrative on Shangri-La and Tibet at large.

Bibliography:

2008. “Uprising in Tibet 2008: Documentation of protests in Tibet.” Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy. http://www.tchrd.org/report/topicalreport/uprising_tibet_2008.pdf

Bhabha, Homi. 1994 [1984]. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, pp. 85-92.

Foucault, Michel. 1994[1966]. “Introduction,” The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. New York: Vintage. Pp. 1-39.

Keane, Webb. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kolas, Ashild. 2010. “Tourism and the Making of Place in Shangri-La.” Tourism Geographies: An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment 6, no. 3 (05 Nov): 262-78.

Lhakar. Lhakar Movement. Web. 07 Nov. 2012. http://lhakar.org

McGranahan, Carole. 2010. Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War. Duke University Press.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Selections.

Steinmetz, George. 2007. The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Stoler, Ann. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura and Carole McGranahan.  2007.  “Introduction: Refiguring Imperial Terrain,” in Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue, eds., Imperial Formations, Santa Fe: SAR Press, pp. 3-47.

© 2012 Dlo08

For the past month, as the number of self-immolations climbed, my adviser and I sat down several times, trying to figure out activities we can do to highlight the situation better here at the University I’m currently studying at. Then last week, I saw the video campaign with messages to world leaders launched by SFT spreading in the web-sphere. My adviser, Carole McGranahan, called me and my friend, Ben, who is also doing his PhD related to Tibet, into her office to ask if we wanted to do our own videos for the campaign.

At first I was hesitant. I told her I had been thinking about it but was having second thoughts because I plan to go to Tibet at some point in the future and didn’t want to hurt my chances of getting my visa to go in. Carole was supportive but reminded me that there were individuals related to Tibet who have gone to Tibet and China despite having been related to high profile activist-related activities in their past.

Instantly I went, “Oh yeah!” and remembered Lhadon Tethong, Tashi Rabgey, and Elliot Sperling to name few highly known individuals within the Tibetan diaspora context who have gone to Tibet and China.

In 1998, Lhadon Tethong and Tashi Rabgey shared the stage to speak to thousands on Tibet at the Freedom Concert in DC.

Both Tethong and Rabgey have continued to be highly visible figures in the Tibetan diaspora context with their work, at different capacities, towards empowering Tibet at-large. Since their speeches at the Freedom Concert in 1998, both women have continued, in different but sometimes similar paths, their work and have travelled to China and Tibet.

Lhadon was not only able to secure a visa but was residing for a short period in China in 2007, writing and reporting daily about Tibet in the runner up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics on her blog Beijing Wide Open. Tashi Rabgey has continued to travel to Tibet and other places to continue her work that focuses on empowering communities, including our own. Both of these women have taken very different paths since 1998, however, both women have still stayed true to themselves and their shared goal to better the cause of Tibet, be it grassroots political movement or capacity building through community development on-or-for the Tibetan plateau.

A few years back, I had the pleasure of listening to Professor Elliot Sperling give an explosive and politically charged lecture on Tibet through skype while he was IN China. He was, at the time, visiting several Chinese universities giving lectures on Tibet.

After reminding myself again of these highly visible individuals in exile who have pushed the boundaries for what you can do for your community in their youth and continue to be challenge those boundaries in their adulthood, I wondered why I was hesitant in the first place—especially when I have yet to make any splashes that will have the Chinese take notice of me? Why start making compromises now and what else will I have to compromise later? I recorded this short video calling on President Obama shortly after reflecting over my own fear.

My initial reluctance for making this video was based on fear of the unknown. The idea of, “would I not get a visa to Tibet if I: made this video, attended this talk, went to this vigil, shouted in this protest, talked to this journalist, and so on?” The likelihood of you not getting the visa to Tibet because of A, B, C, and D are true but the same can be said for you not getting that visa for not doing anything and being completely silent. Sure, maybe you can reason to yourself that not taking part in something you feel passionate for may provide you with a better chance for getting the visa to Tibet, but that same assurance can be guaranteed by simply changing your name legally on your passport without ever having to give up anything you feel strongly about. The possibility and loopholes on how to get around that system is endless.

The increase in the number of self-immolations have been weighing down on my mind and I’ve been especially frustrated with the lack of coverage by international media but when it came time to give voice to the situation I instantly thought about hurting my chances of going to Tibet and possibility of becoming useful inside. We all want to go there someday, and some of us have plans on how we can be useful inside, however, why start compromising now when most of us have barely begun that journey?

This is not to make some of you feel guilt nor is it a plea for you to make a video. Your journey is your own, how you choose to speak is your own choice and should remain that way. However, saying “don’t be afraid, speak up!” is not to say that we should treat words lightly.

“It is never my custom to use words lightly. If twenty-seven years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die.”

– Nelson Mandela at the closing address of the 13th International Aids Conference in Durban, South Africa on July 14 2000.

Silences, like words, also have power but for different reasons, for those who hold themselves back from speaking: Don’t compromise who you are and your own voice for fear of the unknown.

© 2012 Dlo08

(FOR READERS: I’ve defined the following terminologies to smooth out the read:

Assumption: Representation.

Invisibility: Erasure: Silences.

Formation: as how things are formed

Discourse: narrative: discursive: polemics: writings: texts: as the mediums in which the conqueror, narrates the story of their conquest and the people they conquered, in the way they like to imagine themselves, to themselves.

Colonizer: Oppressor: Conqueror: Aggressor:  as the governance or group that is exerting power on another group.

The Orient: Colonized: Oppressed: Conquered:  as the group that the governance or more powerful group is exerting power on.)

What does an ethnographic discourse on the invisibility of a colonial empire in the 21^st century look like? What does that invisibility contribute to, or rather take away from, the experiences of Tibetans inside and outside Tibet? In this post, I examine the historical and contemporary discourses on Tibet that frame Tibet as either not colonized or about human rights, which, I argue, silences Tibetan aspirations for Nationhood. Aside from contextualizing Tibetan subjectivities, I contribute to the ongoing discourse on how ethnographic narratives can re-construct the invisibility of existing colonial empires and justify their presence as a given right rather then foreign.

Map of Tibet

 Fernando Coronil problematizes maps as having:

“often served as a medium for representing the world as well as for problematizing its representation. From Jorge Luis Borges’s many mind-twisting stories involving maps, I remember the images of a map, produced under imperial command, that replicates the empire it represents. […] In this exact double of the empire’s domain, each mountain, each castle, each person, each grain of sand finds its precise copy. The map itself is thus included in the representation of the empire, leading to an infinite series of maps within maps […] Thus, history makes the map no longer accurate, or perhaps turns it into a hyperreal representation that prefigures the empire’s dissolution” (1996:52).

As a young girl, I too ran into Coronil’s “infinite series of maps within maps.”

When I was six years old, I learned how to draw the map of Tibet. In order to memorize how to draw this, I was told by my older Tibetan friend, whom I called chocho (older brother), to remember that it looked like an upside down boot. Soon I had become very good at recognizing and drawing the map without any help. In fifth grade, some students and I were looking at a map of the world and we were pointing at where our parents or we were from. I remember searching for the upside down boot shaped Tibet on the map for several minutes and became distressed when I realized I could not locate Tibet. One of my friends asked me how Tibet was spelled; after I told her, we went over the map to search again. I found Tibet, however, it was placed in a larger map of China. The part of the map that had Tibet sectioned off did not look like the upside down boot I had memorized, and it looked significantly smaller than the map I remembered drawing. When I reached home that evening, I told my father the dilemma I had run into when trying to locate Tibet and how the Tibet I saw on the map was located inside China and how it did not look like the one I remembered drawing. I told him Amdo and Kham had disappeared, and only Lhasa was visible. My father saw my confusion and told me that Amdo and Kham were still there, that they were now on the map marked as part of Qinghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan. However, his explanation was not enough for me. It did not make sense to me that Tibet was put inside China and Amdo and Kham were now being called by Chinese names. This was the first time I realized that the land I called Tibet in its entirety, which included Amdo and Kham, was not recognized as such by the rest of the world. “But China invaded Tibet, why do they think Tibet is part of China?” My father did not know how to respond. He told me that the rest of the world understood Tibet to be part of China and that was something other Tibetans like himself, were trying to change. As I grew older, I came to realize that all Tibetans I came to know, including those from inside Tibet, had to face this question and contest it every time we introduced ourselves as Tibetan.

Map of China’s Tibet

In my adulthood, the question I had asked when I was ten has now become more important and pressing. The self-immolations in Tibet have now climbed in the 100s and most of them have taken place in Amdo, recognized as Qinghai by those in China. As foreign and Chinese journalists, pundits, academics, and scholars record, and, therefore, re-construct additional narratives on Tibet-China through the current situation in Tibet; it has become important to disturb (Foucault 1994[1966]:30) their assumption of Tibet as part of China.

In the following post, I take this assumption, this representation, seriously. Coronil states, “[u]nlike cartographers’ maps produced under imperial order, the representations I wish to examine are discursive, not graphic, and seem to be the product of invisible hands laboring independently according to standards of scholarly practice and common sense” (52). Using Coronil’s framework, I ask the following question: how did the contemporary ethnographic discourse on Tibet by non-Tibetans, specifically in the pro and anti China camps, come to assume Tibet as part of China? And how did this assumption exclude the recognition of Tibet and China as occupying a colonial relationship? This post will attempt to disturb this assumption within the postcolonial framework to locate how, when, and why, the popular discourse on Tibet has come to assume Tibet as part of China, and, therefore, not a colonized territory.

The Discursive Formation of Tibet in China’s Imagination:

Heeding Foucault’s advice, I hope to examine; who was producing this ethnographic discourse on Tibet, what types of works were they producing, how were they producing this work, and why were they producing this ethnographic discourse—what purpose was it serving?

China’s Propaganda painting depicting all the “ethnic minorities”

In a recent article in The New York Times by Xu Zhiyong, a Han Chinese lawyer and human rights advocate, Zhiyong ends his article on the self-immolations of Nangdrol and others like Namdrol, with some powerful last words:

“I am sorry we Han Chinese have been silent as Nangdrol and his fellow Tibetans are dying for freedom. We are victims ourselves, living in estrangement, infighting, hatred and destruction. We share this land. It’s our shared home, our shared responsibility, our shared dream — and it will be our shared deliverance” (Zhiyong 2012).

Although Zhiyong’s closing words seem to acknowledge the state-sponsored inequality and violence on Tibetans with his apology. However, with his use of the word “we” he misses the point that the immolators and other Tibetans he had met on his journey were trying to communicate when they told him “We are Tibetan.” Zhiyong’s “we” reminds me of Gregory’s section—who’s work contextualizes Said’s Orientalism in the US’s construction of the middle eastern-orient-Palestinian-Iraqi-Afghani-terrorists to justify and carry out its imperial projects in the middle-east—on the conflict between imagined narratives by the colonizer and the colonized played out in the colonized space-land: the Israeli’s saw themselves as fighting for the “right of homeland” as scripted in the Zionist imagination while the Palestinians saw themselves as fighting against Israeli “invaders” (2004:Ch5). Zhiyong’s use of the word “we” is employed empathetically to include Tibetans and Hans together as Chinese citizens against unequal state policies in order to “share this [Tibet] land,” this “shared home.” However, in this all-inclusive homogenized “we,” Zhiyong fails to understand that Tibetans, such as those who have immolated, do not want to be part of this “we” but want to be “Tibetan.” In fact, according to historian Tsering Shakya, “the notion of Tibet as an integral part of China is a recent invention by the Communist Party in its process of nation building” (2002). Self-immolators, such as, Ngawang Norphel on the 20^th of June this year shouted pro-Independence slogans for “freedom” that are in direct conflict with Zhiyong’s “we.” Zhiyong comes to interpret the “freedom” that the “Tibetans are dying for,” to mean freedom from unequal state policies that also affect him, as a Han. He does not, however, see that the “freedom” Tibetans want is beyond state policies, that Tibetans from the past (uprisings in 1959, during Cultural Revolution, late 80s to early 90s, 2008) and in the present have demanded from the Chinese State. That they do not want to be China’s citizens but instead, want to be Tibetan citizens of a historically sovereign Tibet. Zhiyong’s “we” assumes the Chinese State’s official narrative; that Tibet is part of China.

“ethnic minorities” performing infront of the Potala, Lhasa, Tibet

Zhiyong’s conflict in understanding Tibetan assertion of being “Tibetan” in contrast to his Chinese citizen “we,” and my conflict, as a ten year old, in not understanding why everyone, except for Tibetan, seemed to assume Tibet to be part of China, resonates with what Achille Mbembe’s called “Colonial Entanglement”in Dennison’s book Colonial Entanglement (2012). As described, “Achille Mbembe defines colonial entanglement as including ‘the coercion to which people are subjected,…a whole cluster of re-orderings of society, culture, and identity, and a series of recent changes in the way power is exercised and rationalized.” Pushing against what she sees as the ‘discrepancy between prescription and practice’ in many colonial histories, […] where even the most personal of moments are fraught with debates over political discourses” (7). But how did this conflict of understanding and/or confusion arise in the first place? In other words, how did Zhiyong, along with most of China’s population and the contemporary narrative on Tibet, come to envision Tibet as part of China? To disturb Zhiyong’s notion of Tibet as “our shared home,” I turn to interrogate the “effects of ethnographic discourse” on Tibet produced starting from the time of the Qing dynasty (Steinmetz 2007:xix).

Qing and Nationalist Empire:

When talking about the historical and political relationship between Tibet and China, most scholars on both pro and anti China sides of the spectrum point to the Qing dynasty (from 1905 to 1911) to historically frame the beginning of the political conflict between Lhasa and Qing administrations (Shakya 1999:xxii). According to historian Tsomu, Qing administration’s desire to control Lhasa’s administration, and, therefore, Tibet, was prompted by the impending threat of Western imperialism (2012:3). The Qing administration became increasingly insecure as its neighboring countries and kingdoms became colonies under various European empires. The threat of Western powers penetrating its own territories, according to Ho, prompted the Qing administration’s interest in incorporating Tibet and securing its “frontiers” (Ho 2008:210-46). This insecurity was furthered by the British invasion in 1904 (Tsomu 2012:3) and the rise of Nyarong Gonpo Namgyal’s power in Kham (19) (see Woeser for more on Nyarong Gonpo). According to Tsomu, in order to take “effective control over Lhasa” the Qing needed to first secure its dominance over the border province, Kham (4). Here we find the motive for why the Qing wanted to take control of Kham, and, therefore, Lhasa: insecurities about Western imperialism.

“Western-Imperialism” against China propaganda art-wrok

Although the Khampas opposed the Lhasa administration’s authority, they united under the 13^th Dalai Lama’s call to “defend Buddhism” against the Qing in 1912 (5). However, the Nationalist (also called Kuomintang) revolution that broke out across the Qing Empire ended Qing threat in Kham and, therefore, Lhasa, resulting in the 13^th Dalai Lama’s declaration of Tibet as an Independent nation (5). The threat of Han-domination, however, did not end with the Qing. After the Nationalist party came to power (from 1912 to 1949) following the fall of the Qing, the Nationalists took up where the Qing had left off with Kham. Along with military attempts to take control of Kham, the Nationalists implemented a textual strategy to incorporate Kham “into China’s national imagination and understood as a core territory of the new China” (5). According to Tsomu, “[d]uring this period, there was a new effort to translate works [on Tibet] by Western authors” while producing their own works to 1) write Kham and, therefore, Tibet into China’s national history, and therefore, Chinese imagination,  and 2) support claims of western imperial interest in Tibet, while simultaneously justifying their presence in Tibet (6). Here we find how the Nationalists planned to make Tibet part of China’s national and historical imagination: (re)production of ethnographic discourse on Tibet.

At that time, Ren Naiqiqiang, funded by government authorities (11), was one of the leading contributors to the construction of Chinese discourse on Kham (6). Ren’s work on Tibet, and others he influenced, reproduced the orientalist (Said 1978) framing of Khampas, and, therefore, Tibetans, as “primitive” and in need of “civilizing” from the translated works of early western writers on Tibet (Tsomu 2012:10-1). His discursive work on the Khampas placed them in China’s primitive past, as a civilization left behind in China’s primitive history, that needed the Nationalist State’s help to “modernize” Tibetans to bring them on par with the rest of China’s civilization (Trouillot 1991. Tsomu 2012:16). The purpose of the ethnographic discourse produced at the time in framing Tibetans as Chinese (through the construction of Tibetans in China’s historical past) helped to explain and justify the Nationalists presence in Tibet and the construction of Tibetans as “primitive” helped to justify the Nationalists projects in Tibet (for more on this topic, see Woeser’s “The Hero Propagated by Nationalists” and “The Xinhai Revolution And Tibet”).

Ren also surveyed and constructed his own “standard Map of Kham” to serve as part of the project of “incorporating the Kham regions into the Chinese national imagination” (15). These same maps were later used “as blueprints […] by the People’s Liberation Army [PLA] to advance [in]to Tibet” (15). The Peoples Republic of China (PRC, from 1949 to present) not only employed the same maps and ethnographic discourse on Tibet to justify their invasion-colonization, but also reproduced the same evolutionary ideological framing of Tibetans as primitives-savages in need of their modernizing-civilizing projects to justify PRC’s presence in Tibet. The ideological framing of the Tibetans that the PRC has inherited from the British-Qing-Nationalist-era (Stoler & McGranahan 2007:25) seems to have reproduced and solidified in how the PRC construct and continue to construct the socio-political-economic-cultural “native policies” on Tibetans.

Going through the historical genealogy of how the ethnographic discourse on Tibet was constructed—Qing, Nationalist, and PRC, drawing from earlier works by western Orientalists—helps to explain why the map I encountered in fifth grade placed Tibet inside China, and why Zhiyong imagines the Tibetans and Hans as “we,” and, therefore, Chinese.

This historical genealogy also reasserts Steinmetz’s emphasis that “the colonized were not the authors of their own native policy, even if they sometimes revised it or selectively reinforced certain parts of it,” instead; these policies were constructed and asserted by the colonial State (2007:xix). However, the contemporary discourse on Tibet (both pro and anti-Tibet) fails to frame Tibet in the continuing discourse in pre and post colonial framework, instead, it has become further fixed in the dichotomized discourse between humanitarianism or China’s right to rising national power placed against Western domination (Sautman 2003). (I define contemporary notions of humanitarianism as, a globalized-homogenized concept of human rights that blur and deny particularity to indigenous peoples of different background’s historical-political-individual experiences). This dichotomized discourse further discourages any discussion on Tibet’s political right to sovereignty, including individual agency to resist China’s policies (Yeh 2009), and ignores China’s colonial role in Tibet and its socio-economic-political empire aspirations in Asia, Africa, and South America (McGranahan 2007). So, what are the discursive formations that prevent Tibet from being placed in a colonial framework with China?

Tibet in Modern Discursive Imagination:

The other night, I was talking to a friend from outside my discipline. He asked me what I was working on, and I replied “something on colonialism.” Puzzled, he retorted, “but I thought colonialism was over a long time back.” When I questioned him further on what he meant, he pointed to how former European colonies were no longer under colonization. I point to this example because colonization is often generally assumed to be specific to Europe and, therefore, over (Stoler & McGranahan 2007). This is not an assumption that only my friend makes, but is normalized in the popular discourse, especially in the scholarship by the Left (Chomsky 2012). The problem with this reductive logic, however, is that it fails to acknowledge past existing forms of empires with colonies that were not exclusively European (i.e. Japanese, Chinese, Mongolian, African, Egyptian, etc.). This is also problematic because it centers the history of the world, even about empires, on Europe. In addition, this logic also ignores contemporary forms of colonialisms (i.e. Palestine, Tibet, East Turkestan, Hawaii, Kashmir etc.) and imperialisms (i.e. US-EU exerting power in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, to name a few, China’s ventures in Africa, Asia, and South America). However, it is important to historically contextualize how this assumption, in particular to Tibet, came to be.

In 1949, as the PRC began to advance from its borders into Kham, World War II had come to an end and the former colonies of European colonization outside of Tibet and China were experiencing decolonization (180). As a result, according to McGranahan, “[d]isavowal of imperial status” at that time was becoming “de rigueur” (176). Although imperial status was going out of style, it did not mean empires disappeared; they simply went “underground” (180). As McGranahan argues, contemporary forms of imperial projects simply changed their tune by condemning old forms of domination associated with European colonialism, while functioning anew under “national languages of defense, development, and global responsibility” (176). For the U.S., its domination during the Cold War functioned under political intervention through Cold War discourse to free other parts of the world through democratization (i.e. Parts of South America, Congo, Philippines, parts of the Caribbean islands) while claiming to champion anti-colonial efforts (186).

U.S. propaganda poster during Cold War

According to McGranahan, “[i]f [the era of] Decolonization discouraged colonialism as a specific form of imperialism, it ironically opened the world to other forms of similar domination” (175). During this time, the PRC was able to carry out colonial domination of Tibet while taking full advantage of the “moment of decolonization” (186). The PRC’s promotion of itself as anti-capitalist and anti-western imperialism during this era of decolonization was also useful in their efforts to keep other nations that Tibetan officials were lobbying (Shakya 1999:52,59,221) from directly intervening on behalf of Tibet (at the U.N. for example). In the present context, the PRC’s accusation of western interest in Tibet as motivated by the West’s aspiration to exert its imperial domination to keep a rising China down (Hillman 2009. Sautman 2012) is employed effectively enough to keep most of the popular discourse in the West from directly acknowledging Tibet as a colonized space. This is not to deny the West (in particular, the U.S.) as an imperial power in the present, but rather, to acknowledge that this narrative is used to move the focus away from Tibet’s colonization and its right to political sovereignty, to a narrative about western domination over China: It avoids talking about Tibet.

Anti-CNN protest by Chinese Nationalists during 2008

As previously argued, the PRC inherited its theoretical framing and narrative of itself as developing Tibet to modernize the Tibetans from their undeveloped-backwardness from its predecessors, the narrative, however, has now evolved to frame itself in the humanitarian discourse: one about helping the Tibetans develop, in order to modernize. Their discursive method has also advanced at home and abroad to include—along with additional types of texts—movies, images, music, plays, and cartoons to further embed Tibet-an in China’s historical imagination and narrative (Norbu 2010. Zeitchik & Landreth 2012). Still, how could China be colonial when it grants Tibetans citizenship, something that classical-European colonization denied its colonial subjects?

It is true that China allows all Tibetans the right to Chinese citizenship but “citizenship does not rule out colonization” (188). The citizenship that China offers may suggest political inclusivity for the Tibetans, Zhiyong’s “we,” it does, however, come with limited features (strict policies targeting Tibetan language and spiritual institutions) that does not acknowledge nor accommodate the Tibetan identity. The “characteristics of contemporary Chinese imperialism [in Tibet] include accumulation, territorial expansion, direct rule, military intervention, and the simultaneous cultivation of inclusive and exclusive categories of national belonging” (180).

Film poster for “Serf”. Produced by August First Studio in 1963. From Woeser’s article in High Peaks Pure Earth.

The denial of China as a colonial power in Tibet on both sides of the camp (pro and anti-China) directly and indirectly supports China’s narrative attempts to cover up its relationship to Tibet as colonial. The problem with these narratives, and the popular discourses that imitate its form, takes away, as argued by Yeh, the different individual experiences and agencies of Tibetans who are experiencing China’s colonization directly by those inside Tibet (2009) and indirectly by those who have escaped into exile, and-or facing transnational experience-displacement in host nations.

Conclusion:

In concluding, I have explored the historical and contemporary ethnographic genealogy of both pro and anti China narratives to show how they re-construct the invisibility of China’s visible colonization of Tibet and assist in justifying and hiding the physical colonization in Tibet. Not recognizing China’s on going physical colonization in Tibet, as argued, is part of the reason why the conversations on Tibet gets (sometimes strategically) locked into a narrative about China’s right to National growth by pro-China narrators or Tibetan’s right to human rights by pro-Tibet narrators, rather then a narrative that includes Tibet’s right to sovereignty. Both sides of the conversation directly and indirectly help to cover-up the existing realities of what colonization has done and continue to do in Tibet. It is part of the reason why Tibet, according to the world map, no longer exists. Though the subjectivities of Tibetans inside and outside are different, my own personal narrative as a Tibetan exile reflects this erasure, this silence, on Tibet’s colonization. This erasure affects all Tibetans regardless of background.

This invisibility also leads to the confusion that prompted George W. Bush to ask “Why do they hate us?” out loud after September 11^th(Gregory 2007:20), or Zhiyong to ask “do you [Tibetans] hate the Hans?” to the Tibetans he met inside, or the Israeli to ask “Why do Palestinians hate us?” after another bombing in Israel. Further, I have attempted to show the discursive formation of how the colonizer subdues and narrates the story of its conquest to itself and others, through the employment of, what Said described as, “the Orient [in this case, Tibetans] needed first to be known, then invaded and possessed, then re-created by scholars, soldiers, and judges who disinterred forgotten languages, histories, races and cultures in order to posit them—beyond the modern Oriental’s ken—as the true classical Orient that could be used to judge and rule the modern Orient” (92). In problematizing the discourse regarding China’s relationship with Tibet as colonial, I hope my work has further revealed the reality of Tibet as that of a colonized space. In addition, I hope my work contributes to the ongoing intellectual discussion on the different ways in which contemporary forms of imperial and colonial formations are justified and allowed to exist. My work is also an appeal for Tibetans to continue asserting and contextualizing Tibet as a colonized territory in any mediums thinkable because saying it repeatedly makes this truth come to life.

Works Cites:

Chomsky. 2008. Interview by ZNET Sustainer. Chomsky on Tibet Vis-a-vis Palestine.. PRAGOTI. ”ZNET Blogs.” 25 Mar. 2008. Web. 15 Dec. 2012. <http://www.pragoti.in/node/681&gt;.

Coronil, Fernando. 1996.  “Towards Post-Imperial Geohistoric Categories,” Cultural Anthropology 11(1): 51-87.

Ho, Dahpon David. 2008. “The men who would not be amban and the one who would: four frontline officials and Qing Tibet policy, 1905-1911.” Modern China 34, 2 (Apr.):210-45. 1905-1911

Dennison, Jean. 2012. Colonial Entanglement: Constituting a Twenty-First Century Osage Nation. University of North Carolina Press.

Hillman, Ben. 2009. “50 Years On, What Do We Know about Tibet?” East Asia Forum. The East Asian Bureau of Economic Research (EABER) and the South Asian Bureau of Economic Research (SABER)., 16 Mar. 2009. Web. 15 Dec. 2012. <http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2009/03/16/50-years-on-what-do-we-know-about-tibet/&gt;.

Foucault, Michel. 1994[1966]. “Introduction,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. New York: Vintage. Pp. 1-39.

Gregory, Derek. 2004. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony, in Colonial Entanglement: Constituting a Twenty-First Century Osage Nation: 66.

McGranahan, Carole. 2007. “Empire Out-of-Bounds: Tibet in the Era of Decolonization,” in Imperial Formations, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 187-227.

Norbu, Jamyang. 2010. “THE HAPPY LIGHT BIOSCOPE THEATRE & Other Stories (part I).” Shadow Tibet. Shadow Tibet, 10 Feb. 2010. Web. 15 Dec. 2012. <http://www.jamyangnorbu.com/blog/2010/02/10/the-happy-light-bioscope-theatre-other-stories-part-i/&gt;.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Selections.

Shakya, Tsering. 1999. The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A history of modern Tibet since 1947. Columbia University Press.

Shakya, Tsering. 2002. “Blood in the Snows.” New Left Review. New Left Review, May-June 2002. Web. 15 Dec. 2012. <http://newleftreview.org/II/15/tsering-shakya-blood-in-the-snows&gt;.

Sautman, Barry. 2012. “Tibet’s suicidal politics.” East Asia Forum. The East Asian Bureau of Economic Research (EABER) and the South Asian Bureau of Economic Research (SABER). 21 Mar. 2012. Web. 15 Dec. 2012. < http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2012/03/21/tibet-s-suicidal-politics/&gt;

Sautman, Barry. 2003. “Cultural genocide and Tibet.” Tex. Int’l LJ, 38, 173.

Steinmetz, George. 2007. Devil’s Handwriting : Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura, and Carole McGranahan. 2007. “Introduction: Refiguring Imperial Terrains.” in Imperial Formations: 3-42.

Triouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness,” in Richard G. Fox, Recapturing Anthropology. Santa Fe: SAR Press, pp. 17-44.

Tsomu, Yudru. 2012. “Taming the Khampas: The Republican Construction of Eastern Tibet.” Modern China.

Yeh, E. T. 2009. “Tibet and the problem of radical reductionism.” Antipode, 41(5), 983-1010.

Zeitchik, Steven, and Jonathan Landreth. 2012. “Hollywood Gripped by Pressure System from China.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 12 June 2012. Web. 15 Dec. 2012. <http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-et-china-censorship-20120612,0,7403326.story&gt;.

Zhiyong, Xu. 2012. “Tibet Is Burning.” New York Times. New York Times, 12 Dec. 2012. Web. 15 Dec. 2012. <https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/opinion/tibet-is-burning.html?_r=1&&gt;.

I really enjoyed reading Clare Harris’s The Museum on the Roof of the World  (2012). On finishing the first half of the book, which went into detailed analysis on the political life of archival documentation, specifically images of Tibet-ans, I immediately found myself wishing I had read this book to supplement what I was missing in my last post on Lhakar Diaries, “The Art of (China’s) Colonialism: Constructing Invisibilities in (Tibetan) History and Geography”: the role of the British in constructing the Orientalized Tibetan other.

British invasion of Tibet under the command of Younghusand.

Harris brings back to life documents and images from a range of colonial archives, and includes accounts and fictions published by British officers, ethnographers, soldiers and Asia-Tibet enthusiasts of that time to piece together how the myth of the exotic Tibet-an came into existence in the West. Her analysis is based on exploring the discursive formation of how the West came to imagine Tibet and its inhabitants. She describe how representations of Tibet in these works were being informed and produced by the ideologies of that time —placing different societies in racial evolutionary scales with the West serving as the most advanced. As Harris points out, this framing placed Tibet in a desirable exotic light; as a society capable of having their own civilization and worthy of western attention. A society that was, importantly, displayed through the desire to accumulate Tibetan “artifacts.” This aspect of her argument articulates Steinmetz’s emphasis on “symbolic capital” (capital in status, not material, form) (2007). According to him, one of the ways colonial officials without hereditary status (the non aristocracy) back in imperial Germany were able to attain status through the accumulation of symbolic capital by fashioning themselves off as experts with access to native knowledges and who demonstrated this expertise through possession of native materials that they seized from regions they invaded and occupied.

As explored by Harris, colonial British officials on the Younghusband mission in Tibet were able to sell artifacts they stole during the invasion of Tibet on their return to Britain. Some of these objects can now be viewed in different museums across the west that belong to the private collections of the families of those officials or private collectors. Those who worked as private ethnographers for the British administration were able to make careers off their oftentimes-uninformed “expertise” gleaned from their interactions with Tibetans during the invasion of Tibet.

One of the most abused picture of Tibetan nun’s to this day, wearing wigs to keep their heads warm, taken by John Claude White from the Younghusband mission.

Harris does a superb job at showing how the images, descriptions, and artifacts of and about Tibet-ans did the intended work of informing the British public of how to view the Tibetans. She also does not hide the fact that these representations of Tibet also served to make Tibet a desirable space for potential British colonization. This dream was however, interrupted by India’s independence and gave way for the Chinese to intervene in Tibet.

Although I cannot say enough on how historically robust and well thought out Harris’s first half of the book is, I was not as satisfied with the second half of her book on “Contemporary Tibetan Art.” She does a wonderful job explaining how contemporary Tibetan art came to be: in Lhasa. That it emerged as a way to subvert Chinese authoritarian gaze on Tibetan art-ists. Despite superb details on the art, artists, and the messages embedded within these art works, and even with the additional information about the times in which these works were produced, I was not satisfied with the lack of focus on such artworks’ audience.

Gonkar Gyatso’s “My Identity.” One of the most well known Tibetan contemporary artist.

Unlike the first section of her book, she does not go into who the intended and possible unintended audience for these works were. While she loosely mentions the western collectors who seem to be interested in these works for similar reasons earlier collectors were intrigued, other than mentioning the added excitement over assumed exotic natives capable of producing “modern” works of art, I saw very little discussion on a Chinese audience, and close to nothing on a Tibetan audience. I do, however, acknowledge the difficulty of such a task, it may even require a completely different project to look into those audiences.

While reading about the different artists (all based in or from Lhasa) and their work, I found myself asking; for whom are these works intended? Who is the artist producing these works for? Almost all of the artists Harris mentioned in her book produce work intended for an audience through exhibitions, showings, and installations. I am interesting in knowing whether these contemporary Tibetan artists produced specific works with an intended audiences in mind during the time of its construction. I would also be interested in who the unintended audiences were and why.

Jamsang’s Buddha series.

Though Harris tells us that some of the works by artists she explored hint at how some of the artists identify with not one specific identity: Tibetan or Chinese, but a possible global identity, she also points to the particularity with which these artists use iconic Tibetan symbols, especially Buddhist imagery in their works. I personally see tension between this particularity and the “global” identity, this assumed global citizenry or humanity. Through an exploration of the possible audiences, the section on Contemporary Tibetan Art could have been more powerful in describing how representations of Tibetan-ness or global-ness has manifested in the intended and unintended audiences of these works.

Works Cited:

Harris, C. E. 2012. The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet. University of Chicago Press.

Steinmetz, George. 2007. Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press.

[The following post is a section in Ch. 2 ‘There Is a Tension in Our Hearts’ from the book “Echoes from Dharamsala” by Keila Diehl (2002, p57-62). Dr. Diehl has given permission for Lhakar Diaries to make this section of the book available to our readers.

It’s been a while since my last post so I’m here with a treat for my readers. I’ve been reading “Echoes from Dharamsala” again while I’m conducting my own research here in Dharamsala, both for information and inspiration. While reading Ch. 2, I came across the section on Chang ma Ama la’s in Dharamsala during the mid 90s and found the read fascinating both in its details and given the fact that I have hardly ever had much of a clue about all the going-on that have taken place at all the Tibetan weddings I have attended thus far in the Tibetan diaspora. It captures in one incident (a Tibetan wedding) the feel of how we celebrate current circumstances yet also remind ourselves of being away from home in the most intimate of spaces. Through the tradition of chang-mas with revamped songs (to suit exile livelihoods in the 90s) and their lyrics, between the game of drinking and dancing, there’s also the sorrow of not being at home which are captured in these playful drinking songs. I hope that you the readers enjoy it as much as I did and find meanings that I didn’t based on your own Tibetan wedding experiences.]

A polished white Ambassador sedan pulls up in front of one of the Indian tourist hotels in McLeod Ganj, and a young bride and groom step out of the car. Relatives help straighten their bright clothes and readjust their furlined brocade hats, while the British travelers having tea on the front lawn crane their necks around leggy rosebushes to see what is happening. The wedding guests are all inside the hotel’s dining room listening to a new cassette of Tibetan rock songs and chatting over sweet tea as they wait for the ceremony to begin at 1 :30 P .M ., the auspicious time recommended by the astrologer. Outside the Hotel Bhagsu, an enterprise run by the tourism department of Himachal Pradesh, the couple is greeted by a line of older Tibetan women carrying elaborate silver vessels filled with chang  (Tibetan barley beer) and rimmed with great smears of butter. As the empty taxi pulls away, the women burst into a full-throated song of welcome for the shy bride:

We have called forth the serpent goddess

From this place, the Norbu Ling.

We offer happiness to her.

Today, into this dwelling,

We bring good luck and blessings.

 This is followed by a song to greet and bless the groom’s parents:

Welcome! Welcome!

The lords have gathered together.

We offer them happiness!

Today, come into this dwelling

And dance to lively songs!

Women who sing such blessing songs and offer barley beer to the wedding party, the guests, and the gods during Tibetan marriages are widely known colloquially as chang ma . Such women played an important role in weddings in central Tibet before 1959 , but it wasn’t until the early 1980 s that Dharamsala weddings began to incorporate these well-loved traditions. During the 1960 s and 1970 s, most young couples in Dharamsala and elsewhere in the new Tibetan diaspora had simple wedding ceremonies and celebrations, if any at all, mainly because of financial constraints and the fact that families were often scattered across several countries. Since Tibetan weddings are not legal or religious affairs, a small gathering of friends with good food, tea, a little chang  just to be auspicious, and some khata  (ceremonial offering scarves) sufficed to made the arrangement “official.”

The combination of greater financial security and, more important, a strong desire on the part of some older Tibetans to resurrect a cultural activity nearly lost in exile motivated several families to undertake the research and work necessary to sponsor more elaborate and traditional weddings for their children. Gradually, the practice caught on, and today the chang ma  are seen and heard at most public wedding celebrations in Dharamsala and, increasingly (though to a far lesser extent), elsewhere throughout the Tibetan diaspora. There are now two groups of chang ma in Dharamsala: an older group of a dozen women in their sixties and seventies and a smaller group in their forties and fifties.

Ama Tsering Palmo, considered the local expert female folk singer and dancer and now the leader and teacher of Dharamsala’s chang ma,  recalls the first time she was asked to sing at a local wedding, in 1982 . She gathered together some friends she knew were particularly fond of singing and dancing, and they pooled their memories of weddings in Tibet to come up with an appropriate repertoire. None of the women, most of whom are from the Tingri region of Töd in south-central Tibet, had ever sung in any formal capacity at a wedding before, but they had often gathered to perform khor shay  (circle song-dances) during community festivals and religious events, as they still do.

Ama Palmo had casually met Ama Dekyi and Ama Ming Chung in the early 1960 s at Shar Kumbu, a camp set up for Tibetan refugees in Nepal. Ama Lobsang Dolkar, Ama Kyipa, Ama Tsering Tsomo, Ama Tsamchö Dolma, and some of the other modern-day chang ma spent extended time at Shar Khumbu as well. All the women had fled from Tibet with their families, acting on warnings that Chinese soldiers were coming, and were working as day laborers, petty traders, or wool spinners in difficult conditions in Nepal until, one by one, they decided to move to India to receive blessings from the Dalai Lama and to enroll their children in the new Tibetan-run boarding schools.

Eventually, they all made their way to Dharamsala and settled into lives generally patterned around seasonal work: first on road and building crews in northern India and later selling sweaters on the plains. In the early years, the women recall that there was “nothing” in McLeod Ganj. They camped under a big tree near His Holiness’s old palace (now the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute) or on the veranda of the Civil Dispensary (now surrounded by cafés, shops, and guest houses). Some carried stones to be used in the construction of the Dalai Lama’s new palace, which was completed in 1970 . Others joined road crews with their husbands in the mountainous areas of Manali and Lahul-Spiti.

Ama Palmo, Ama Kyipa, and Ama Phurbu worked on the same road crew, earning about two rupees a day (or up to four rupees in Manali, where the conditions were particularly harsh), which was just barely enough to buy rice, oil, tea, and other essentials. They recall that although the working conditions were difficult, the workers were provided with good tents for their families and complete medical care from Red Cross doctors. Many of the Tibetan laborers were not happy in those days, having just left their homes and finding themselves in a strange place with an unfamiliar climate, language, and diet, so they worked hard in part to occupy their minds and to cover up their grief. However, there was not, I was told, the kind of despair one hears about and senses today among Tibetan refugees in India, because all the workers thought they would return to Tibet within a year or two.

Perhaps because of this general optimism despite immediate hardship, the chang ma remember their years working as laborers as nawa kyipo (happy-go-lucky) and semgu yangpo  (carefree), as a time when they were healthy and young, despite the hard work breaking and hauling rocks eight hours a day, six days a week. They used to compete to see who could toss a shovelful of rocks the highest and to sing songs to pass the time and keep up the rhythm of their work:

In this earth in the shovel

There are various flowers of every kind.

Flowers, the thoughts of youth

Have been distracted by you

Where is our fatherland?

Please explain our lineage.

Without our country,

I hesitate to tell you our lineage.

A pleasant homeland brings happiness.

The country of another is determined by our fate.

If the right hand is tired,

Please join with the left hand.

If the left and right hands are both tired,

Partner, please join me.

The good humor and resilience of these women live on. The chang ma are perhaps most enjoyed and respected by Tibetans living in Dharamsala for their ability to take the legendary aggressive hospitality of their society to burlesque extremes. After the formal wedding ceremony has been completed and the guests have divided into small groups to play bak (mah- jongg), sho  (dice), dominos, or card games, the chang ma  fill up their pitchers with freshly made chang  and methodically move from table to table, zeroing in on one guest at a time. Each person is handed an overflowing glass of liquor as the women begin to sing one of the many well-known Tibetan chang shay  (beer songs). Only the most experienced wedding guests know exactly how to pace their drinking so the empty glass is slammed down on the table just when the song concludes with “cheek, nyee, sum! ” (“one, two, three!”) or the standard “Gakyi dzompay kyi dzom! ” (“Let us all be happy together!”). If the guest drains the glass too quickly or too slowly, it is immediately refilled, and the song resumes. If the guest leaves even two drops in the bottom of the glass, his or her tormentors hoot with delight: “O! Khyerang kom dook! ” (“Oh! You are thirsty!”)—and splash another helping out of their bottomless vessels as they sing:

Those seated at the head of the three rows on the right side!

Our root lama is more valuable than one hundred ounces of gold.

The one who liberates us from death is more valuable than one hundred

ounces of gold.

I accept all that is said to be happy.

I put aside all that is said to be bad.

Please stay with good thoughts at this happy gathering.

Those seated at the head of the three rows on the left side!

Our head leader is more valuable than one hundred ounces of silver.

The one who conquers the three realms is more valuable than one hundred

ounces of silver.

I accept all that is said to be happy.

I put aside all that is said to be bad.

And there is no point in protesting. Reluctant drinkers are mercilessly teased and, eventually, given nyepa  (punishments). Rolling her eyes in dramatic exasperation, one chang ma will surely eventually unpin the brooch from her chuba and start pricking the troublemaker menacingly, while her cohorts cajole:

Now, if you don’t drink this, she’s going to really prick you! You can’t

get angry. Getting angry is never allowed. This needle is not very thick;

it’s quite a thin one. It won’t wound you. It’s no problem at all.

If this incentive isn’t enough, some chang  is poured on the stubborn guest’s head until . . . “Da garab tung tsar shag! ” (“Ah, now he’s finished drinking quite a lot!”). Teetotalers are not exempted either, although many try to be. These guests are offered bowls of scalding tea, which must be downed before the  lump of butter at the bottom melts. “Shab ta!”  (roughly, “Bottoms up!”), the women command. Even chang ma  who take a seat to visit with friends or simply rest for a moment soon find themselves at the receiving end of their colleagues’ jests.

When the chang ma  are satisfied that all the guests have been individually welcomed (it is said that a really accomplished chang ma  should be able to sing a different song to each and every guest), they put down their vessels and settle in for a few more hours of singing and dancing in the round, often accompanied by a man playing the dranyen  (six-stringed Tibetan lute) in the middle of their circle. Their pangden  (the colorful striped aprons worn by married women) of different lengths and brightnesses create

a dazzling effect as the dancers move in synchrony. At this point any distinction between the roles of hostesses and guests, performers and participants, is completely blurred, as others join in the dance. The chang ma of Dharamsala are basically, one realizes, a group of dear old friends who feel sem kyipo  (happy) when they sing and dance. “We sing to please the wedding guests and ourselves and to preserve Tibetan culture,” Ama Lobsang Dolkar says. She hopes the tradition will continue now that it has been revived but isn’t entirely confident that it will. She senses that many young people do not like the “old Tibetan style.”

On the afternoon of the second day of the marriage festivities in the McLeod Ganj hotel, the circle dancing eventually subsides, and the chang ma  are formally invited to sit down in folding chairs placed in the center of the room. The groom’s relatives offer the women chang, which each one flicks into the air three times, and then hand them each envelopes containing an unfixed sum of rupees offered in thanks. The chairs and tables are pushed out of the way to clear the floor, some lights are dimmed and others start to flash, and the “Western dancing” begins. The chang ma  settle down with the other guests to have a hard-earned drink, tap their feet, and enjoy the younger generation’s antics. But underneath the teasing and the pleasure of celebration there is always, as Ama Lobsang Dolkar notes, a “tension in our hearts.”

I met Dhardon la briefly in Dharamsala during the 2008 Uprisings in Tibet. She was part of the Tibetan Women’s Association (TWA). At the time, things were so hectic and busy that I didn’t have much of a chance to get to know her well. In 2010, during the Kalon Tripa elections, I attended an event where supporters of each candidate were able to debate one another on the merits of their chosen candidate. Dhardon la was speaking in favor of T.N. Tethong. Previous to this engagement, I had never heard her speak, so this was my first time hearing her.

That day, I was standing in the very back with some friends in a packed room. When I scanned the room, I noticed that the majority of the audience there were men and it seemed like it was going to be a tough crowd. Each speaker entered the room and I noticed Dhardon la in a modest chuba right away as someone I recognized from TWA. She was also the only woman on the panel. After each speaker presented their case for their candidate, the Q&A session with the audience began. It seemed that most of the questions that evening were being shot her way to challenge her position. In between all the whooping and hollering by certain male audience members that were trying to distract and intimidate her, she calmly and nonchalantly shot back articulate answers and even had the time to respectfully point out the inappropriateness of some of the male audience members. I was simply amazed at how she handled the crowd of mostly men and herself. Initially I had become nervous with the way some male audience were reacting to her but by the end of the debate, most of the audience members were so impressed, including myself, that my nervousness was replaced with a sense of pride at seeing how a young Tibetan woman handled herself with grace and strength, with a tough crowd of mostly men. It was a proud moment for me as a young Tibetan woman. I felt that though she may not have persuaded audiences that had already made up their mind about their own candidate; listening to the crowd outside after the event, I noticed that she had definitely made a strong positive impression on everyone there that evening.

When some members of the Lhakar Diaries family contacted me to see if I could do an interview with her, I was more than excited since I had been thinking about it for some time-it also helped that I am currently in Dharamsala. When I contacted Dhardon la, she was more than accommodating. She took some time off her busy schedule and we did a quick interview over some tea.

Could you briefly tell me about yourself and how you became actively involved in exile Tibetan politics?

I was born and raised at TCV schools (Tibetan Children’s Village). My roots, parents, the community in which I was raised was all part of how I became involved politically.

I was a political person from childhood. The TCV schools in which I was brought up instilled patriotism in children. Just look at the school mottos “others before self” and its guiding principle, “come to learn. Go to serve.” My upbringing was connected to serving the Tibetan political struggle.

I was also active during my college days in Madras, we would give up on our grades sometimes to work on political campaigns.

During my MA final year, I stood a very good chance to receive the gold medal that is given to students who scored highest in all the semesters; however, my last semester coincided with His Holiness’s visit to Bylakupee.  At the time I was also part of TSAM (Tibetan students Association of Madras) and we needed to use this opportunity to raise funds for the organization. Since I was a cabinet member, I choose to focus my attention on TSAM instead of my last semester, this caused me to miss out on the internal assessment exams that could have put me in the position to receive the gold medal. Incidents such as this caused others and me to miss out on other opportunities that came our way.

In Dharamsala, while I was preparing to pursue a PhD, I met Dr. B. Tsering, the then President of TWA (Tibetan Women’s Association). She expressed that she needed someone to fill in a position at the research desk for TWA. I saw it as an opportunity to have a hands-on involvement for the Tibet cause. In the summer of 2005 I joined TWA for a year; my plans to pursue a PhD were shelved. However, later I received an opportunity from the Department of Education, CTA to study at the University of Edinburgh for a MSC in Counseling Research Studies. During my time in Edinburgh it was very lonely, I became homesick because I missed the political and social life of the Tibetan community-India, which I had become accustomed to over the years.

On my return, I rejoined TWA, even though CTA was pulling me to head the media section of the DIIR. Maybe this was part of my destiny; everyone I loved was against me joining TWA for practical reasons but I didn’t care too much for the low pay or facility and decided to go against their wishes and joined. My commitment to TWA was two years, during which I began the application process to pursue a PhD in the States but all that changed when the 2008 uprising in Tibet happened. The 2008 Uprisings in Tibet was a turning point for me.

When the first news of the 2008 protests in Tibet broke, I was one of the first persons to cover it, I helped two monks translate a press release about the March 10 protest in Lhasa led by monks from Sera, Ganden and Drepung. Watching and working while the Uprisings took place, hearing first accounts of all that was happening inside, I felt like I was witnessing it up close. It was the first time I strongly felt connected with Tibetans inside, not just spiritually and psychologically, I felt I was there experiencing it with them on the grounds. I decided then and there that this was going to become my priority in life, not family or personal gratification.

That’s why in 2010 when it was time for me to shift my path to a PhD, my mind was not into it. Instead, I wanted to stay and continue my work here in Dharamsala, India. During this time, I was voted by the General Body of TWA to become an executive member of the TWA. However, my plans for a PhD took a back seat, because I was enjoying my work.

When and how did you make the decision to become the youngest parliamentarian at the CTA?

In 2010, TWA ran a mock-election campaign to encourage Tibetans in the community to become actively involved in the Kalon Tripa elections race. After the campaign finished, I decided to become involved as an independent campaigner for the candidate T.N. Tethong. I had no plans or even interest in running for any part of the government. During this time, Youth for Better Democracy (YFBD) was giving out profiles on young Tibetan professionals who they thought would make good candidates for the parliament. My name was on this list. When the elections committee released the results for the preliminary elections, my name was among the 20 people that had been voted. At the time I didn’t think much of it but soon after I was contacted by the local elections committee before the final results for parliament was to be made public, they told me I had been voted 3^rd highest in the elections. I was surprised, shocked, and ecstatic but I also became anxious and nervous. I had never really considered that genre of work professionally but after the election results I felt I was being drawn to it. It was a confusing time but there was no way I could withdraw. I gave in and decided to join.

As you are aware, there are more men than women in the CTA parliament. How does it feel to be the youngest woman parliamentarian?

I am sensing an added responsibility as I represent two very potential groups in our movement-youth and women. Therefore, with a sense of pride there is an overwhelming sense of responsibility, of being accountable to the expectations people have of young women and also to be able to lay the ground for youth and women to gain foothold into political leadership.

I am aware that being a parliamentarian requires a lot of work but what would you consider the difficulties and rewards of being a parliamentarian?

After being voted to become a parliamentarian, the first thing I had to do was to be sworn in. It was overwhelming taking that real oath because I’m taking an oath to serve the Tibetan people inside and outside Tibet, it was not a joke. It was especially scary when I had to take the oath to conduct all my actions as a parliamentarian “with fairness and integrity” because you can’t measure it, its not tangible. It all felt overwhelming; taking this oath, at the parliament, in front of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s portrait. I felt too young and unprepared to be taking on such big responsibilities and to be swearing an oath to “serve.”

Unlike the other parliamentarians of sovereign nations where they have the security of having power with responsibility, the Tibetan parliament does not enjoy the same level of power that enables this parliament to serve its responsibilities to the Tibetan people. But I also want to point out that for the Tibetan parliamentarians, we have much more responsibilities to the Tibetan people than governments that do not have to deal with the reality of being pitted against a country like China.

Being part of an exile government, I think we are doing something called transnational governance, we are based here in India, but also governing a diaspora community spread across the world. With so much responsibilities to those inside Tibet as well, we as parliamentarians have limited resources. However, despite all the difficulties and the lack of resources, I am always amazed by how our work always falls in place with so much effort that goes beyond our sense of responsibility and understanding. It is incredible to watch the amount of work, effort, and external factors put in by everyone to finish a project. There are a lot of provisions but it all falls in place because we push ourselves. Despite the fate of the game not being certain, we push ourselves and move forward to continue this work. I find that amazing.

Just last month we wrapped up the All-India Parliamentary Lobby Campaign in Eastern and North Eastern parts of India. Some of the State leaders assumed we represent the tribal groups of their respective constituencies and upon briefing them about the situation inside Tibet, they were taken aback by all the progress we have made in exile and commented that they laud our commitment and conviction to forge ahead despite all odds.

What advice would you give to other young Tibetans, in particular women, who hope to pursue a similar path?

I may sound bias, but since joining the parliament I’ve observed that women tend to be more focused and clear.

I am conscious of the fact that if people like me do well that it is opening up more opportunities for women in general and for young women to participate. At first, I wasn’t necessarily attracted or interested in becoming a parliamentarian but after doing this for few years as a young Tibetan woman, I feel that maybe other young Tibetan women may find this avenue more approachable and appealing. They can connect to the fact that I am also a young Tibetan woman; this is what I hope at the least. I am aware that I’m not just a parliamentarian, I know I have the added responsibility of letting young women in the Tibetan communities know that they too can take an active part in the Tibetan political life.

What are some of your plans for the future?

I don’t think the Tibet movement is just about protests and reacting to Chinese Government and their policies. There’s a lot more to it. The Tibet movement has more scope for intellectual discussions. For example, Tibet can be approached from the global diplomacy point of view. But I feel the general discourse on the Tibet movement overlooks this possibility.

I want to pursue a PhD alongside my work as a parliamentarian and as the Co-Chair of the Steering Committee of International Tibet Network. My tougher uphill task is my plans for further studies that will contribute to showing the intellectual sides of the Tibetans and the Tibetan movement. I hope to do a scholarly research in the field of Communications that paints a more realistic, boarder and more complex picture of the Tibet movement that isn’t just about the frustrations or the hopelessness but about resilience and fortitude and its potential as an academic area of interests, considering what it could offer to today’s world both in spirit and in intellect.

Last week I participated in student conference called “The Fantastic and the Banal” hosted by the anthropology Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. The conference’s call for paper listed the following:

“Bureaucracy is mundane and absurd, blasé and infuriating, orderly and convoluted. Weber recognized the paradoxical qualities of bureaucracy, heralding it as the hallmark of modern social organization – one that promises routinization, standardization, and rationality, but also delivers tedium and disenchantment. Bureaucracy is clarity-meets-opacity par excellence with a dash of the superfluous, the ridiculous, and the impossibly kind thrown in as well. In this conference, we aim to rethink bureaucracy by attending to its iterations and contradictions, from the banal to the fantastic. We contend that bureaucratic authority is crucial for understanding contemporary issues across the humanities and social sciences, including, but not limited to, various forms of governmentality; humanitarianism; development projects and neoliberal reforms; issues of sovereignty, citizenship and human rights; affect; social movements; and the movements of peoples and goods across and within borders. In highlighting the breadth of social scientific research and theorizing on bureaucracy, we welcome papers from all disciplines on topics speaking to our theme.”

I presented the following for the conference and I’m sharing the edited version for the blog here. I hope some readers will share their thoughts, questions or opinions in the comment section:

Non-Refugee Refugees: Tibetans’ Struggles for Visibility in Bureaucratic India

The struggle for visibility (documents) has always played a central role for Tibetans living in exile, especially for those living in India and Nepal. In this post, I look into this struggle that Tibetans in India face as newly arrived Tibetans from Tibet (second half) and Tibetans born and raised there (first half). During my stays in Dharamsala, India, I came across several different socio-cultural-political-economic phenomenons that have been emerging as a result of the lack of visibility for Tibetans living as, what I refer to as non-refugee refugees, in bureaucratic India. In the following, I take a closer look at one of these emerging intercultural phenomenon currently shaping the possibility of existing on paper for Tibetans especially from Tibet that bureaucratic India has yet to offer.

The other day, while I was roaming through updates on my Facebook newsfeed, I came across a Facebook status discussion that a few of my Tibetan friends were taking part in. The topic centered on the difficulties of living in exile, specifically India, as “refugees”. Tenzin’s status (name changed) shared that he had recently walked away from a possible job offer in the banking sector in Delhi. According to him, he had “cleared all the [different] levels of interview as well as the aptitude tests” and was asked “at the end [of the interview]” to show them his identification proof in order for them to officially accept Tenzin as an employee. On showing his Residential Certificate (RC), he explains, they became confused and asked for another form of identification that looked more official. He explained his status as an “exile Tibetan”, that the Indian government issued the Tibetan exiles an RC. The company personnel’s discussed the issue among themselves and told him they could not offer him the job without another official identification document that they could identify and approve. He explains he “remained helpless” and proceeded to tell them that “this [was] everything [he] had,” and finally asked them for his RC back and left.

I highlight this story because this brings up an important contemporary issue for Tibetans living as refugees in India: the conflict of not having proper documents that get in the way of Tibetans living as refugees in India from doing the simplest of activities—such as; getting a job, entering school, or traveling—that average citizens with documents may take for granted.

After the invasion and occupation of Tibet by China in 1959, many Tibetans fled to India. The first wave of Tibetans that escaped from 1959 to the 1970s were recognized as refugees and granted asylum by the Indian government. The Indian authorities issued each Tibetan an RC—a legal document that allows Tibetans to legally live and travel within the country, serves as an identity document, and is a pre-requisite for the Identity Certificate (IC), a necessary document for international travel. However, in an attempt to build Sino-Indian diplomatic relations, the Indian government stopped legally recognizing Tibetans as refugees in 1963 and made it difficult for Tibetans that arrived after the initial wave to acquire RCs and ICs. Nonetheless, this did not stop the flow of Tibetans escaping from Tibet to India.

For Tibetan refugees that are not recognized as “real” refugees, the issue of documentation, or rather the lack of documentation, is a real one that interrupts even the most mundane of activities. Recently, on March 25^th, 2013, the Indian Nursing Council sent a letter to all universities and State Nursing Councils stating that “all Tibetans, being foreigners, cannot work as nurses in the country” (Phayul.  Sep. 6^th, 2013). Nursing in the last few decades has become the preferred study and professional avenue that many Tibetans in India have utilized to become financially independent for themselves and their families. In fact, my younger cousins in India just finished a 5-year intensive diploma in Nursing and now remain defenseless to this new policy (new development on this case by Sikyong Lobsang Sangay; however, “the Indian Nursing Council has said it would not change its decision.”). Like Tenzin, having an RC still leaves Tibetans vulnerable to discriminatory policies that make life difficult for Tibetans born and raised in India.  In addition, for the Tibetans that continue to make the journey from Tibet to India—who do not legally qualify for the RC or the IC—life becomes even more difficult due to their lack of documentation and keep them contained within the small Tibetan exile communities in India, where they are offered some support from the Tibetan government in exile and NGOs. However, organizational help is restricted within the Tibetan communities and not outside in greater India where they are exposed to possible arrest if caught without documentation. Despite these difficulties, Tibetans have found other legal and illegal ways to meet the challenges of being identified as either non-refugee refugees or having no identification at all in India. Out of all the options that Tibetans have made available for themselves in India, the most popular has been legal and illegal immigration to the west.

Opportunities for small groups of Tibetans to migrate to different countries in the west where different rules applied began in the early 1990s. Immigration to the west provided Tibetans the option of citizenship; this allowed Tibetans many choices not limited to owning property, business, and the ability to travel with ease—something that was not easily available without illegal means (bribing local authorities to own property or to operate privately businesses, buying fake Indian documents for everything and anything, etc.) in India. More importantly, citizenship offered Tibetans a legal way to return and reunite with family many had not seen since their initial escape from Tibet, while others that were born outside of Tibet, this provided a safer legal way to see Tibet for the first time. Due to the possibilities of citizenship, something that was not available to Tibetans in India until very recently, many Tibetans have opted to migrate to the west. This was made possible when one member of the family had already migrated, and several years later, they worked out all the legal details to bring other members of the family abroad. This has proved so successful that places such as New York, USA and Toronto, Canada have become homes for over 8000 Tibetans and growing with thriving communities. The interest in moving to the west has generated multiple social and cultural phenomenons – both legal and illegal – within the exile Tibetan communities in India over the last few decades.

While India-born Tibetans face challenges with the RC, recently arrived Tibetans from Tibet—called sarjorpa, newcomer, by Tibetans born and raised in exile—don’t have family in India, let alone abroad, this makes the possibility of their immigration to the west more complicated. With no legal documents, nor the funds to illegally obtain forged RCs and ICs, the newcomers are the most vulnerable to life in India. Bureaucratically, they are considered illegal and do not exist on the grid; because of this they are the most susceptible to arrest and can serve time depending on whether they have the funds to provide for legal representation. Because of these vulnerabilities, most seek out different options to immigrate to the west. One of these cultural phenomenons happens to be: marital unions with westerners.

Last winter I returned and began living in the Tibetan community in Dharamsala, India. During my stay, I took notice of something that has been taking place for several decades now: the phenomenon of western (almost exclusively white) women in Dharamsala who were either with or seeking Tibetan men. The reason for why the racial make up of these women happen to mostly be white is because most of the tourist in Dharamsala, India, happened to be or look Caucasian. These women that came to Dharamsala were of various backgrounds; seeking different experiences as students, travelers, artists, or humanitarians on their short/long stays in India. Some had fallen in love during their stays in Dharamsala while others came specifically to seek Tibetan men.  The men on the other hand were almost entirely newcomers—recently arrived or settled Tibetans from Tibet. This is not to say that all newcomers were attracted to white women, since there were newcomers that were not particularly interested in white women. Also, I did notice few newcomer women with white men; but the majority of the western-Tibetan heterosexual relationships I noticed in the town were between white women and their newcomer partners. This was partially due (among many other reasons) to newcomers often sharing the tourist space either as employees at cafés and restaurants (considered labor intensive work that most exile Tibetan men avoid) or as friends of the employees of restaurants and cafés they frequented. It seemed that most India-born and bred Tibetan men worked either in privately owned family businesses or the Tibetan (non)government-related institutions where they had less contact socializing with westerns of different backgrounds.

India-born Tibetan women on the other hand hardly mingled romantically alone with white men in public. Like the India born men, the women also worked and shared the spaces in the private sectors and (non)governmental institutions. However, there were also gendered reasons for why Tibetan women didn’t seek out western or newcomer partners. From what I was advised and noticed, Tibetan women did not frequently socialize alone with Tibetan men, unless the opposite sexes were hanging out in groups. This had much to do with Dharamsala being a small space where women and men often complained about gossip. It was also a space where women were disciplined by family, society and themselves to keep their honor and status intact. Although there were a few exile Tibetan women who did occasionally date western and newcomer men, most had exile Tibetan men as partners—most of whom they had known since childhood and/or shared similar backgrounds in schools and other social spaces.

On a much smaller scale, some Tibetan men that were not necessarily born in India but were raised there, occasionally sought out western partners. They were young men who had been brought to Dharamsala by parents from Tibet to be admitted at a young age (between 6-10) to the Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV) schools, the Dalai Lama’s school, and had grown up and graduated within the boarding school system with none or minimal (occasional phone calls) contact with their parents back in Tibet. Although they fared better than the newcomers because they had RCs and ICs, they too, like the newcomers, lacked access to a network of family and security that could help improve their lives in India.

This past year wasn’t the first time I had noticed these relationships, but it was the first time I shared close friendships with some of these women and their Tibetan husbands, soon to be husbands, or lovers. This new perspective allowed me to see these relationships outside the category I had previously placed them in: superficial and fake.

Whenever I hung out with my white friends who had Tibetan partners, aside from conversations about the usual ups and downs that one expects from the standard romantic relationships, documentation – or lack there of – was a central discussion. Almost all of the men and women in these relationships were not oblivious about the possibility of the unionship offering the men a chance at existing bureaucratically on paper and the prospect of citizenship in another country, whether the men were seeking it or landed into it. Both parties were aware that citizenship offered these men the chance to go back to Tibet safely—some who had not been back since childhood—to see family again. The men were less vocal about it due to the negative connotation the community has about Tibetans, especially newcomers, who are thought to marry white women just for papers and how that negatively affects the overall peaceful-humble Tibetan image. This is not to deny that some relationships by some Tibetan men were initiated purely to help gain access to immigration and the prospect of a better life, however, at the same time, there were also white (and sometimes older) women who came to Dharamsala only to seek younger Tibetan husbands. But such relationships were the exceptions – most of the couples I interacted with shared an emotional bond with the knowledge of possible migration that both sides hoped for and encouraged.

Although the dating sections of the different Tibetans living in Dharamsala are brief generalizations that could each use a research on its own, my intention was to create a general overview of the dating landscape in the town.  They are by no means limited to the short summaries I have given them above. The reason for why I raise these (un)usual unionships is to shed light on how the bureaucratic issues that Tibetans in India face end up creating these (inter)cultural ones. Knowing some of the challenges Tibetans in India face as non-refugee refugees, it made it harder for me to pass judgment on these relationships however authentic or not they felt. Though I will not get into the details of them here, there existed complex issues of power between those who needed bureaucratic visibility (Tibetans) and those who offered those possibilities (white women) (this topic alone needs a whole different research on its own).

I often struggled with giving my white female friends honest relationship advice when they seemed to have real relationship issues, but I always held back because it felt like too much was at stake. These relationships weren’t simply romantic relationships. They offered some Tibetans the opportunity to exist-on-the-grid on the one hand but were laced with unequal power dynamics on the other. The lives of Tibetans in India with their precarious non-refugee refugee status and their struggles for achieving visibility attest to how, as the call for papers for this conference I participated in noted: “despite—or perhaps because of—the seeming indifference and alienating power of peoples’ experiences with bureaucracy, bureaucracy [or lack there of] can reach into the most intimate of spaces of life.” For many Tibetans, to secure a life and a future, it is dependent not only on love and partnership but on the papers that accompany these unions. Such examples help widen the conversations currently taking place on the complexities involved in citizenship and bureaucracy.

A few nights ago I attended the talk “Ways of Knowing the Body in Buddhist Tantra and Tibetan Medicine” by Janet Gyatso, a prominent and innovative scholar of Tibetan Buddhism. Gyatso mentioned that the talk she had prepared for us is pulled from one of the chapters from her upcoming book Being Human in a Buddhist World: Towards an Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet published by Columbia University Press set to release next year.

Aside from visiting a Tibetan doctor maybe several times in my life and having some friends studying in the field, my knowledge on Tibetan medicine has always been minimal. However, Gyatso’s talk wasn’t necessarily on the specifics of Tibetan medicine, she explores the social, cultural and political climate of the time frame she covers to understand the complexities involving the Tibetan society, demonstrating, what I call, Tibetan modernities (outside of western influence).

The Great 5th Dalai Lama

Gyatso’s focus was the Buddhist-Tantric concept of “channels” and “chakras,” and Tibetan medical scholars’ questioning about these channels that Tantra says exists in the body. This debate provided insights into the politics and beliefs of that time: scholars of Tibetan medicine doing research on anatomy, physiology and the like and coming across findings that made them question the empirical existence of the chakra’s, and therefore, question an aspect of Tantra tradition. With Tibet under the rule of powerful monastic elites at the time, this debate also risked challenging that ruling body because it questioned their religious ideologies.

Dr. Gyatso explained she was looking specifically at the text Gyu-Shi, from what I hear, it’s the text that all Tibetan medical students need to memorize. Her research was specifically focused on the time frame when Desi Sangay Gyatso served as the regent to Tibet under the 5^th Dalai Lama, however the debates she covers began, as she noted, in the 12th century. This was also the time when Tibetan medicine flourished due to Desi Sangay Gyatso’s interest in Tibetan medicine. In her findings, Gyatso came across debates by Tibetan medical specialists on whether the channels (that Tantric tradition tells us exists in our bodies) really exist, and if so, in what capacity.

Desi Sangay Gyatso

So what are these debates about?

Since Tibetan medical experts dealt with the material-physical body, if they could not unambiguously and reliably locate and see the channels and chakras that Tantric tradition says exist in the body, then these phenomena, they seemed to ponder, could only ever be marginal to their craft and science.

In these debates, Gyatso comes across two individuals, Yang-Gom-Pa and Zurkharwa Lodoe Gyalpo, whom inspired a variety of standings on the chakra’s within the Tibetan medical community. Existing proposals included: 1) straightforwardly  the channels do not actually exist. 2) they do exist but are part of a subtle anatomy (Buddhist notions of “Subtle body/levels of Knowledge”) and are not material in the conventional sense, (so, these channels should not be viewed in physical term). 3) They are parts of the anatomy produced by intensive meditation practice, and don’t exist pre-formed in the average adult body.

According to Gyatso, Zurkharwa compromise’s and his way of reconciling empirical medical studies with Tantric religious concepts was to propose, based on existing Tibetan theories of embryology, that the channels developed in the human embryo during the first few weeks of life. Zurkharwa’s explanation accounted for Tantric dogma in terms compatible with current medical theory. Because, even though they were familiar with human anatomy from adult corpses, Tibetan doctors in the 12^th century weren’t dissecting embryos. By locating the Tantric channels in the embryo, Zurkharwa effectively made them un-verifiable, real but unexplainable. As Gyatso noted as a side-note, a cynic might point out how historically the notion of “unexplainable-ness” has served as an excuse to serve those who want to maintain their order or world-view, their status quo.

Though some of these Tibetan physicians were interested in this debate for medical and intellectual purposes, Gyatso insists, that most of them were not necessarily interested in questioning the Tantric tradition they were steeped in (since most of them identified as Buddhists also), and so, by extension the political order at that time which was at least in part grounded in the reality of Tantric knowledge and power. It would’ve invited unwanted attention and trouble. So in their medical explanations and drawings, they continued to mention these more ‘subtle’ channels even though they weren’t relevant to their medical practices like empirically verifiable veins, nerves, organs and bones were, and even though including these channels could create intellectual, philosophical problems.

Medical diagram showing the chakra’s

In her examination of the medical texts and diagrams/drawings, she came across the use of ambiguity in words and explanations when talking about the channels. In diagrams that she showed us, there were drawings of the human anatomy with detailed explanations and labels for minute details for each area of the body. But when it came to the channels and chakras the explanations became either vague or the labels were not precise even if the authors stated that the channels and chakras were drawn in. Theoretical scholarship, such as Trouillot (1995), on how authoritative histories are produced has pointed out how attention to purposeful silencing can provide insights into the social, political and cultural moments, and the relationships of power that shape them. Purposeful ambiguity can also be utilized to try to get at what was being silenced or made ambiguous, why were they considered important enough to be silenced or made ambiguous, and what purpose were these silencing and ambiguity serving? Who were all the parties involved? What were all the potential benefits or dangers?

The debate on whether the channels exist or not is, according to Gyatso, still an ongoing debate happening both inside and outside Tibet. The point, however, is not whether the chakra’s really exist or not, but the insight these Tibetan medical debates provide on Tibetan society. They are commentaries on how Tibetans at that time thought of governance and shared beliefs, and how monastic and lay civilians (medical experts) saw themselves in that spectrum.

Gyatso mentioned that there could arise the question of whether these questions were inspired by Western ideas and influence. At that time, Jesuit priests were having discussions on sciences and medicine in Asia influenced by the debates on science and religion taking place in the West. Based on Gyatso’s findings, there were no indications that the West influenced these debates on knowledge, religion and the body in Tibet; they were organic in and of themselves, truly indigenous. Although Gyatso notes, “Tibetans did not have a conception (nor a word) for modernity” at that time, her discussions on these debates are an example of how I see Tibetans at that time grappling with (how we currently think of) “modernity,” conducted and engaged on their own terms, outside of western modernity ideas/influences.

I have always been annoyed, yet understand the impulse, by some Tibetans who will comment “yes, Tibet was backwards before but now we have modern government and democracy in exile after China’s invasion” in defense of questions by outsiders who argue that China has brought modernity into Tibet. I too have made that comment when I knew very little on Tibet’s historical past, before China’s invasion. However, as Gyatso’s discussion demonstrates, Tibet was complex and had the capacity to define its own idea of modernity (and so society) on its own terms to better itself, outside of Chinese or Western modernity or influence. Chinese modernity or even western modernity was not needed when Tibetans were making their own inroads on how to move forward, whether in the frameworks of Tibetan medicine, literature, womanhood, or spirituality, and so on.

I am not arguing that Tibetan ideas of modernity cannot borrow from Chinese or Western influences, instead I am arguing against the idea that Tibetans did not have their own kind of modernity. We Tibetans, I am arguing, could have moved forward to the march of our own conceptions of modernity if it were not for China’s invasion that put a halt on our development as a people, society, and nation. However, I acknowledge that despite China’s intrusions, Tibetans are still moving forward in our struggle to (re)negotiate and (re)define our approach to modernity (i.e. the current political discourse developing around democracy) with each other on our own terms both inside Tibet and in exile.

_____________________________________________________________________

Several readers have asked why I’ve decided to use the term “Tibetan Modernity(ties).” Here’s my reply with minor edits from the original reply (the original reply to the first commenter was in the  comment section):

On a not so subtle note, THANK YOU Ben Joffe for (always) helping me with edits, especially on the complex explanations on the chakra section from the talk. You are always brilliant!

Works cited:

Trouillot, M. R. (2012). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Beacon Press.

© 2013 Dlo08

In the past few years, an unprecedented number of Tibetans have chosen to drink gasoline and light themselves on fire. What are self-immolations about? They are framed as protest, but is that all they are about? Self-immolations are deeply complex and like an onion, they involve layer upon layers of meaning that need to be considered.  In the following, one of the ways I interpret them is by considering the self-immolations as producing historical narratives of Tibet that counter China’s hegemonic narrative on and control of Tibet.

Buddha On Fire. Rigdol.

Benjamin explains that one must “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at the moment of danger” in order “to articulate the past historically” (1969[1940]:255). Protest of any kind are considered criminal by the colonial state; however, the Tibetan self-immolators are literally “seizing hold of a memory” by immolating, “as it flashes up at the moment of danger” and disrupts and challenges the dominant narrative of Tibet-ans as prospering under the colonial state’s modernization projects that are constructed and controlled by China. They are voices of the “subaltern” (Chakrabarty 1992) that the colonial state tries to silence (Trouillot 1995), yet they refuse to be silenced and had chosen to self-immolate instead in order to be heard; this forces those of us listening to de-center narratives on Tibet away from “the center,” the Chinese colonial state, towards the “peripheries,” Tibet (Dirks 1990). Although popular news coverage on the issue has been shallow at best, the self-immolators have indeed shifted the media’s attention away from Beijing, and into the towns in Amdo and Kham where self-immolations have taken place. The self-immolators have captured the attention of people around the world, however fleeting, especially the Tibetans. This proves that their voices are generating changes/actions/movements/consciousness, especially in Tibetan communities inside and outside Tibet. In fact, my motivation to write on the subject is itself proof that they are generating action. Although there has been a growing number of analysis written on self-immolation—notably in the special issue on self-immolations released by the online journal Hot Spot Forum: Cultural Anthropology in April 2012 and a symposium held on self-immolations on May 14^th and 15^th 2012 at College de France, in Paris, France, both of which I’ve used in this research—there has been little analysis of self-immolations, the act itself, as examples of testimony. Like Makley (2012), I too consider self-immolations “a dialogic medium of communication.” For this reason, I want to explore self-immolations—as action and the moment it generates—as producing counter-narratives of Tibet that challenge China’s historical narrative on Tibet.

As I sat on December 5^th, 2013, trying to contextualize the self-immolations that have been taking place at an increased level inside Tibet, I received news that another self-immolation took place the day prior in the town of Meruma, located in Amdo Ngawa inside Tibet. Kunchok Tseten was a 30-year-old Tibetan man with a wife and two children under 5 years of age. He set himself on fire while shouting slogans calling for the long life of the Dalai Lama, his return to Tibet, and for Tibetans “inside and outside of Tibet” to “unite” (Phayul. December 4^th 2013). According to reports, he died soon after his self-immolation (ICT, December 5^th 2013). However, Chinese police took his body away after a brief clash with Tibetans who tried to prevent authorities from taking possession of his body. Soon after the incident, local authorities arrested his wife, several of his relatives, and some Tibetans who were charged with fighting with the police during the self-immolations. As of now, reports indicate that his body has not been returned to his family.

Tashi Norbu, Self-Immolation.

Kunchok Tseten’s self-immolation makes this the 124^th self-immolation by Tibetans that have taken place inside Tibet. According to International Campaign for Tibet’s (ICT, 5 Dec. 2013) website, as of December 10^th, 2013, a total of 130 self-immolations by Tibetans have taken place since 1998. The 6 that occurred outside of Tibet took place in India and Nepal, including Pawo Thupten Ngodrup, the first Tibetan to self-immolate in India in 1998. 19 self-immolators have been women and 111 have been men. Of the 124 self-immolations inside Tibet, 103 are known to have died, 24 self-immolators were age 18 or under and 81 were lay Tibetan women and men.  43 were from Amdo Ngawa, Tibet (known in Chinese as Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan). Among those in Ngawa, 12 were monks from Kirti monastery in Ngawa, 10 were former monks from the same monastery and 2 were nuns (https://www.savetibet.org/resources/fact-sheets/self-immolations-by-tibetans/).

In this post, I begin by first exploring the act of self-immolation itself as a performance of testimony to understand what is being performed and spoken when a self-immolation occurs. Second, I take a look at how different audiences are receiving self-immolations and what types of counter-narratives/actions they generate. I bore witness to Carole McGranahan and Ralph Litzinger frantically working away on the special issue on self-immolations in the Cultural Anthropology journal. Around the same time, when self-immolations were taking place once or twice for what seemed like every week for a few months, alarmed at the fast rate they were taking place, I was also trying to understand and explain self-immolations to myself and wrote a quick write up on a talk I had given on the situation. When the journal first came out, the central question resonated with me as a Tibetan trying to grappling with their meanings and how I should approach writing about them:

“how does one write about self-immolation—an act that is simultaneously politically charged, emotionally fraught, visually graphic, individually grounded, collectively felt—and what does one write? How do we intellectually make sense of these self-immolations, and how do we do so while writing in the moment, but writing from the outside?” (McGranahan & Litzinger 2012)

This is my attempt to write about self-immolations by exploring the narratives self-immolations produce and the types of narratives they are generating from its audiences. This way, I hope to contribute my own narrative that attempts to memorialize and historicize in text what I call, the moment of self-immolations, and add to the small but growing narrative on self-immolations by Tibetans.

Why self-immolation?

Scholars across disciplines have attempted in their own way to explain why the Tibetans are protesting in the particular fashion of immolation. While many have tried to explain self-immolations with an historical, Buddhist, or economic analyses, almost all agree, “self-immolation cannot be explained by individual motivation” (Shakya 2012, Hotspot). However, I found Barnett’s analysis to be the most compelling (2012, Tibet is Burning). The act of self-immolation requires a fiery protest that assumes death is inevitable. This means every self-immolator performs the act knowing that they will most likely die. This is confirmed when reading testimonies that were written or recorded by self-immolators such as Lama Sobha. Barnet argues that “[s]uicides that are responses to a political event or action by the authorities are not at all unusual in Tibetan society: they have long had a social value among Tibetans which made them meaningful acts” (58). Occurrences of Tibetans “swearing the oath to die” in order to “defend their country” when dangers to nationhood and identity were perceived have been recorded throughout Tibetan history. In the last century, evidence of these incidents could be found, according to Barnett, during the British intrusions (1880s-1900s), the People’s Liberation Army’s invasion (1940s-59), Cultural Revolution (1960s-80s), and during the guerrilla warfares of the Chushi Gangdruk inside and outside Tibet (1950s-70s) (59, 60). Indeed, a more in depth look into the willingness by Tibetans to give up ones life when homeland and nationhood were threatened can be found in Carole McGranahan’s book Arrested Histories (2010). Although the self-immolators do not explicitly take an “oath” to die in order to defend their country, they take on the act knowing they will likely die in order to preserve the Tibetan way of life.

What are self-immolations producing?

“Testimony: noun (plural testimonies)

a formal written or spoken statement, especially one given in a court of law.

 evidence or proof provided by the existence or appearance of something:his blackened finger was testimony to the fact that he had played in pain

 archaic a solemn protest or declaration.” (Oxford Dictionary, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/testimony?q=testimony)

Among the ­­­130 Tibetans who have self-immolated thus far since 1998, according to Barnett (2012:41, 54) and other scholars, only a few left behind “written or spoken” testimonies about their decision to self-immolate. Although not every self-immolator left behind written or spoken text, the act of self-immolation as protest is itself a performance of testimony. The Oxford dictionary defines testimony as “a solemn protest or declaration.” Almost all self-immolators shouted an amalgamation of “declarations” that included references to “the Tibetan nation or the Tibetan nationality […] call for the nation or the people to be protected from suffering, to be united, or to be given freedom. […] [The] importance of Tibetan Buddhism, […] the Dalai Lama and call for his return to Tibet” while they were still in flames (54). Official narratives on Tibet inside Tibet are controlled by the state and narratives critiquing or opposing the state’s authority are viewed as criminal and therefore, punishable. Self-immolations are condemned (Kai & Daqian 2013) because 1) their messages are in direct violation of the state’s laws and 2) they produce narratives about Tibet, Tibetans, and China. For the purposes of understanding these as counter-narrations, I view self-immolations as performances of testimony and acknowledge, as Rothberg put it, the “importance of testimony as a mode of articulating the suppressed truth of colonialism” (2010:25).

Tenzing Rigdol, Kirti-From the Ashes of Agony.

The self-immolators communicate their testimonies through their chosen medium of immolation because in the moment of immolation they take away the state’s narrative authority on themselves as Tibetans. By taking back the state’s authority as narrator, self-immolators establish themselves as narrators of their own subjective realities under the current Chinese colonial state. The Oxford dictionary further defines testimony as implying “evidence or proof provided by the existence or appearance of something.” Using this definition, I argue that the self-immolators’ immolations, their charred bodies, are evidence or proof of the existence of Chinese state-sponsored violence on the Tibetans—making them active agents that speak against the state, rather than the general assumption in the media that characterize them as passive. In performing these testimonies, the self-immolators are “enable[ing] and produ[cing] a new understanding of, […] what has remained unconscious and unarticulable” (Rothberg 2009:213) for themselves and those that become witnesses to their act.

Self-immolations thus far have not occurred in isolation; most of them have taken place in public spaces. In Katia Buffetrille’s article “Self-immolations, the Changing Language of Protest in Tibet” (2012), Buffetrille brings attention to how most of the self-immolators that took place in Tibet chose to carry out the act of self-immolation in front of official state buildings, monasteries, and in the market place (14). All of these places are public spaces frequented by both Tibetans and Chinese. Because most self-immolators chose such public spaces to immolate, it is not hard to decipher that they wanted their actions to be witnessed, producing an event for those that witness the act, and in so doing produce audiences for the act.

In Multidirectional Memory, Rothberg summarizes Felman and Laub’s psychoanalytic thoughts on the “performative dimension of testimony [as] involv[ing] two figures: the traumatized victim, who is not yet in possession of her [or his] own experience, and the listener to whom the testimony is addressed, who ‘comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event’” (2009:214). In Felman and Luab’s psychoanalysis, the therapist allows for the co-production of a narrative that allows the victim to articulate more completely their experience. However, in the event of a self-immolation, the witnesses are “not yet in possession of [their] own experience [of state violence]” and the self-immolator who “comes to be a participant and co-owner of the traumatic event” through their chosen medium of immolation. Echoing Felman and Laub’s thoughts on testimony, both the self-immolator and the witnesses become active agents in producing the moment of self-immolation—the self-immolator as the producer of the act and the audience as witnesses of the act—and together they all become the producers of that moment and bearers of that particular memory of self-immolations. But to who specifically are the self-immolators in the moment of immolation directly speaking to? 

Who are self-immolators speaking to?

When self-immolations began to rapidly increase in 2012, many journalists and activists—including exile Tibetans—argued that the immolations were “desperate” attempts by Tibetans taking extreme measures to draw international attention to the deteriorating social, political and cultural issues faced by Tibetans inside under the current Peoples Republic of China’s (PRC) administration. While these interpretations may retain some truth, it is important in thinking about self-immolations as testimony. What were self-immolators specifically saying before and/or during the act of self-immolation and who these messages were directed towards.

In “Political Self-Immolation in Tibet,” Barnett’s findings reveal that the majority of the written and spoken testimonies left behind by self-immolators called “on the importance of the Tibetans acting to preserve their ethical and cultural identity” (2012:54). Although Barnett and other scholars specifically examine the material testimonies (letters and audio) left behind by nine self-immolators, the majority of self-immolators did not leave behind material testimonies; however, as they went up in flames shouting messages similar to the material testimonies that were left behind, they performed their testimonies. In all of their testimonies the self-immolators called on “Tibetans” to “unite,” based on this it becomes clear that they were speaking to Tibetans first and foremost.

Although local Tibetans witnessing the initial self-immolation become their first audience, by calling on “Tibetans” (and more recently “Tibetans inside and outside”) while invoking “the Tibetan Nation” (ICT 2013), self-immolators were also speaking to anyone belonging to the pan-Tibetan identity—generating and encouraging what Shakya identifies as an “ethno-nationalistic movement.” Shakya explains ethno-nationalism as “mobilization and organization centered on shared ethnicity and territory rather than on questions of particular rights or grievances” (2012:23, Tibet is burning). However, before I get into how Tibetans that identify with the pan-Tibetan identity responded to the immolations, I want to first look into the initial response to the immolation on the ground as the act took place.

China:

As can be seen in the videos of a number of self-immolations in Tibet that have made it outside of Tibet and onto the internet, when self-immolations occurred, the act seemed to generate different responses from the different audiences. This is partly due to the immolators protesting and shouting slogans that are considered criminal by the Chinese state. Local police’s immediate response has been “firstly to try to extinguish the flames in order to prevent the death of the immolator, and secondly to get possession of the immolator’s body. If still alive, officials then tried to take the immolator into custody or to a hospital, or arranged for the immediate cremation of the body if the immolator had died” (Barnett, 2012:45).

Crazy Crab, “Emergency Only.”

When self-immolations began appearing in international news, the Chinese state responded with a narrative that painted the self-immolators as: psychologically and emotionally disturbed, terrorist instigators sent by the Dalai clique, social pariahs, or breakers of the Buddhist precepts. Inside Tibet, state authorities introduced new laws that criminalized the self-immolations and anyone that became involved, adding criminal to the building narrative on self-immolators.

Chinese intellectuals and rights advocates took on a different narrative (Barnett 2012, Tibet is Burning). They viewed them as desperate and passive outbursts to the states poor treatment of Tibetans as minorities that would, according to them, sadly go in vain because the state would pay no attention to their desperate pleas (Sperling 2012, Tibet is Burning). However, almost none of the self-immolators make demands on changes in policy towards the Tibetans nor do they call on the Chinese, instead they call on the “Tibetans” to “preserve” the Tibetan culture that self-immolators perceive are under attack by the current colonial state (Shakya 2012:36, Tibet is burning). The audience they directly call on, as I have argued, is not the Chinese state or people but the Tibetan people.

The multiple audiences:

Local Tibetans responding in a number of ways when becoming witnesses to the self-immolation and the responses it generated from local authorities. During the immolation, as they become witnesses, some attempt to protect the immolating individual from local authorities, while others keep the crowd of witnesses in line to make sure the self-immolator is not being disturbed while in flames. Others bystanders are recorded as offering prayers and white scarves. In cases where a self-immolator has passed away from the act of self-immolation, groups of Tibetans fight off local police from disturbing or taking the body and carry the body away to monasteries nearby or to Tibetan homes to begin ritual services for the dead to pass safely to the next life, that sometimes also double as commemorative. Large numbers of local Tibetans with or without relation to the dead come to join the service. In situations where authorities came to possess bodies of self-immolators, local Tibetans responded by “besieging police stations to demand that the body be returned to the monastery or the family so that the appropriate rituals could take place” (45). Tibetans who responded to self-immolations both as witnesses and in action show that they, as audiences, also became active participants in co-producing that moment, and therefore, counter-narrative, with the self-immolator.

Ngawang Jorden, Contemplation of Selflessness.

How do those of us living outside of the towns where these immolations took place, outside of Tibet, come to know about these events? Tibetans who had become witnesses to these self-immolations when they took place also memorialized the moment by capturing them on film, in images, and in spoken accounts and risked their own safety to disseminate what they saw to the world outside the towns and villages in which the self-immolations occurred. Once these captured moments were shared across the plateau and outside Tibet, self-immolations and their testimonies became mobile, traveling beyond where they had originally taken place, capturing many and multiple audiences. For those of us outside, thanks to technology, these testimonies become easily accessible through the Internet.

In these accounts and images, the dead and the disappeared, for what seems like a few moments, come back to life to speak to a whole new set of audiences who, along with those on the grounds inside Tibet who also become witnesses in the moment they click to view a self-immolator speaks to them directly.  In this way, bodies of the dead and the disappeared, forever memorialized in these images, come back to life to speak to us again and again. Every time they are viewed, they capture a new audience, who in turn, shares it with another set of new individuals; making the process of witnessing and sharing with new audiences itself a form of commemoration. In this way, after bearing witness self-immolations are memorialized in ones own memory while feeling compelled to also share what was just witnessed to a new audience.

Genealogies of loss:

The morning of December 7^th, 2013, I woke up and began working on this post from where I had last left it off. In-between I decided to check my facebook. As I began scrolling through my newsfeed, I came across a recently released picture of Kunchok Tseten’s charred body. I immediately closed my browser out of shock because I had not been prepared to see an image of him so charred that also captured the moment of his death. Death is personal and intimate, yet he chose to display his death so publically. Seeing that image put me in shock. The shock was soon replaced by a sense of loss—another death by immolation, another Tibetan life lost. This made me ask myself: why was I taking Tseten’s death, and all the others who had also died or survived their self-immolations, so personally? Also, why were Tibetans inside and outside, also taking self-immolations (including the actions, suffering, and deaths) so seriously and personally?

Kunchok Tseten self-immolated on December 4, 2013 in Amdo Ngawa.

Shakya’s correct to describe that these feelings generate “ethno-nationalist” sentiments; however, I find the terminology too limiting to account for the sense of loss that is deeply felt by Tibetans individually and collectively across the globe. Cruikshank convincingly argues that the same story can have “multiple meanings depending on location, circumstances, audience, and stage of life of narrator and listener” (2000:43). For the Tibetan audience, I believe these self-immolations trigger their own memories of personal and national losses. Forcing them to remember their own genealogies of loss and pain (that are both personal and collective) accumulated (literally and/or inherited) over the course of their life; spanning from when they first lost their homes to the Chinese, all the losses that followed that invasion up to current status of Tibetans as displaced and/or refugees in exile, or living as minorities under the current Chinese colonial authority in Tibet.

What do these losses look like? In The Pastoral Clinic (2010), Garcia explains Williams’s “structures of feelings” concept as “actively felt sensibilities derived from lived, material histories,” and how “at any given time there are multiple structures of feeling in operation, corresponding roughly to the generations living at that time. Each generation creates its own structure of feeling in response to the world it inherits” (92). When looking over the age of those who self-immolated, the majority of them are between the ages 20-30, meaning they were all born after the PRC invasion of Tibet. Using Williams’s analysis, it appears that one of the ways the current generation of Tibetans are expressing their “structures of feelings” is through self-immolation, in response to the world they have inherited.

According to recent works (Shakya 2012, Tibet is burning. Fischer 2012) that take a closer look into the recent history of China’s governance of Amdo and Kham (from 1980s to the present) where self-immolations numbered in the highest, the rise in dissent and protest coincides with the increase of state management in these areas (modernization projects) and the loss of local control over their ways of life. These intrusions by the state on local autonomy are being viewed by Tibetans, according to Shakya, “as a threat to local identity and culture” (2012:32, Tibet is burning). However, in addition to these recent incursions by the colonial state, I argue we must consider longer, cross-generational histories of Tibetan losses and sufferings rather than view self-immolations as just a reaction to recent suffering and loss caused by contemporary state-development projects.

Mural by Karma Tsechoe & Friends.

Self-immolators seek to testify to successive and interconnected epochs of disenfranchisement traceable back to an original loss shared by all Tibetans: the loss of nation. In other words, self-immolators are absolutely about responding to terrible local issues in their communities but they are also about the loss of nation, that’s why they are explicitly framing local struggles in terms of a history of nation and loss. These losses can be genealogically traced to the loss of homeland during the Chinese invasion, the destruction of culture and identity during the Cultural Revolution, the loss of local autonomy in the development era inside Tibet, loss of lives in the 2008 and 1980s uprisings, and for those in exile, the loss of personhood experienced as non-refugee refugees (dlo08, October 2^nd, 2013) or as displaced transnational immigrants in foreign countries, that Tibetans of different backgrounds have experienced both personally and collectively.

These losses—lived, remembered, memorialized, and commemorated—“compelled by a set of social and historical situations” (Garcia 2010:71) are felt individually and collectively. According to Halbwachs, the present cannot be explained or understood without referencing the past (1992), I view self-immolations within the context of Tibet’s historical past and take the losses that resulted from that past into account—why else would self-immolators, most of whom were born after China’s invasion, make references to the “Tibetan Nation” when it never existed according to the Chinese state narrative? In a similar fashion, I argue that Tibetans who become witnesses to self-immolations make sense of them by referencing their personal and collective past as “Tibetans” and is the reason why these self-immolations take on personal meanings.

Commemoration:

In response to the self-immolations, Tibetans inside and outside Tibet began memorializing and commemorating their actions through artistic, spiritual, and/or political mediums. I view these commemorative practices in line with Khun:

“remembering [as] institutionalized through cultural means—in objects, material culture (monuments, books, and suchlike) as well as through practices and rituals of commemoration that may involve, but are not confined to, what participants actually remember from their own experiences.  Material culture and acts of commemoration may reference and construct a commonly shared past, and thus communities of remembering” (Kuhn 2010:298).

In Tibet, with an increased level of state surveillance on locals in response to self-immolations, commemorative practices by Tibetans have mostly taken on, but are not limited to, artistic and ritual forms that communicate subliminally and explicitly. Initially, self-immolations were being commemorated through ritual means (prayer sessions and death rituals). However, local authorities began criminalizing any form of commemoration. Yet, in some areas of Tibet, locals still continued to carry out ritualized commemorations, despite the threat of violence from the state (Phayul, 23 Jan. 2013). The more subliminal approaches to commemorating self-immolations have been through artistic means.

Dorje Lhundup’s cremation attended by Local Tibetans. 4 November 2012. Amdo Rebkong.

Tibetan artists have produced a collection of works—through poetry, songs, literature and art—dedicated to the immolations. This genre of work has become popularized both inside and outside Tibet due to its subliminal nature, as it becomes harder for state authorities to track them. They are also easily mobile because their digitized nature allows them to travel easily across the plateau and into exile through the Internet (Kaiman, 4 Dec. 2013). However, due to its popular nature, state authorities have heightened security on artistic expressions resulting in the arrest of Tibetan artists who have been more explicit in their expressions of commemorating the self-immolations (Robin 2012). In exile, commemorations have taken on multiple forms expressed communally and individually in a plethora of ways. Like those inside Tibet, exiles have also taken to ritual and artistic commemoration; however, unlike those inside restricted by state security, exiles have produced commemorative projects that take on explicit political messaging. Due to the lax nature of the host nations in which Tibetan exiles live, these expressions take on many forms and are still on going.

Although commemorative practices by Tibetans inside and outside Tibet are expressed differently, they all share the commonality of dedicating these practices to the self-immolators. Digitized works such as self-immolations themselves, along with commemorative works dedicated to the immolators are consumed and shared collectively at a high rate by Tibetans both inside and outside Tibet. However, in both exile and inside Tibet, one of the more interesting and tragic ways in which the commemorative practices are taking shape has been in the pressure and/or need to also sacrifice something. Inside and outside Tibet, it began with Tibetans giving up celebrating the Tibetan New Year to commemorate, at first, those that died from the 2008 uprising, followed by those who self-immolated (Davis, 11 Feb. 2013).  This willingness to also sacrifice something explains how some Tibetans risk their own safety inside Tibet in order to articulate self-immolations with other Tibetans or against state authorities.

Tibetan National Uprising, Brussels, 10/03/2012.

However, this has for some, resulted in the tragic need to also self-immolate as commemoration and to speak in solidarity with those that immolated before. In Jampa Yeshe’s testimony, who self-immolated and died outside Tibet in Delhi, India, on March 26^th, 2012, he made references to self-immolations of Tibetans inside Tibet (Bartholet, 30 Nov. 2012). While self-immolations are testimonies about losses and sufferings incurred locally, they are also narratives about the loss of homeland and nation that is expressed, in part, through solidarity and commemoration. This can be seen through instances like Jampa Yeshe. Yeshe referenced the self-immolations of Tibetans inside in his written testimony in a similar manner to Lama Sobha, who immolated two months prior to Yeshe on January 8^th, 2012 inside Tibet. Like Yeshe, Lama Sobha’s testimony (ICT, 1 Feb. 2012) makes references to Thupten Ngodup, the first Tibetan to self-immolate outside Tibet in Delhi, India, in April 27, 1998.

Despite the tragedy of growing numbers of Tibetans choosing to self-immolate, other Tibetans inside (RFA, 3 Aug. 2012) and outside (Phayul, 30 May 2013) have made collective pleas asking Tibetans not to take such drastic measures. On a more positive turn, more Tibetans inside and outside Tibet appear to have taken seriously the calls to “preserve Tibetan culture” and to “unite” by self-immolators. The heightened sense of awareness and dedication by Tibetans inside, expressed in a multiple of ways, can be seen on the popular blog High Peaks Pure Earth (www.highpeakspureearth.com). Like those inside, in exile, these dedications have tended to focus more on the need to “work harder” as Tibetans. Exile Tibetan governmental institutions and NGOs have gone in differing but sometimes overlapping directions in actualizing “working harder” in their own existing projects and campaigns. However, on an individual level, Tibetans in exile have put an added sense of personal responsibility on themselves to “work harder” as Tibetans at their own capacities, an example of this can be seen as “Lhakar Pledges” on the popular blog Lhakar (www.lhakar.org/pledge). This response by Tibetans inside and outside Tibet confirms that Tibetans are in fact, actualizing the words of self-immolators.

In concluding, I’ve argued that self-immolators, with or without written or recorded audio testimonies, are performing testimony and thus produce new counter-narratives  that challenge China’s historical accounts on Tibet by using their own immolating bodies as “memory-texts” (Kuhn 2010). By examining their written, spoken, and performed testimonies I’ve shown how they perform and narrate not only their own histories but also speak of the collective histories of the Tibetan present and past. I’ve also shown how these testimonies ignite, sometimes literally, responses that take on commemorative practices, which speak about self-immolations, and like the immolators themselves, express personal and collective historical losses and sufferings.  This shows that self-immolations are producing historical narratives on Tibet in the present that are based in and further legitimize Tibet’s historical past. The self-immolating bodies of Tibetans are the literal examples of Foucault’s discussion of “the body,” which he describes as being:

“…the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body” (1991:148).

In this way, it is important to understand self-immolations as producing historical narratives that counter the Chinese colonial state’s hegemonic control over histories of Tibet. These are histories of Tibet told by Tibetans individually self-immolating and collectively remembering.

Works Cited:

Barnett, Robert. “Political Self-Immolation in Tibet and Chinese Popular Culture.” Revue D’Eudes Tibétaines (December 2012): 41-64. Print.

 Bartholet, Jeffrey. “Tibet’s Man on Fire.” National Geographic. National Geographic Society, 30 Nov. 2012. Web. 11 Dec. 2013. <http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/121130-tibet-burning-protest-china-world/&gt;.

 Benjamin, W. (1969). Theses on the Philosophy of History (Vol. 255). New York: Illuminations.

Buffetrille, Katia. “Self-Immolation in Tibet: Some Reflections on an

Unfolding History.” Revue D’Eudes Tibétaines (December 2012): 1-18. Print.

 Chakrabarty, D. (1992). Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?. Representations, (37), 1-26.

Cruikshank, J. (2000). Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory. UBC Press.

Davis, Carlo. “Tibetan New Year Celebrations Canceled In Light Of Immolations.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 11 Feb. 2013. Web. 11 Dec. 2013. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/11/tibetan-new-year-celebrations-canceled_n_2660421.html&gt;.

Dirks, N. B. (1990). History as a Sign of the Modern. Public culture, 2(2), 25-32.

Dlo08. “Non-Refugee Refugees: Tibetans’ Struggles for Visibility in Bureaucratic India |.” Lhakar Diaries. N.p., 2 Oct. 2013. Web. 12 Dec. 2013. <http://lhakardiaries.com/2013/10/02/non-refugee-refugees-tibetans-struggles-for-visibility-in-bureaucratic-india/&gt;.

Fischer, A. M. “The geopolitics of politico-religious protest in Eastern Tibet.” Cultural Anthropology Hot Spot Forum online 4 (2012): 1-6.

Foucault, M. (1977). Nietzsche, genealogy, history. Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews, 139-64.

Garcia, Angela. The pastoral clinic: Addiction and dispossession along the Rio Grande. University of California Pr, 2010.

ICT. “Self-immolations by Tibetans.” International Campaign for Tibet. N.p., 5 Dec. 2013. Web. 11 Dec. 2013. <https://www.savetibet.org/resources/fact-sheets/self-immolations-by-tibetans/&gt;.

ICT. “Harrowing images and last message from Tibet of first lama to self-immolate.” N.p., 1 Feb. 2012. Web. 11 Dec. 2013. < https://www.savetibet.org/harrowing-images-and-last-message-from-tibet-of-first-lama-to-self-immolate/&gt;

Kai, Cao, and Wang Daqian. “Xinhua Insight: Tibetan Self-immolation Instigator Contrite.” Xinhua Net. Xinhua News, 08 Feb. 2013. Web. 11 Dec. 2013. <http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2013-02/08/c_132160744.htm&gt;.

Kaiman, Jonathan. “Hack Tibet: Welcome to Dharamsala, Ground Zero in China’s Cyberwar.” Foreign Policy. N.p., 4 Dec. 2013. Web. 11 Dec. 2013. <http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/12/04/hack_tibet_china_cyberwar&gt;

Kuhn, A. (2010). Memory texts and memory work: Performances of memory in and with visual media. Memory Studies, 3(4), 298-313.

Makley, Charlene. “The Political Lives of Dead Bodies.” In Hot Spot Forum, Cultural Anthropology. 2012.

McGranahan, Carole. Arrested histories: Tibet, the CIA, and memories of a forgotten war. Duke University Press, 2010.

McGranahan, Carole, and Ralph Litzinger. “Self Immolation as Protest in Tibet.” Cultural Anthropology (2012).

Phayul. “Tibetans Challenge China’s Dictat, To Hold Public Prayer Service for Self-immolator.” Phayul.com. N.p., 23 Jan. 2013. Web. 11 Dec. 2013. <http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=32898&gt;.

Phayul. “CTA Rejects China’s Allegations, Appeals Tibetans Not to Self-immolate.” Phayul.com. N.p., 30 May 2013. Web. 11 Dec. 2013. <http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=33507&gt;.

RFA. “Call for End to Burnings.” Radio Free Asia (RFA). N.p., 3 Aug. 2012. Web. 11 Dec. 2013. <http://www.rfa.org/english/news/tibet/burnings-03082012123141.html&gt;.

Robin, Francoise. “Fire, Flames and Ashes. How Tibetan Poets Talk about Self-

Immolations without Talking about them.” Revue D’Eudes Tibétaines (December 2012): 123-132. Print.

 Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional memory: remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization. Stanford University Press, 2009.

Shakya, Tsering. “Transforming the Language of Protest.” Cultural Anthropology Hot Spot Forum online (2012).

Shakya, Tsering. “Conversations and Debates: Chinese and Tibetan Engagement
with the Broader Discussion of Self-Immolation in Tibet.” Revue D’Eudes Tibétaines (December 2012): 89-98. Print.

Sperling, Elliot. “Self Immolation, the Changing Language of Protest in Tibet.” Revue D’Eudes Tibétaines (December 2012): 19-40. Print.

Trouillot, M. R. (2012). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Beacon Press.

© 2013 Dlo08

In the last decade, high speed internet via broadband, wireless and mobile devices initiated by globalization have transformed how Tibetans maintain communication with each other across the world in ways that were previously not available. These new forms of communication have allowed Tibetans to peer into each other’s lives, whether in Tibet, India, Belgium, Taiwan, or California, through social media platforms such as blogs, Youtube, and Facebook. These virtual spaces have permitted the Tibetan diaspora to communicate in ways that allow a transnational network of Tibetans to communicate and mobilize. However, one of the downsides to this transnational network of communication has been the disclosure of sensitive—sometimes hateful—topics that gain longevity and audiences on the virtual space in ways that would not have been possible before this technological boom from globalization.

Recently, the Tibetan virtual world has seen an increase in the controversial subject of racial and linguistic “purity” framed in the context of preserving the Tibetan identity. According to these Tibetans, the ideal Tibetan needs to be of “pure” Tibetan blood and speak “pure” Tibetan. The conversation has attracted transnational participants and audiences that include Tibetans of racially mixed backgrounds and/or engage in speaking Tibetan mixed with other languages. In this post, I frame this current purity conversation, rooted in the idea of a “pure” Tibetan ideal, in relation to earlier Tibetan conversations of purity to better understand its historical significance and how this current version, like its previous avatars, also engages with Tibetan identity politics surrounding who does and does not get to be Tibetan.

***

FRAMING PURITY CONVERSATIONS IN THE POLITICAL MOMENT:

The subject of cultural preservation is not a new topic to Tibetans. In contemporary Tibetan experience, cultural preservation has been an on-going project proliferated by Tibetans living inside and outside Tibet since Tibetan society as a whole was threatened starting with the Chinese invasion in 1959. However, current Tibetan conversations on cultural preservation seem preoccupied with purist ideals of the Tibetan culture that view young Tibetans—who are either of mixed heritage and/or speak Tibetan mixed with other languages—as threatening this purist ideal.

How are current Tibetan conversations on purity different from past conversations on preservation? In the current moment of globalization, discussions on preservation are partly shaped by: (1) the advancement in global technology that has changed the nature of how Tibetans (and the world at large) communicate across borders. (2) The heightened Tibetan sense of awareness on current political happenings such as Lhakar and self-immolations inside Tibet that has been used as frameworks on why purity is needed. (3) And finally, I view these purity conversations as taking place in reaction to the growing awareness in the Tibetan diaspora of the rising number of Tibetan youth (of both mixed and non-mixed heritage) born and/or raised in non-Tibetan spaces in the west that was previously not seen in the Tibetan experience.

Before the age of high-speed Internet, protests by Tibetans inside Tibet trickled into exile at a snail pace—resulting in delayed reactions by Tibetans outside. Globalized technology, Internet, has changed this process; recent political protests in Tibet are now covered outside Tibet as soon as they take place on the ground inside Tibet. The current conservative conversation on language purity coincides with this advancement in communications technology. On the one hand, this advancement has allowed Tibetans inside and across the diaspora to react in unison with the happenings taking place inside Tibet; however, on the other hand, it has also allowed for purist conversations, which were previously land-locked to the spaces in which they were spoken, taking on a new life and become amplified on the internet (see Hall & Nilep 2014).

I view the purity conversations currently taking place in the context of the recent political activities taking place inside Tibet. Movements such as Lhakar—which began in Tibet and has taken off in the Tibetan diaspora—and the self-immolations by Tibetans have intensified the anxieties Tibetans  feel about the possibilities of losing grasp of the Tibetan culture and has also initiated different conversations on strategies to counter these threats. For Tibetans inside Tibet, these anxieties have manifested under past and current state development and assimilation projects carried out by the Chinese colonial state, while the Tibetan diaspora fears the possibilities of becoming assimilated in the cultures of nations they reside within and failing to maintain the Tibetan cultural identity (Lau 2009). Current movements such as Lhakar and the self-immolations have captured multiple audiences and inspired many different actions initiated by Tibetans across the Tibetan plateau and outside. The emphasis on the need for the preservation of the Tibetan culture in the messaging of both the Lhakar movement and those who have self-immolated has inspired differing conversations on how to approach the question of cultural “preservation.” Current conversations on purity should therefore be viewed in relation to the intensification of the Tibetan political activities inside Tibet, whose messaging has largely included the need for the preservation of the Tibetan culture against the backdrop of Chinese colonization.

Voice of America Tibetan (VOA-Tibet) recently aired a segment acknowledging and engaging the topic of Tibetans with mixed heritage. The conversation was soon laced with purist reactions that condemned Tibetans from mixing in order to honor historic and current sacrifices of Tibetans inside Tibet. They also framed these sentiments with regards to the survival of the Tibetan race. Although I don’t agree with their assessment—that to promote and preserve the Tibetan culture, one needs to retain some form of racial and linguistic purity—this sentiment is important to engage. Especially when anxieties around cultural preservation are not new to the Tibetan experience (see Diehl 2002; Childs & Barkin 2006; Lau 2009; McGranahan 2010). They can extend back to histories of Tibet even before the Chinese invasion. Back in those days, the pure Tibetan ideal in the eyes of a Lhasan may have looked drastically different from a Lithang Khampa. These tensions in cultural differences marked by the many regions with different customs and dialects, as can be seen in a recent video titled “Lingustic Diveristy on the Tibetna Plateau,” complicates how the pure Tibetan ideal sounds:

For purposes of clarity, it is important for me to identify who the individuals engaging in these purist topics are. It should be clarified that the Tibetans who are having these conservative purist conversations are not limited to the older generation; they include Tibetans of all ages and backgrounds whose purist ideas of the Tibetan emphasizes the romanticized frozen-in-time image of the Tibetan before this image was contaminated by China’s invasion and exile living (Lopez 1999). This image of the Tibetan does not consider change or diversity of Tibetan cultures and/or experiences. Those taking part in the current purity conversations are not just generational, they include Tibetans of young, old, mixed, and non-mixed, monks, nuns, born and/or raised in the west and the east. Although I argue that generational differences have influenced the conversation on purity, my emphasis is the transition that takes place between the older and younger generation, not the generations themselves.

***

RACIALLY PURE: POLITICS OF BLOOD 

On the 24^th of March 2014, Voice of America (VOA) Tibetan posted a segment discussing Tibetans of mixed parentage on its official Facebook page. The post quickly attracted Tibetans who believed that Tibetans should not engage in racial mixing—never mind that the segment itself covered youth of mixed heritage. This inspired a heated debate between Tibetans (and some non-Tibetans) who felt such comments were harmful and even racist, while others felt mixing would degenerate the Tibetan blood, and so, culture—which they felt was already under the threat of disappearance. Here is one example of a conservative comment on racial purity (some comments have since been removed by the administrators):

Soon after, Tibetan friends of both mixed and non-mixed backgrounds expressed how “racist” they thought some of those “purist” views on the comment thread were. Sonam (name changed), of mixed heritage, told me how she was not surprised by some of these purist comments and discussed how she had heard such comments by Tibetans made throughout her life.

In a separate Facebook conversation with Dhondup (name changed), also of mixed background, on the topic of purist attitude by Tibetans, he wrote, “I’ve become increasingly disillusioned about the ‘Tibetan cause’ in general over exactly this [purist sentiments by some Tibetans] matter.” Although Sonam and Dhondup expressed no surprise at such purist sentiments, it was obvious that they felt unsettled and hurt by these comments. For Dhondup, these purist conversations, which dictate the politics of belonging that exclude Tibetans such as him, were hurtful enough to discourage him from participating in his passion for the “Tibetan cause.” However, such purist sentiments by conservative Tibetans are not limited to ideas about racial ideals, these discussions include discouraging and reprimanding Tibetans of any background from mixing spoken Tibetan. In other words, such discussions are not only about how the ideal Tibetan should look but also included how Tibetans should speak Tibetan.

Racial purity conversations led by conservative Tibetans discourage other Tibetans from racially mixing, while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge the fact that there is an existing population of young Tibetans of mixed backgrounds. Linguistic purity conversations are critical not only of Tibetans with racially mixed backgrounds, but Tibetans of “full” Tibetan backgrounds (having two parents of Tibetan heritage). Linguistic purity conversation targets any Tibetan that mixes spoken and written Tibetan with any other languages—such as English, Chinese, Hindi, Nepali, Japanese or any other European languages. However, linguistic purity conversation in the contemporary context has been especially critical of Tibetan youth born and/or raised in the west. This is partly due to the growing population of Tibetans in the west that began with the migration of Tibetans from India and Nepal to the west in the early 1990s (Yeh 2006). In the last twenty years, the Tibetan community has seen a rising number of young Tibetans who are born and/or raised in the west. These children, some of whom are now adults like myself, are highly visible on the Internet and can be seen interacting on social networks like Facebook or enacting their different Tibetan subjectivities through different mediums such as music, art, and poetry—influenced partly by the style of the cultures within which they’ve been socialized—on popular platforms such as Youtube.

***

LINGUISTIC PURITY & ITS HISTORIC TRAPPINGS: 

Two years ago, my friend Pema Yoko, NYC Yak, and I did a video blog for Lhakar Diaries titled “Shopping in Little Tibet” exploring Tibetan businesses in Jackson Heights to highlight the cultural empowerment movement “Lhakar” that taking place inside Tibet, while hoping to encourage others (Tibetan and non-Tibetan) in joining this movement by supporting Tibetan businesses. Soon after we uploaded the video on Youtube, we received the following comments in the comments section:

As can be seen, commenters Nemo and 456 both tell us to “speak Tibetan.” I should make it clear here that both NYC Yak and I are not of racially mixed background, however, Pema Yoko is of both Japanese and Tibetan heritage. But in this video, racial background doesn’t seem to be the issue; instead the issue according to 456 and Nemo is the need for us to “speak Tibetan” (even though the video was meant for both Tibetan and non-Tibetan audiences and was emphasizing the need to financially support local Tibetan businesses). While conservative ideas and conversations on racial purity by Tibetans target Tibetans of mixed heritage, linguistic purity conversations target Tibetans of any—mixed or non-mixed—backgrounds that engage in either mixing spoken Tibetan with another language or uses languages other than Tibetan.

In “Transidiomatic practices,” Marco Jacquemet describes ethnic minority groups that move into multicultural and global spaces, such as London, where one language and culture, English, reigns dominant, such groups become threatened at the realization of becoming a minority. In response to these threats, Jacquemet writes:

“[M]inority groups respond with their own strategic ideological retreat to defensive positions, such as re-identification with cultures of origin, reliance on symbolic membership in strong counter-ethnicities, revival of cultural integralism and traditionalism, and defense of the ‘purity’ and ‘integrity’ of their ‘communal’ language (Hall 1992; Hill and Hill 1986; Silverstien 1996). At the base of all these cases, we find people who, feeling threatened by the linguistic diversity and communicative disorder (among other unsettling changes) brought about by deterritorialization, activate an exclusive linguistic ideology to raise the membership bar (Anderson 1983; Crowley 1992; Crawford 1992; Silverstien 1996; Errington 2000).” (2005:263).

While migration for Tibetans from India and Nepal to the west meant that they were becoming “deterritorialized,” this shift from the east to west, however, is not the first time Tibetans have faced the effects of deterritoriaization. As previously mentioned, the Chinese invasion in 1959 forced large numbers of Tibetans to become refugees in Nepal and India. Works such as Echoes from Dharamsala (Diehl 2002) and Arrested Histories (McGranahan 2010) details how the Tibetan refugee communities faced similar anxieties when faced with having to rebuild the Tibetan community in Nepal and India in the aftermath of the Chinese invasion against the backdrop of a complete foreign environment. Both McGranahan and Diehl’s work details the reconstruction of the Tibetan communities across Nepal and India after the initial shock and trauma of invasion and refugeehood in order to survive as a people and culture against China’s ongoing colonization of Tibet and to maintain the continuity of the Tibetan culture in exile.

Cultural preservation in Dharamsala played a central theme when it came to rebuilding community as refugees (Diehl 2002) followed by the promotion of narrowed ideas of Tibetan culture that took shape in an Utsang (central Tibetan) tone (due to the first wave of Tibetan refugees being mostly from Utsang areas) and was led by the Tibetan apparatus (whose leadership included the old Lhasa administration) to guard against multi-cultural assimilation threats in host countries (Childs and Barkin 2006, McGranahan 2010). Both McGranahan and Diehl’s work also reveal purity sentiments coming from Tibetans who felt the Tibetan culture needed to be preserved in a particular fashion.

In Diehl’s ethnography on Dharamsala in the early 90s, it was the newcomers from Tibet, sarjorpas, and India born and/or raised Tibetan youth (exemplified by the yak-band, who also represent my parents generation) who were harming the preservation of the pure Tibetan cultural ideal. Older Dharamsala residents—who were mostly of Utsang background and so, their cultural experience and expressions had been dominated by the Utsang tradition—felt young Tibetans born and/or raised in India were contaminating the Tibetan culture by partaking in rock and roll while dismissing newcomers from Tibet as having lost their “Tibetan” culture because they sounded and looked too Chinese. These anxieties still seem to hold weight as demonstrated by Tim Lau’s short ethnography Tibetan Fears and Indian Foes on a Tibetan community in India (2009). While Lau could have done a better job contextualizing this “fear” by framing it within the recent discourse between Tibetans inside and outside of Tibet, I agree with his emphasis that these anxieties are associated with “Tibetan fears of cultural extinction in exile” (25).

While Tibetan youth in Dharamsala enjoying rock and roll music or singing in a Chinese style were triggering “fears of cultural extinction” for Tibetan elders in the early 90s, the group that’s currently causing similar fears seems to have shifted to include Tibetan youth of mixed and non-mixed racial backgrounds speaking Tibetan mixed with other languages in the west. This shift can be viewed as a similar manifestation of previous anxieties faced earlier in the 1990s when older members of the Tibetan community in Dharamsala—who had escaped the Chinese invasion—were encountering a new generation of Tibetans born and/or raised in China and India whose subjectivities did not match their own upbringing back in pre-invasion Tibet. Similar to the unsettled feelings that Diehl and Lau unravels in their ethnographies, Emily Yeh’s “Hip-hop gangsta or most deserving of victims?” also uncovers similar “fears” amongst older Tibetans in California in the early 2000s, whose upbringing in India and Nepal did not prepare them to make sense of their children whose subjectivities were being enacted through American pop-culture in California (2006).

Young Tibetans from my generation, early 90s, whose families migrated to the west are the first in our families to have been born and/or raised in the west. The Tibetan diaspora, which previously only extended to Asia, has experienced a gradual rise in the number of mixed and non-mixed young Tibetans who were born and/or raised in western cultures in the last two decades. I argue that this rise in the number of Tibetans born and/or raised in the west,  matched with their growing visibility in Tibetan spaces online and on the grounds, who look and sound different from the generation raised in the east, are one of the reasons why the topic of purity is resurfacing.

***

THE POLITICS OF BELONGING: WHO DECIDES?

In a short film that Pema Yoko made in 2007 called “British Tibetan,” she shares intimate thoughts and frustrations on her relationship with her Tibetan father and their opinions regarding Pema’s Tibetan identity:

Pema Yoko:

1. I can’t speak Tibetan, yet I demand cultural genocide [in Tibet] to be stopped.
2. Allow Tibetans to be Tibetan, yet in a free country I still talk English.
3. In a free country my father is still demanding me to be more Tibetan
4. Bhoe Keh gyab kukpa, speak Tibetan stupid.
5. How can I fight for the right of Tibet yet I can’t even speak Tibetan? Right dad?
6. I want this relationship to workout. And we even talked about it before
7. Before and after mom died and before you got [re]married.
8. But I guess like now your whole new family’s like all Tibetan, pure Tibetan, and there are more Tibetans living in this area. And it makes you feel more strong about something or more strong about being Tibetan.
9. And then you’ve got like me, who could barely speak Tibetan innit, and you start to get ashamed of me. And it saddens you cause you think that I’m more something else. And less Tibetan. And you start getting angry at this fact and like try to shout at me and start getting violent.
10. C’mon dad, I mean you married a Japanese woman yeah, and you married in London and had me here, so like what did you think I would be? I mean I’m growing up in London with hardly any Tibetans man. I try my best to be apart of Tibet of the Tibetan community and things that you wanted me to be. Nothings ever good enough for you, or you just don’t appreciate it.
11. Cut me some slack man. Please.Pema’s Tibetan Dad:
12. Right now I enter the house. Khando [Pema’s half sister who’s full Tibetan] just walked in. And she looked back and smiled. And that made me very happy, at the same time made me sad.
13. It reminds me of Choelsang [Pema’s Japanese mother], who is a wonderful person of mine, and who is not here. That, if I loved Choelsang, in other words, I’m saying, how can it be, that I don’t love you?
14. its-i-its, there is no way. You are in my heart. I-i-in other words, you are in my heart.
15. So when you, when you and I argue, it makes me [distant] and cynical and say negative words. That is because, that is because I care and I want you to improve that means.
16. So what I was saying is, you sort it out.
17. If you cannot speak Tibetan, it is you, your fault only.
18. And you have to learn to adjust and think again.

On line 10, Pema responds to her frustrations with her Tibetan father’s unrealistic pure Tibetan expectations with “C’mon dad, I mean you married a Japanese woman yeah, and you married in London and had me here, so like what did you think I would be?” In the same sentence, she makes it known that she grew up in London “with hardly any Tibetans,” yet she tried her best “to be apart of Tibet, of the Tibetan community and things that [he] wanted [her] to be.” However, she concludes, “nothings ever good enough for you, or you just don’t appreciate it.” Although her father makes it clear on lines 13 and 14 that his frustrations with her lack of Tibetaness is not about his love but follows up with “If you cannot speak Tibetan, it is you, your fault only” on line 17.

When discussing the politics of spoken Tibetan with Tibetan friends who are politically active from mixed and non-mixed backgrounds who’ve spent the major part of their lives in the west, they often express feelings of discouragement. Often times when they are organizing in the community regarding Tibet work, they often complain of how they always encounter Tibetans usually of a certain age tell them sometimes gently and other times in a hostile manner, how shameful it is that they don’t speak Tibetan. This, as they express, often times leaves them feeling frustrated, disempowered, and discouraged. Another friend, Tenzin, who grew up in Canada in a predominantly white town, told me once that she preferred not to even speak Tibetan in front of other Tibetans, not because she is ashamed but because she is afraid of “messing up” and incorrectly pronouncing certain words with an accent that would reveal her incompetence as a Tibetan. What’s surprising here is the fact that most of these friends of mine, including Tenzin, cannot not speak Tibetan, they speak Tibetan mixed with English; they just don’t speak the idea of the “pure” Tibetan.

Hill, who’s linguistic ethnography looks at an ethnic Mexicano community describes Mexicano elders who engage in testing or judging the purity of spoken Mexicano by younger Mexicanos as using purism rhetoric as “a toll of dominance” (1985:734). Her findings reveal that these challenges, which she calls “linguistic terrorism,” create fears and insecurities that actually discourage, rather than encourage, the use of Mexicano (735). I find similar fears being expressed by Tibetan youth, such as my friends, who decide not to speak Tibetan because they would invite purist rhetoric that challenge their Tibetan identity. In addition, the purist rhetoric tend to further the belief that Tibetans, such as my friends, don’t actually speak Tibetan when in reality, they do. For example, in Pema’s father’s monologue, he tells her it’s her own fault for not knowing how to speak Tibetan, however, as shown in line 4, she actually does.

Although there is a lot of love and pain in both Pema and her father’s monologues, somehow her father’s response to Pema on line 17 seems to ignore her subjectivities as mixed with Japanese, born in London, and raised in an environment without many Tibetans around as reasons that play a large role in why Pema cannot speak Tibetan in the way her father invasions pure spoken Tibetan. Contrary to Pema’s father’s response, it isn’t Pema’s fault for being born racially mixed and raised in a western environment. These were circumstances that were beyond her control. However, I am not suggesting it is her fathers fault either. Reasons for why Pema’s father decided to shift to London alone when he was in his 20s—where there were barely any Tibetans in the early 80s—has much to do with the lack of opportunities for Tibetans as refugees at that time in India and Nepal, and further, the Chinese invasion of Tibet has everything to do with why Tibetans became refugees in the first place. It is important to acknowledge the circumstances that dictated both Pema and her father’s subjectivities that were, in some ways, beyond their control.

At the end of her video, Pema leverages words that express her identity. One of them reads “British Tibetan.” When I first saw this video in 2007, I remember being surprised at seeing the words “British” and “Tibetan” together because it was the first time I heard a Tibetan call themselves “British Tibetan,” she was also the only British Tibetan I knew back then. In Ana Celia Zentella’s ethnographic look at young children in a bilingual Puerto Rican community in New York, she writes, “[c]hanging definitions of Puerto Rican identity among those who were born and/or raised in the US was a product of their concrete reality. As they grew up in an English-dominant nation that belittled their bilingualism, children’s networks spoke more English than Spanish and children became less proficient in Spanish than English” (1997:54). Since Pema, as a racially mixed Tibetan speaking English interspersed with Tibetan, cannot quite fit the ideal Tibetan image, she decides to play with that image by juxtaposing an image of herself in traditional (Utsang) Tibetan clothes set against the backdrop of Tibet while also mixing that image with the images of herself wearing jeans and hoodie against a London backdrop, both of which express her identity. She instead declares she’s “British Tibetan” in the end, deciding to define herself instead of letting others define her and echoing Zentella’s emphasis that she is a “product of [her] concrete reality.” Contrary to conservative Tibetans that are against racial and linguistic mixture, Pema’s redefinition of her own identity as a British Tibetan embraces her Tibetan identity along with acknowledging her upbringing in London.

In scaling a Tibetan child’s proximity to meeting the pure Tibetan marker, it would be unfair to judge a Tibetan child from Dharamsala against a Tibetan child living a nomadic existence in Amdo-Bora. It would also be unfair to judge a Tibetan child from Boston against a Tibetan child in Dharamsala on how they do on their proximity to this pure Tibetan ideal. These comparisons don’t consider the complexities that shape those children’s lives and the environments in which they are raised. A Tibetan child living in the thriving Tibetan community of Dharamsala, India for example, may experience a mixed environment with their Indian neighbors and engage in the Indian culture (cuisine) and pop-culture (Bollywood), they however live in a thriving Tibetan hub where the Tibetan culture and language is considered the norm (Chen 2012). Unlike a Tibetan child growing up in a Tibetan community in Dharamsala or Lhasa, a Tibetan child growing up in Boulder, Colorado, for example, does not have the same everyday access to a lived Tibetan culture and language.

As Das argues—whose ethnography focuses on the Tamil community in Montreal—in “Between Convergence and Divergence” (2008), “Diaspora children and youth, who are seen as the sole inheritance of a dispersed Sri Lankan Tamil nation, are thus encouraged to study literary Tamil and to maintain its [linguistic] purity through their vernacular speech. These community leaders hope that the ancientness and purity of the Tamil language can be preserved until the homeland of Tamil Eelam is reclaimed.” (14). Similar to Das’s Tamil parents, Tibetan parents, also motivated by the need to “preserve until the homeland is […] reclaimed,” try to meet the challenges of raising “Tibetan” children in a western environment by exposing them to other Tibetans when space and time allows. These kids get to interact with other Tibetans during the occasional meeting for communal celebrations and the weekly Sunday school sessions. These spaces offer Tibetan children the chance to engage in speaking and hearing Tibetans from other Tibetan children and adults. However, Tibetan children in the west, for the most part, spend major parts of their time socializing in the larger western environment where spoken English (or any other European languages) is the norm. The fact that Tibetan children born and raised in the west spend their lives socializing in complete western environments is partly the reason for why Tibetan children (racially mixed and not) in the west may engage more in linguistic mixing than a child in Lhasa or Dharamsala.

To reiterate Pema’s frustrations, Tibetans of mixed and non-mixed backgrounds, despite growing up in a predominantly western environment, try their best “to be a part of Tibet of the Tibetan community and things that you [and the Tibetan community at large] wanted [us] to be.” For Pema, this can be seen with her choice to remain actively involved with the Tibetan community and its larger political movement. For other young Tibetans, mixed and non-mixed, born and/or raised in the west, their efforts to engage their Tibetan identity and culture take on multiple modes. While some engage through music, such as Chino and MC Rebel, others choose to engage politically through efforts such as “lobbying for Tibet” which takes place yearly. And others take yearly or seasonal trips to Dharamsala to learn Tibetan at programs designed specifically for their backgrounds at the Tibetan Children’s Village, Tibetan Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, and the College for Higher Tibetan Studies Sarah. These are but some examples of how Tibetan youth in the west try to engage, as well as meet the challenges of, being Tibetan. However, the purity conversations by Tibetans tend to ignore these efforts; despite the silencing of these efforts, MC Rebel is hopeful when he raps, “Even in the face of assimilation, we will survive.”

***

MOVING ON:

As previously discussed, conversations regarding pure Tibetan identity have historically taken place when the Tibetan community at large is experiencing a transition, a change. In its current stage, these conversations are taking place in reaction to the political moment inside Tibet, globalized communications through technologies, and a rising number of Tibetans that may look or speak a little differently from the previous generation but are moved and motivated by Tibet in similar ways. I acknowledge that the current purity conversations by Tibetans are partly in reaction to traumas suffered under the historic and current weight of the Tibetan losses that began with China’s invasion. I agree with Childs and Barkin’s emphasis that these conversations “also represent the activism of a people who have historically been mar­ginalized from the centers of power, challenging the he­gemony of the Chinese and [host nation] government policies by promoting a media-based public culture intended to propagate their own ideologies, which are grounded in a discourse of subjugation and genocide” (2006:49). However, this does not excuse the divisive nature of purity politics in narrowing concepts of the Tibetan identity and identity expressions that divide the community through the dismissal of Tibetans of mixed language or blood.

Purity politics frames Tibetans that mix and/or are mixed in a polarizing framework that views them as becoming something else, something not Tibetan. According to Lau, this view of them is considered a “direct threat to Tibet, the Tibetan cause and the Tibetan nation as imagined in the diaspora. The consequences of this threat pertain to the basic distinction of being Tibetan as opposed to being non-Tibetan” (2009:87). Yet, experiences such as Pema’s, who speaks Tibetan mixed with English and is racially mixed, counters such fears or threats with her declaration of her Tibetan identity. The polarized framing of the Tibetan identity causes real pain that Sonam, Dhondup, Tenzin, Pema and her Tibetan father endure. Instead of the narrowed approach that purity politics proposes, I suggest we examine other groups that have faced similar experiences of invasion, genocide, and assimilation to understand how they have shaped and re-shaped their identities. Circe Sturm writes of the Cherokee (indigenous) Nation:

“Cherokee national identity is and always has been about how multiple forms of difference come together in socially and politically meaningful ways to constituted complex subjects. These differences of identity among Cherokees—whether they are defined in terms of blood, race, culture, or some other national substance—are not innate possessions, nor are they passing illusions. Instead, they reflect the meaningful interactions between groups of people struggling with themselves and others over access to power, including the rights of self-determination and self-definition that have long been promised to them.” (2002:209)

Rather than construct the current conversations on Tibetan identity with narrowed terms dictated by the politics of purity, an approach that embraces the multiplicities of how Tibetan identities can be enacted and communicated can ensure the continuity of the Tibetan identity. It also allows room for the complexities that shape the different subjectivities of Tibetans living in different lands under different conditions as displaced peoples shaped by the circumstances that began with China’s intrusion.

***

Works Cited:

Chen, S. T. 2012. When ‘exile’becomes sedentary: on the quotidian experiences of ‘India-born’Tibetans in Dharamsala, north India. Asian Ethnicity, 13(3), 263-286.

Childs, G., & Barkin, G. (2006). Reproducing identity: using images to promote pronatalism and sexual endogamy among Tibetan exiles in South Asia. Visual anthropology review, 22(2), 34-52.

Das, S. N. 2008. Between convergence and divergence: reformatting language purism in the Montreal Tamil diasporas. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 18(1), 1-23.

Diehl, K. 2002. Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the life of a Tibetan refugee community. Univ of California Press.

Hall, Kira. Nilep, Chad. 2014. Code Switching, Identity, and Globalization. In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 2nd Edition. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. 1-35.

Hill, Jane. 1985. The grammar of consciousness and the consciousness of grammar. American Ethnologist 12(4):725-737.

Jacquemet, Marco. 2005. Transidiomatic practices: Language and power in the age of globalization. Language and Communication 25, 257-277.

Lau, T. 2009. Tibetan fears and Indian foes: fears of cultural extinction and antagonism as discursive strategy. vis-à-vis: Explorations in Anthropology, 9(1).

Lopez, D. S. 1999. Prisoners of Shangri-la: Tibetan Buddhism and the west. University of Chicago Press.

McGranahan, C. 2010. Arrested histories: Tibet, the CIA, and memories of a forgotten war. Duke University Press.

Sturm, C. 2002. Blood politics: Race, culture, and identity in the Cherokee nation of Oklahoma. Univ of California Press.

Yeh, E. T., & Lama, K. T. 2006. Hip-hop gangsta or most deserving of victims? Transnational migrant identities and the paradox of Tibetan racialization in the USA. Environment and Planning A, 38(5), 809.

Zentella, Ana Celia. 1997. Growing Up Bilingual. New York: Blackwell.

Many of my readers may remember that I wrote a piece called “Non-Refugee Refugees: Tibetans’ struggles for visibility in bureaucratic India,” on Lhakar Diaries last year. The subject of the essay concentrates on marital unions between Tibetans and westerners that offered some Tibetans possibilities of documents that could help them escape their precarious existence as, what I termed, “non-refugee refugees.” Sometime after that post, I began seeing several Facebook posts by expats living in Dharamsala for the self-published book Dharamsala Days Dharamsala Nights by Pauline MacDonald (a pseudonym). I was told by friends that the book was on the subject of newcomers in Dharamsala, including male newcomers’ relationships with female Injis. I was able to get my hands on a copy, but only just found the time to read it. Upon finishing the book, I couldn’t help but write an FB commentary on the sloppiness of MacDonald’s analysis. The FB thread was soon followed by some responses. One of the responders, Ben Joffe, a friend and a fellow CU Boulder PhD student of Carole McGranahan who studies Tibet, has allowed me to publish his review of the book in my post. But before readers can get into Ben’s review, I’d like to make some of my thoughts clear.

My take:

Although MacDonald’s tone is one of good intention and conviction to tell the hardships and stigmas that newcomers from Tibet face in McLeod-Dharmsala, my main problem with her book was that she decides to choose sides: she favors newcomers over exile Tibetans, and even further makes exile Tibetans, whom she calls “settlers,” the villains. Choosing a side requires categorizing the two groups as single entities at odds with each other. This doesn’t allow room for complexities within and between the group, and also ignores complexities that create tensions between the groups in the first place.

In her account, she paints all newcomers into a single entity known as the “Sali gyals,” whom she describes as newcomer men out on the prowl for western female partners. She portrays exile Tibetans as an similarly homogenous merger of CTA/activists and India or Nepal-born Tibetans. Although she tries to create a more sympathetic and complex character of the newcomer by sharing stories of their personal struggles and pains that she was exposed to, she ultimately depicts them as hopeless characters doomed to fail whether in business, relationship, and so on. In her analysis, these failires are because of “settler” Tibetans, not because of the precarious status of Tibetans as non-refugee refugees (or of most Tibetans in India or Nepal, newcomers or not). Aside from a few people throughout the book, exile Tibetans are portrayed by MacDonald as characters without complexities although poor Tibetans face different kinds of stigmas too. Such characterization of Sali gyals–a term she uses interchangeably with “newcomer”–as hopeless characters misses experiences of newcomers who are women, students at the College of Higher Tibetan Studies Sarah, and families thriving in places such as Norbulingka, all of whom are situated also in Dharamala. While I acknowledge with MacDonald that newcomers occupy a more vulnerable status than RC and IC-holding exile Tibetans, her one dimensional characterization of newcomers misses the impact of newcomers as initiators of cultural change in Dharamsala, whether in fashion (Amdo and Khampa chupas becoming popular), music (from Tibet), or food (Amdo restaurants).

The lack of analysis of exile as an entity, identity, and status without much resources or rights does a disservice in contextualizing how this adds to the stigma that MacDonald describes. Narratives shared to MacDonald by newcomer Tibetans are important in that they bring to light certain subjectivities within the exile Dharamsala community that need to be heard and addressed. MacDonald’s discussions on the different types of tourists that converge in Dharamsala seeking certain kinds of exotic are also potential topics that could lend itself to discussions on how the capitalist tourist economy allows certain raced and classed bodies/cultures to become consumed (Tibetans) due to precarious circumstances, while other privileged bodies could become the ones consuming those bodies, cultures, and experiences (western tourists and expats). Power in this discussion is central for all characters, the tourists, Indian locals, exiles, and newly arrived Tibetans.

The book doesn’t necessarily go there, mostly because as Ben discusses below, the author’s direction of the book is itself confusing. She does, however, do a good job detailing lives of the men she becomes close with and the western characters that populate their lives, including herself. This book is most successful as a personal story rather than a sociopolitical analysis. Newcomers’ experiences outside of Dharamsala are also not a part of the story here, but should be. MacDonald offers an opening, problematic though it is, for further research and writing on newcomer issues in the Tibetan exile community.

 Finally, here’s Ben’s review:

I know McDonald well, she is a good friend of mine, so it’s difficult for me to critique this book. Still, I feel like I ought to register my reservations and reactions honestly and fairly. Dawa really hits the nail on the head with the issue of often un-nuanced polarizing of exile-born vs. sarjorpas and the politics and rhetoric of most-deserving victim at work here. One of my chief difficulties with the book is what feels like its inconsistent genre and register. The book struggles to decide on its voice as a travelogue, personal memoir and set of personal reflections on Dharamsala, contribution to exile oral history, or critique of the Tibetan exile administrations and its policies. The best parts of the book are where we get to read about the experiences McDonald is most qualified to speak about: the travails of those sarjorpa who married non-Tibetans and immigrated abroad, and the weird and wonderful mix of people that make up McLeod’s more or less transient population. Beyond this though, as Dawa mentions, McDonald’s totalizing account of sarjorpas vs the CTA/exile Tibetans strikes me as too homogenizing and de-contextualized. Everyday prejudice against sarjorpa by exile-born Tibetans gets projected onto the CTA, which comes across as a largely monolithic if not maniacal entity (in no small part through McDonald using the central villain of Samdhong Rinpoche as its metonym). At times it would seem McDonald would have us believe the CTA is set on sending sarjorpa back to Tibet out of sheer malice or disregard. This conspiratorial tone and her frequent literary recourse to shock and outrage leave little room for a fuller discussion of the relative power and resource-lessness of the exile administration to secure RCs for newcomers and to guarantee protections for any and all of its refugee de facto citizens. What negotiating power does the exile administrative really have to convince the government of India to offer sarjorpa RCs and increased protections? We hear about the discontinuation of RCs but not much about the actual negotiations around this.

Talking about sarjorpa in exile is important, necessary, long-overdue but at times the complexities of exile Tibetan policies and political activities and the range of relationships between multiple demographics gets sacrificed in favor of McDonald’s preferred, simpler tale of heartless exile-born ‘settler’ Tibetans and their disregard for newcomers, who in the final analysis, seem helpless unless and until they escape Tibetan exile communities. Ultimately, I worry that, for all of McDonald’s obviously good intentions, the tone and level that she pitches her critique will prove more harmful and distracting than eye-opening and transformative like she would like.

I enjoyed many parts of this book. Much of the history and personal accounts McDonald has collected are invaluable and unprecedented. It is in many parts an entertaining, unstinting and compassionate read as so many reviewers have said already. The right register of critique, however, is very, very difficult to achieve especially in as sensitive a context as Tibetan exile. In this regard, I am reminded of the section on critique from the ‘How (Not) To Read this Book’ moment of the introduction of your ethnography, Carole McGranahan:

“TO CRITIQUE IS NOT TO INVALIDATE. To ask about the production of history is to explore structures of power. For resistance history this means to critically examine the social politics of the refugee community, the Tibetan government-in-exile, and the Dalai Lama. I critique from a point of engagement; with the veterans’ guidance, my discussion of the pains of exile, of forgetting and loss, of specific disputes within the refugee community is designed to show the very real and deeply felt commitments individuals have to their communities and to their leaders. It is not to invalidate the exile community or the Dalai Lama or the political projects of either, but to show the range of decisions people make in the name of religion, nation and history…[Ultimately, for all of this] I write mostly WITH rather than against. I write with those Tibetan veterans, scholars, and others who understand that to critique is not to invalidate history or politics, but to make them interpretable and bearable in the present.” (McGranahan 2010: 35)

I think McDonald would like to do the same, but each reader will have to decide how successfully and fully she accomplishes this, and with what consequences. For me, the book is uneven in its ‘critiquing with’ and as invalidation, as well as in its genre/project, in a way that makes it hard for me to know just how to recommend and/or critique it as a work myself. McDonald has said that she felt compelled to write the book because no one else had addressed these issues fully, and I know she worked very hard and with a strong sense of commitment and conscience on bringing important issues to light.

Still, McDonald makes it clear throughout that she knows that her brand of critique amounts to bridge-burning. Her keen awareness of the protection and privilege that her non-academic, non-Tibetan position provides her suggests that she herself knows very well that much of her writing is critique not with but against. This is her prerogative, but we as readers must decide how much of each kind of critique we feel is necessary and useful in talking about sensitive issues that affect a vulnerable highly visible population of which we are or are not a part.

This is the longer version of the essay, “Gender Violence, Leadership, and the Modern Tibetan Woman,” that I presented on the 22nd of May with other Tibet and Buddhism scholars at a panel titled “Beyond Goddesses and Yoginis: Buddhism and Gender Across Asian Societies and Traditions” at the Berksire Conference on the History of Women. That essay was later published by the Tibetan Political Review  on their website on May 30th, 2014.

***

The last few decades has seen a rise in Tibetan women’s voices that has led to an increase in women’s leadership positions in the male dominated Tibetan state apparatus in exile—Central Tibetan Administrations (CTA)[1] and leading Tibetan NGOs in Dharamsala, India. This is in part due to the exile/diasporic Tibetan state apparatus’s longstanding cultivation/fostering in both its male and female de facto citizens of a desire to rise to the level of “leadership” in order to politicize Tibet and to serve an already disenfranchised community of Tibetans in exile following Chinese invasion in 1959. But what happens when Tibetan women loyal to their community desire subjectivities not endorsed by the exile government?

 ***

Desiring Leadership:

Leadership, throughout Tibetan history, has shifted through gendered terrains. In Janet Gyatso’s Women in Tibet, an edited collection co-edited with Hanna Havnevik, Gyatso and Havnevik explores lives of leading female figures throughout Tibetan history. The book details the lives of women who became recognized for their leading roles in arenas such as politics and spirituality despite traditional Tibetan notions of women as “low-births” (2005). In regions such as Kham, stories existed of armed women that led tribal men into wars over tribal feud and territory. Women such as Tsering Drola, Khangsar Yangjan Kandrol, and Tonpon of upper Nyarong Gyari Chimi Drolma, who were known in the region as, “The Three Devils of Yangchen Lama of Khangsar Tribe.”[1] However, the women in these historic narratives were the exception, not the norm. Women in Gyatso and Shakya’s narratives were remarkable, in that they defied the gendered norms of their time period that were dictated by their communities; challenging communal beliefs and those in power. But their stories reveal that throughout Tibetan history, female leaders, prior to the Chinese invasion, were not desired but resisted. However, the Chinese invasion and exodus to exile presented Tibetan women with opportunities to assert their own desires to become leaders.

Women in Tibet

The rise of Tibetan women in prominent leadership positions in exile can be attributed to a genealogy of exile Tibetan women’s roles in performing caring-work and welfare during the establishment of the refugee community in India and Nepal. I am interested in tracking the project of leadership, and how it materialized for women, as a desired subjectivity that the Tibetan apparatus needed, to meet the crisis following China’s invasion. To understand the changing role of the female leadership figure in exile Tibetan, I focus on the historic and contemporary role of the Tibetan Women’s Association’s (TWA)[2] to track these changes in leadership in the Tibetan exile polity.

In contemporary exile Tibetan understanding, leadership at its base involves individuals that achieve professionalism through education, who aspire towards leadership by using those learned professional skills to serve the Tibetan society by engaging in communal empowerment and/or politicizing Tibet. Leadership in this context is achieved through an investment in ones own education to access avenues that could empower the individual to become self-making. Such emphasis on education and economics affords Tibetans with, what Carla Freeman calls, “neoliberal mandate for flexibility in all realms of life,” which suggests that the individual be provided with “the capacity to constantly retool, retrain, and respond to the shifting tides of the global marketplace” (2012;88). However, for Tibetans in exile, such “flexibility” was a necessity needed to meet “the shifting tides of” challenges that Tibetans in exile had to face as refugees following the Chinese invasion in 1959. While Freeman frames “the neoliberal mandate for flexibility” on “the shifting tides of the global marketplace,” which has come to embody “middle-class experience” in Barbados; I frame the Tibetan desire for “flexibility”—implied in “entrepreneurs of the self”/leaders—on the “shifting tides” that the Chinese invasion brought to Tibetans who became refugees in Nepal and India. The need for “flexibility” and self-made subjectivities following exile in Nepal and India was not based in just the desire for “middle-class experience,” but the desire to survive, build community, and to politicize Tibet in exile.

***

Gendered Labor in the period of reconstruction:

In the aftermath following Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959, the Tibetan refugee collective required immense labor from its newly displaced population to re-establish community in exile in order to ensure their own survival as a people. With thousands of Tibetans escaping into Nepal and India, the Tibetan apparatus (specifically The Dalai Lama, Lhasa administrators, and wealthy aristocratic families) had no choice but to swiftly respond to the crisis as it unfurled. However, division of labor and roles quickly became gendered. Elite men handled external work involving political advocacy and securing aid in the international arena, while the women busied themselves in the domestic arena as caregivers—to ensure the survival of high numbers of orphaned Tibetan children. Women who took on such roles—like the women from the Dalai Lama’s family, his mother Diki Tsering and sisters Tsering Dolma and Jetsun Pema, and other elite women such as Rinchen Dolma Taring—are affectionately remembered in contemporary exile Tibetan society as exemplary leaders who tirelessly cared for orphaned Tibetan children.

His Holiness and his mother, Gyalyum Chemo.

In Hardt’s “Affective Labor” (1999), he identifies (with caution), women’s “caring-labor” with “biopolitical production.” According to Hardt:

“Biopoltical production here consists primarily in the labor involved in the creation of life—not the activities of procreation but the creation of life precisely in the production and reproduction of affect. […]. Labor works directly on the affects; it produces subjectivity, it produces society, it produces life. Affective labor, in this sense, is ontological—it reveals living labor constituting a form of life and thus demonstrates again the potential of biopolitical production” (99).

It is important to note, using Hardt’s framework, that the role these women took on to care for orphaned Tibetan children involved “biopolitical production.” The children raised from these orphanages went on to become the mothers, fathers, civil servants, teachers, nurses, doctors, and other leading figures that the Tibetan refugee apparatus and community at large needed and desired to “produce [a fully functioning Tibetan] society” in exile. The caring-labor produced by these women, who performed the roles of mothers—literally called Ama, mother, by Tibetans who were raised under their guidance—ensured the “lives” needed to sustain the continuity of the Tibetan collective in exile. These same mother figures went on to become the founding members of the oldest and only Tibetan women’s organization: Tibetan Women’s Association (TWA). Because of TWA’s historic involvement with these historic female figures, TWA becomes an important location to explore the changing roles of the exile Tibetan women, especially in the figure of leadership as desired by the Tibetan apparatus.

***

Tibetan Women’s Association (TWA):

TWA’s historic ties with leading female figures helped the organization gain recognition by the highest levels of authority (the Dalai Lama and CTA). The organization has regional offices across the Tibetan diaspora (Butler 2007). TWA is also well known to have launched leading female figures, in the past and the present, in the exile Tibetan polity. Many former and current female parliamentarians in the male dominated Tibetan Parliament in Exile (TPiE) were either former TWA staff or were promoted by the organization. As an organization that has launched the careers of many female leaders in Tibetan diaspora, it becomes important to review TWAs history to better situation female Tibetan leadership in contemporary Tibetan society

In Alex Butler’s Feminism, Nationalism, and Exiled Tibetan Women, Butler discusses TWA’s history and its changing roles and ideologies in the exile Tibetan polity, which ultimately matched, as she argued, CTAs own projects in exile (2007). According to Butler, between 1985 and 1992, TWA functioned primarily as a nationalist and welfare organization within the exile [Tibetan] community in India and Nepal” (3). This makes sense since the exile Tibetan community was busy constructing refugee Tibetan communities—with Dharamsala serving as its center—during this time (Diehl 2002; McGranahan 2010). Although the organization’s main objective, is to “raise public awareness of the abuses faced by Tibetan women in Chinese-occupied Tibet,” the majority of their role between mid-80s to early-90s in the exile consisted of providing welfare projects—handicraft centers—which provided employment to the continuing flow of undocumented Tibetan female refugees escaping to India. While women during the construction period of the refugee community demonstrated their leadership by providing care-work, leadership in the era between the 80s and 90s seems to have operated under “entrepreneurial imperatives” initiated by TWA to provide “flexibility” to the refuged Tibetan women so that they could become “entrepreneurs of the self” (Freeman 2012;85-88). Such economic initiatives helped Tibetan women ensure income so that they could support themselves and their families, which contributed to populating the Tibetan community. However, by the mid 90s and onwards, TWA’s leadership began shifting their focus beyond welfare projects to include assertive workshops that aimed to “empower” Tibetan women in exile.

TWA’s action at the UN Women’s Conference in Beijing, China.

Between 1994 and 1995, TWA became internationally recognized for their political activities at the UN Women’s Conference held in Beijing (Butler 2007;26). The Tibetan community regarded the campaign in Beijing a success and the women who participated in the campaign became widely celebrated as exemplary leaders by the Tibetan apparatus for actualizing the desire for subjects that politicized Tibet. According to Butler, it was soon after the success of the Beijing campaign that TWA began shifting their focus from welfare projects to include leadership trainings—which had been the central theme at the UN Women’s Conference in Beijing. Leadership trainings, according to Butler, involved “[the] introduction and development of the concept of the ‘empowerment’ of women” (4) with an emphasis on the need for “education” (76). As previously stated, CTA’s desire for leaders involved education. During the initial construction of the refugee community in exile, the Tibetan apparatus spent large portion of their efforts in developing schools both as a place to sustain life and to ensure a future generation that would lead the exile Tibetan community and its message.

***

Desiring Educated Leaders:

H.H.’s younger sister, Jetsun Pema. Head of TCV.

Rincin Dolma Taring, head of Central School for Tibetans (CST).

Education has always played the central theme promoted by the Tibetan apparatus as the avenue through which Tibetans could articulate the Tibetan political message at the national and international level. At the 35^th anniversary of the establishment of Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV)[3], the Dalai Lama lectured, “the future direction of our program will be in the field of further education in specialized studies to meet the human resource needs of the community during our period in exile and more importantly when the time comes for us to go back to our homeland”[4]. The huge wall overlooking TCV’s soccer field contains the motto “Enter to learn, Leave to serve” in big letters. CTA’s heavy investment in children’s education emphasizes that to become the leader that the apparatus desires and needs, one needs to attain a modern education and secure a professional employment that would allow individuals to “serve” the community in exile in the present and the future in a sovereign Tibet. By the mid 90s, the Tibetan apparatus’s heavy investment in educational infrastructure seems to have paid off. With large numbers of adults, who as children were educated and cared for at these institutions, took on roles (as mothers, fathers, teachers, government workers, nurses, doctors, property owners and so on) within the community that “served” to ensure the continuation of the Tibetan community. More importantly, the labor that men and women poured into the building and maintenance of these educational institutions contributed to a generation that helped accelerate the transition of exile Tibetans from a precarious state of survivability towards a thriving exile community that places such as Dharamsala, India, currently exemplifies.

Although CTA’s promotion of education was, in McGranahan’s words, “not gendered male or female in exile (see D. Norbu 1994; Phuntsog 1994; Shastri 1994)” (1996;169); prevailing belief in traditional gender roles kept a large number of exile Tibetan girls from accessing education—especially in poor rural Tibetan communities. TWA’s decision to shift their focus to proliferate leadership workshops with an emphasis on “education” made use of the apparatus’s own desire for leaders with education as a criteria, to meet the gender gap between boys and girls in schools. In addition, the emphasis on education as a path to “empowering” women and girls to access economic and social opportunities coincides with the globalization of neoliberal ideologies that championed “empowerment” through educational and economic avenues. These ideologies were rooted in, as Freeman describes, “affective individualism, self-mastery, and introspective selfhood” (2012;103). TWA’s leadership workshops echo these neoliberal ideals by encouraging Tibetan women to be assertive, informed, and “self-mastered,” in order to become female leaders. By using CTA’s emphasis on education as a desired trait for leaders, TWA is able to campaign for equal opportunities in education and economics for women within the community, while creating spaces that allowed women and girls to discuss how they could also participate in leadership that the apparatus’s desired. Neoliberal desires provided TWA the opportunity to advocate for women’s educational and leadership advancement in arenas that had traditionally been male dominated.

TWA’s women’s advanced leadership training

In an article called, “India’s Tibetan women assuming bigger roles,” published January 1^st 2014,[5] Krishnan, the author, covers TWA’s recent workshop efforts to empower Tibetan women. The participants are described as “graduate students, professional workers, political activists, and teachers.” These workshops, “taught [women] how to take up leadership roles in their community” with trainings on “mainstream media and conflict situations” that could assist them in political campaigns such as lobbying efforts to further “the Tibetan cause.” Workshop facilitators, Dhardon Sharling, a member of the Tibetan parliament in exile (and former TWA staff), and Nyima Lhamo, the General Secretary of TWA, share observations on the recent rise in the number of Tibetan women participating in leadership positions in the Tibetan community. Sharling, who was a TWA member in the past, comments, “ I feel that the Tibetan women in exile are catching up with their male counterparts and traditional gender roles of Tibetan society are being challenged.” Lhamo ends the article with “despite their day-to-day struggle, the desire to win independence for Tibet is still very important for Tibet’s female diaspora.” As can be seen in the statements given by the participants, workshop facilitators and participants exemplify the leaders that the apparatus desires as educated and professional women who are active political and social agents that desire to advance “the Tibetan cause.”

***

Complicated Desires: Advocating Against Gender Violence

Sometime around July in 2011, a story regarding violence against a Tibetan woman carried out by other Tibetans in Tenzigang, a rural town located in the state of Arunachal Pradesh, India began circulating on Facebook. According to TWA, “On July 18 this year TWA received some shocking news by email; a Tibetan woman had been beaten, stripped naked and taken to the market by fellow Tibetans in Tenzinghang, a Tibetan Settlement of 800 people across four camps, 160 km from Bomdilla in Arunachal Pradesh, [India].”[6] The victim, according to the report, was attacked for having started a family with a married man, and the attackers had been the wife and her male and female family members.

As the story began taking on a life of its own on the Internet, a transnational network of Tibetans began asking, “what happened?” out loud. Further, why did CTA remain silent on the issue? TWA responded quickly by dispatching several Tibetan women from Dharamsala to investigate the incident. By August, after having received TWA’s report on the Tenzigang case, CTA’s light handling of the situation sparked off a transnational network of Tibetans criticizing CTA on different social network spaces. Female members of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile (TPiE) responded in September to the growing criticism by drafting a resolution to, “condemn all violence against women [and] to ensure the effective enforcement of the host country’s laws and acts on dealing with any forms of violence against women, and to issue new guidelines to the settlement officers aimed at protecting women’s rights and submit it to Parliament, with a deadline of March 2012.”[7] By May 2013, TWA followed by introducing a new workshop titled “Legal Empowerment of Tibetan Women” (LETW) in seventeen different Tibetan settlements in India.[8] According to the report complied by TWA members, the purpose of the workshop was to collect information on gender violence in each settlements, followed by workshops that informed settlement women on their “legal rights” as defined by India. The following year TWA led the second LETW workshop, in which participants of women between ages 20-40 discussed TWA’s report, which revealed high levels of gender violence currently taking place in the Tibetan exile communities. [9]

TWA’s Legal empowerment workshop for citizens facing or witnessing gender violence.

In Ann Stoler’s “Affective States,” she argues, “that the ‘political rationalities’ [of the state]– that strategically reasoned, administrative common sense that informed policy and practice – [are] grounded in the management of […] affective states, in assessing appropriate sentiments and in fashioning techniques of affective control” (2004:5). While Stoler’s work looks specifically at the management of affects in Indonesia under the colonial Dutch, her emphasis on the management in “affect” as prescribed by the state, in this case desires, can be applied to the Tibetan state apparatus in how they manage certain desires as “appropriate” while deeming others not appropriate.

Gender violence, which covers sexual and domestic abuse, is not new to the Tibetans experience. However, the high level of public participation in discussing the subject that’s currently taking place in the transnational spaces online is new. I would argue that it was not TWA but the transnational network of Tibetans in diaspora, especially women, who were talking about it in the virtual space, that prompted TWA to act on the issue as swiftly as they did. Former TWA staff, such as Dhardon Sharling and Tenzin Palkyi,[10] [11] became leading figures in discussing gendered violence in public Tibetan spaces online. This public conversation was met with criticisms largely from Tibetan men. Men who have responded negatively to public conversation on gender violence have largely dismissed the issue by falsely concluding Tibetan society as having always been a gender equal society, or accusing women advocates of trying to emulate western concepts of modernity by taking on western feminist ideologies. At a workshop on women’s empowerment led by CTA’s women’s empowerment desk, Prime minister Lobsang Sangay gave a speech that encouraged empowerment and leadership of Tibetan women through “education [and] job opportunities,” however; nothing on domestic violence was mentioned[12]. CTA’s general lack of actions targeting gender violence and TWA’s embrace of the campaign presents conflicts between two desires. Although TWA’s campaigns have aligned with CTA in the past, in which both organizations desired educated subjects that desired to become leaders through communal or political engagements, TWA’s current desire to enact leadership by politicizing gender violence, does not seems to align with CTA’s desires; reflected by their inaction on the issue.

Although CTA has not condemned nor celebrated TWA’s new initiative to take on gender violence in the Tibetan community, its general lack of action on the issue reveals how the desire to end gender violence, as advocated by Tibetan women, is neither encouraged nor discouraged by CTA—deeming the issue a non-issue for the male dominated Tibetan apparatus. CTA’s inaction around the issue of gender violence suggests that it will encourage TWA projects as long as they are advocating empowerment for Tibetan women through education and professionalism, which CTA has marked “appropriate,” but will not support or give voice to efforts that have yet to be marked “appropriate.” Women advocates enacting leadership by desiring an end to gender violence diverges from CTA’s own desires for leaders, which include education, but not advocacy for ending gender violence. Unlike TWA’s previous engagements, which prioritized and matched CTA’s own desires; TWA’s recent shift to take on gender violence has complicated the “appropriateness” of the issue. CTA’s lack of advocacy on the subject trivializes the issue and can be interpreted to mean that they don’t consider the desire to advocate against gender violence an approved or encouraged desire.

Following CTA’s lack of actions condemning gender violence, my Facebook newsfeed became flooded with Tibetans engaging in a firestorm of Facebook discussions/fights/rants initiated by posts that discussed gender violence and CTA’s role on the subject. There were people on all spectrums making arguments for or against the subject. More interesting discussions that I noticed taking place were by Tibetan men who were either CTA staff or were former staff members with positions ranging from administrators to civil servants. Their comments varied between denying the issue with the claim that that Tibetan society is gender equal, supporting this issue wholeheartedly, and supporting the issue with a twist. Some commenters acknowledged gender violence in the community but dismissed the issue as distracting from the larger issue of Chinese colonization by revealing the imperfections of the Tibetan collective that would ultimately, in their opinion, damage Tibet as a likable cause to the outside world. In other words, they view the public airing of gender violence in the community as harming the current success of the Tibetan cause.

In McGranahan’s Arrested Histories, she explains historical arrest as, “the apprehension and detaining of particular pasts [and present] in anticipation of their eventual release. Pasts [or presents] that clash with official ways of explaining nation, community, and identity are arrested, in the multiple senses of being held back and delaying progress but also in the ironic sense of drawing attention to these pasts [and presents]” (2010;24). While McGranahan is specifically talking about the “arrest” of Chushi Gangdrug resistance army histories, women who desire the public airing of an issue that has haunted Tibetan women’s past and present are being told by a certain group of Tibetans to put their desires on “arrest” because these desires “clash with official ways of explaining nation, community, and identity” (24) Advocacy against gender violence is deemed problematic because it engages wrongdoings within the community, not China. Because the issue does not deal directly with China, critics (who don’t deny the issue but accuse women advocates of harming the larger political movement for freedom) tell women advocates to put the issue of gender violence on “arrest,” at least until freedom is achieved. However, advocacy against gender violence, as a desire promoted by TWA and other women advocates, call attention to the present realities of the Tibetan women in exile. Such advocates like the CTA, are invested in producing leaders that desire the project of sustenance in exile, the politicizing of Tibet, and a future free Tibet; however, they also want to promote a desire for a Tibetan society, present and future, free of gender violence and discrimination.

In tracing the desires of the exiled Tibetan female leadership figure using TWA’s own historical trajectory, I’ve emphasized how the leadership figure, for Tibetan women, have gone through different transitions that either align with or diverge from the official desires as prescribed by the Tibetan apparatus. However, what about Tibetan women who desire or inhabit subjectivities that are not promoted by CTA or TWA?

***

Desiring Other Subjectivities:

Recently, I was talking to a female friend who asked about my sister. After I told her that my sister was in India studying Tibetan Buddhism, she sarcastically responded with “please don’t let her become a nun.” I asked whether she was joking or was she actually against the idea of my sister becoming a nun, she confirmed she was against the idea. When I asked her to explain, she responded, “Well, the Tibetans are having less babies and as a result our population is decreasing”–a belief rooted in recent studies which reveal the decreasing number in Tibetans due to having less children.  In another incident following a close friends decision to become a nun who later joined a nunnery, other Tibetan friends who know us both questioned me on why she choose that lifestyle. My friends framed the question as, why would Rinzin (name changed), as someone raised in the U.S. with a Bachelors degree who graduated from a well-known college, who is considered attractive and worked at stable and respected job, choose to become a nun? They always followed that question with, “I get it, and good for her, but what’s the point?” The not-so-positive response seems to imply that nun’s lifestyle could maybe achieve some spiritual gratification but what tangible outcome, especially for Tibet, would it serve otherwise?

Tibetan Nuns

The desire to study Buddhism or to become a nun involves renouncing not only worldly matters in the spiritual sense but includes the rejection of prescribed gendered subjectivities in the traditionalist Tibetan sense and subjectivities promoted as “modern” under neoliberal capitalist ideologies—which  promotes the idea of “empowerment” through consumption. Although the Tibetan religious institutions are not free of gender discrimination, the desire to become a nun rejects the gendered subjectivities prescribed by politicized Tibet or the capitalist oriented independent/educated self-making modern woman—this desire is also strangely an indigenous Tibetan response and desire. Yet, the expression of such desires evoked responses such as, “but why?” from Tibetans living in exile, whose subjectivities reflect their concrete reality in which they and the apparatus desires leaders that can ensure the continuity of the community and/or its political message. Religious or ascetic lifestyles as a subjectivity desired is not discouraged by CTA, TWA or the modern Tibetan youth; however, they are not desired either.

Tibetan monastic institutions in exile have seen a sharp drop in the number of exile Tibetans—women and men—desiring monastic subjectivities. Such decreases in numbers reflect how the desire for certain subjectivities, such as religious lifestyles, are neither promoted by CTA or TWA nor desired by the current generation of Tibetans in exile. It is also about the promotion of certain subjectivities as “modern” (educated/professional/leaders), while other subjectivities—such as homemakers, spiritual cave dwellers, and/or story telling grandmothers who also contribute to the sustenance of the Tibetan community and culture in Tibet and across the diaspora—take a back seat to the desire for Tibetan leaders that lead community and politicize Tibet.

 ***

Works Cited:

Butler, A. 2003. Feminism, Nationalism, and Exiled Tibetan Women. Zubaan.

Diehl, K. (2002). Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the life of a Tibetan refugee community. Univ of California Press.

Freeman, Carla. 2012. “Neoliberal Respectability: Entrepreneurial Marriage, Affective Labor, and a New Caribbean Middle Class.” In The Global Middle Classes: Theorizing Through Ethnography. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.

Gyatso, J., & Havnevik, H. (Eds.). 2005. Women in Tibet. Columbia University Press.

Hardt, Michael. 1999. “Affective Labor,” boundary 2 26(2):89-100.

Joffe, Ben. 2010. “Roots and Routes.” Unpublished Masters Dissertation, University of Cape Town. < http://uctscholar.uct.ac.za/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=4618&local_base=GEN01>

McGranahan, C. 2010. Arrested histories: Tibet, the CIA, and memories of a forgotten war. Duke University Press.

McGranahan, C. 2010. “Narrative Dispossession: Tibet and the Gendered Logics of Historical Possibility.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52(04), 768-797.

Rofel, Lisa. 2007. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism:Experiments in neoliberalism, sexuality, and public culture. Duke University Press.

Shakya, Tsering. 2014. Private conversation with Dr. Tsering Shakya who shared information regarding the three female warriors of Kham from his private research notes.

Stoler, Ann. 2004. “Affective States,” In A Companion to Anthropology of Politics, Nugent, David and Joan Vincent, ed. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

[1] Shakya, Tsering. 2014. Private conversation with Dr. Tsering Shakya who graciously shared information regarding the three female warriors of Kham from his private research notes.

[2] “Tibetan Women’s Organization,” http://tibetanwomen.org/, (May 2, 2014)

[3] “Tibetan Children’s Village,” http://www.tcv.org.in/, (May 2, 2014)

[4] “About Us,” http://www.tcv.org.in/content/about-us, (May 2, 2014)

[5] “India’s Tibetan women assuming bigger roles,” http://www.dw.de/indias-tibetan-women-assuming-bigger-roles/a-17336447, (May 2, 2014)

[6] “Violence against a Tibetan Woman in Tenzigang: TWA’s report September 2011,” http://tibetanwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/TWA-report-on-sexual-violence-against-a-Tibetan-Woman-in-Tenzinghang-2011.pdf, (May 4, 2014)

[7] “Revisiting the ‘Tenzingang Incident’ after the Delhi Rape/Murder Case,” http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=32874&t=1, (May 2, 2014)

[8] “Know your Right: Legal Empowerment project,” http://tibetanwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/summer-voice-edition-2013.pdf (May 4, 2014)

[9] “Legal Empowerment of Tibetan Women-Symposium Report,” http://tibetanwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Voice_for-website.pdf, (May 4, 2014)

[10] “Reaching For The Sky: A Policy Solution to Gender Inequality,” http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=33644, (May 4, 2014)

[11] “Growing Up a Girl in India,” http://www.phayul.com/mobile/?page=view&c=4&id=34417, (May 4, 2014)

[12] “Gender Equality & Women Empowerment crucial for holistic social growth: Sikyong,” http://tibet.net/2013/12/17/gender-equality-and-women-empowerment-crucial-for-holistic-social-growth-sikyong/, (May 2, 2014)

A few Lhakar Wednesdays ago, NY & NJ Lhakar team held one of the most (among many) fun celebratory event. According to their Facebook album, they wrote,

Gorshey night at heart of Jackson Heights. Teach by:-Loga La, Ngabod La, Thiley Namgyal La, Dawa Yangzom La, AND DJ by Tashi Sherpa La with his volunteer and equipment. Lead by Gompo Sakya La and Lodoe La, Every one had great Lhakar night!!

Jackson Heights, as you may all know from previous LD posts, is what a few of us folks call ‘Little Tibet’ due to the high number of Tibetans the place attracts.

Gorshey is a favorite among Tibetans, especially among elders (who always seem to be the ones starting it). The circle dance only has one requirement, to join in the circle (which can bloom to a huge size depending on participants) and dance, whether perfectly or imperfectly. It’s wonderful, in that it’s inviting and inclusive. I’ve always enjoyed them since childhood because of how fun and inviting they were. For Tibetans living in the West, Gorshey’s are hard to come by. They only take place during communal celebrations; they are rarely spontaneous and they almost always take place within communal space. What I found wonderful about NY and NJ’s Gorshey is that they decided to take a circle dance to spaces that Tibetans may judge as casual or mundane, yet still a little Tibetan. Jackson Heights is where Tibetans go for shopping, eating, and hanging about–it’s the space where they do the things that would be considered the mundane every-day (Tibetan) activities. It’s not quit the space where you’ll find Tibetans doing cultural things specific to the Tibetan culture, like the Gorshey, because it’s a shared social, not so much cultural, space, also, it’s not really our space.

As I mentioned, those of us in the West, we wait for special events like Losar, weddings, HH’s birthday, and so on, to party together as a collective in a Tibetan space where Gorshey is popular among other dance favorites. While in Dharamsala, Gorshey’s are known to break out in the middle of the busy intersection in McLeod, such events in NY is not the norm. So when I saw NY & NJ Lhakar team’s Gorshey video in Jackson Heights, the every-day space for immigrants of Tibetan, Nepali, Indian, and other south-Asian descent, I was immediately hit with nostalgia. Like I said, I always enjoyed Gorshey from childhood, because of how inclusive it was. It was the one space where Tibetans did not judge my imperfect Tibetaness but accepted the imperfections, whether I danced it right or not didn’t matter, and if I wanted to get the steps down the people closest would help explain how the steps worked. It was a space of enjoyment, along with dancing came laughter for dancers and watchers. For me, as a Tibetan American-teen back in the days, it was where I found common ground and laughter with the oldest in the community.

It was wonderful watching NY & NJ Lhakar team do the circle dance in a space where you wouldn’t normally find Tibetans doing the Gorshey and asserting a sense of self and a collective in a communal cultural and public way–such assertions are usually reserved for political activities. It was also nice watching them transform that space temporarily into our space through Gorshey.

Here are some pictures from the event that you may enjoy:

After two weeks in Boudha, Kathmandu, Nepal, I became bored. I was itching to get out. Several friends on Facebook suggested I check out Sherpa country or Mustang, and then I remembered my friend Tsering Lama. She had traveled to Lomanthang several years back and I remembered her mentioning how she had gone up to the border to see Tibet. I knew nothing about Mustang, apart from seeing a few documentaries, but I knew, like Tsering, I wanted to travel to Mustang so I could see Tibet. I knew seeing Tibet would be emotional, but what I didn’t expect was the emotion that the journey itself provoked.

***

Jomsom area

Jomsom

In the articles and films I had read and seen before this journey, Mustang had always been explained by non-Mustangis as a distinct Himalayan territory with people who practiced Tibetan Buddhist culture but with a distinct Himalayan political and cultural identity. With this in mind, I thought I would find maybe cultural similarities with people in Mustang but nothing more. The first shock came upon landing in Jomsom. Tenzin, my travel partner asked a local man in Nepali where we could get a room. As the man began to reply in Nepali, I asked Tenzin in Tibetan if we could catch a bus or a car straight to Lomanthang, which I thought was Mustang—thinking Mustang was one specific place as depicted in documentaries and not knowing Jomsom was actually part of a vast territory and kingdom called Mustang. To my surprise, the man quickly changed from Nepali to Tibetan and asked, “Are you guys Tibetan?” When we confirmed we were, he continued in Tibetan and explained with a chuckle how we were already in Mustang territory and Lomanthang was not going to happen since we had missed the only jeep that sometimes went up in the mornings. He told us we could try catching it the next day instead and took us to a guesthouse owned by his nephew. Once the man told his nephew that we were Tibetan, to my surprise the nephew gave us a discount on a room. At lunch, although everyone mostly spoke their local dialect or Nepali, since I could speak neither, they spoke Tibetan when addressing us. The same man, who we began calling Chocho (big brother), explained how to get to Lomanthang and other sacred Guru Rinpoche sites scattered along the way by local jeep. From Jomsom on up, he explained to my surprise, we no longer needed to use Nepali since everyone further up spoke fluent Tibetan.

***

The road, upper Mustang

Journey to Lomanthang and the Lo Palas

Lo palas on our way up to Lomanthang.

We arrived early at the local bus stop, which was located right next to a new Sakya monastery, and asked if any jeeps were headed for Lomanthang. Just as Chocho had explained, the person at the counter told us a jeep would only go if enough people joined us to fill the jeep for the journey. After waiting maybe thirty minutes, three palas—who looked like the typical Tsangpa Tibetan palas I grew up with at the usual Tibetan community gatherings—showed up. One of them, like Tenzin, was wearing a bhosu-wonju, a Tibetan shirt. Tenzin asked in Tibetan if they were headed for Lomanthang, they said yes, followed by, “Yul gapa ney yin” (which place are you from)? We said, “we are Tibetan,” and they said “oh nyingjey” and asked if we were headed up for pilgrimage. Tenzin explained that he was but that I was particularly interested in seeing Tibet. One of the Lo palas explained, like other Mustangis we had met in Jomsom, that Mustang had been part of Tibet until about two hundred years ago and followed this with, “Ngantso chikpa rey da” (we are the same). Tenzin and I both felt the familiarity and agreed that we did indeed share many similarities culturally. As the jeep climbed higher and higher up the mountains, the Lo palas began dozing off. I, on the other hand, hung my head out of the window to gawk at the beautiful landscape that kept changing the further we went. I put on my headphones and played “Bless This Morning Year” by Helios on repeat the whole ride up. During one of the stops, another Lo pala and two older monks joined us in the jeep and sat in the back where Tenzin had been sitting, they asked where we are from, the other palas—who all seemed to know each other—answered for us and told them we were Tibetan. As we rode further up, the older monk told Tenzin stories about the sacred sites we passed by while the pala’ pointed out camps that former Chushi Gandrug fighters–Tibetan resistance fighters that fought the Chinese till the late 70s–had settled in and said, “these camps are both Lo and Tibetan.” The jeep made short stops in small Lo villages where we were treated to local chang (homebrew) and tea without charge. It seemed they all knew each other. The familiarity with which the Lo palas embraced us, the landscape that matched rural Tibet, and the same song blasting in my ear made me more and more emotional as we got closer to our destination—wondering if this familiarity and beauty is what Tibet actually felt like. As the palas began getting off one by one, they told us to come visit and stay at their homes if we found the time and bid us farewell. One of the palas had decided we were staying at his house and he would show us how to get to Ghar Gompa, a sacred monastery built in the 8^th century, which was close to his village. We agreed and got off at Marang with him—mistakenly thinking we had arrived in Lomanthang.

***

Marang

Dinner Conversation in Marang

When we arrived at pala’s house in Marang, the house was already packed with four other younger men from the town. They were sitting around the fire stove with water boiling for tea on top. Ama la, pala’s wife, immediately seated us and handed me a cup of tea but served Tenzin a glass of local chang. After pala explained we were Tibetan, one of the men looked over at me and said, “we are the same, we are just like the Tibetans.” To my surprise, the pala interjected and asked, “what are you trying to say? That we aren’t Tibetan?” The man quickly replied, “of course I’m not saying that, we most definitely are.” The exchange made me think about how fragile nationally defined identities are. Although Marang is located geographically within Nepal, the Lo pala identified himself as a person of Lo first and as a Tibetan second. What was even more interesting was that there were two Nepalis doing construction work in the town there that night. After they left, the pala explained, “they are rongpa [a Tibetan word for Nepali], they do construction work here, we don’t have any [cultural] similarities to them but they are very nice.” Pala’s strong cultural identification with us as Tibetans versus his cultural distancing from the rongpas made me think about the blurriness of geopolitically defined identities, especially when it came to border communities such as Marang.

***

Showtime in Kagbeni

Kagbeni

On our way back from upper Lo, we decided to spend a night in Kagbeni so we could go to Lo Chimi Gyatso (Muktinath) the next day to visit the famous Buddhist site, Dolamaybar Gompa. The jeep stopped near a hotel located next to the local school. We decided to go in but before we took a step the girl sitting at the hotel counter came out and asked if we were Tibetan. She overheard us while we were talking outside and asked if we needed help. We told her we were trying to find a cheap hotel room; she asked a friend to step in for her and took us to another hotel affiliated with the one she worked for. On the way there, we asked if she is also Tibetan since she spoke Tibetan with the same accent as us. She explained she’s from Kagbeni but had attended a Tibetan school in Pokhara. When we arrived at the hotel she spoke to the manager who gave us a discount on a room after she told him we were Tibetan. Later that evening, we decided to go to the show that the local school was putting as the same sweet girl had told us that the school was celebrating its anniversary. We decided to sit in the back and local amalas and palas lined up on our right speaking Tibetan in the local village dialect while young girls and boys stood behind us speaking Nepali—although they could also speak Tibetan when addressed in Tibetan. The school children performed Newari, English, and Bollywood numbers. They also danced to songs by exile Tibetan pop stars Phurbu T. Namgyal and Tsering Gyurmey, and we all sang along. When people close to us overheard us speaking Tibetan, they asked, “yul gaba ney yin?” (Which place are you from?) in the village dialect. We answered, “we are Tibetan,” and they responded with a smile, “oh nyingjey, here for pilgrimage right?” Throughout the show, with school children performing Tibetan numbers in between Nepali songs, hearing people speak both Nepali and Tibetan, I was yet again reminded of the blurriness of nationally defined identities. Here, as in Marang, I was reminded again of how local identities refuse to fit neatly into identities prescribed by the state.

Performing to Phurbu T. Namgyal’s “Ngai Phayul Gang-jen Jong”

***

Finding Myself Amidst Familiarity

Tsarang, located 3hrs walk down from Marang.

What I found most surprising about my travel throughout the Kingdom of Lo was the unexpected feeling of familiarity. I thought I would feel like a tourist throughout the journey, however, to my surprise I was greeted with familiarity each and every time. The Lo Tibetan palas’ readiness to embrace us, local tea shop owners’ readiness to offer tea in welcome, local girls speaking Tibetan in exile dialect offering us help—such readiness made me feel safe and familiar with people whom I had never met. It reminded me of the everyday members of the exile Tibetan community I had grown up with. This familiarity matched how I felt in the environment, when we walked long distance from town to town, we were always greeted with the familiar Tashi Delek by local people passing by who readily gave us directions. I’ve lived as an exile Tibetan my entire life; for me living with that identity meant I never felt quite-at-home anywhere except for when we create communal spaces during Tibetan celebrations in the States or when living in an exile community like McLeod Ganj. However, for me, the feeling of exile meant knowing that once I left those small communal spaces, I would land right back in a foreign space, whether in the US or India. A feeling of foreignness has always been my norm. That’s why feeling safe and familiar in Lo towns or plains, whether alone or not, was something I had never felt before. I felt completely and utterly at home in Lo and that was something I had not anticipated. So when I wasn’t able to make it to the border to see Tibet, I was reminded of what the pala in Marang said, “it’s as if here, you are in Tibet.”