Painting by Liang Jun Yan

Feminism isn’t about having to be a certain kind of “strong,” it’s about letting people have their own definitions of who they are and the rest of us accepting that instead of trying to get others to become “stronger” or “weaker” in accordance with how you (man or woman) want to imagine how women should be.

Tibetan women’s ideas and definitions need not have to be narrowed to put together what Tibetan women should be. Instead, we need to imagine a kind of feminism that empowers those that want to push the social boundaries, as well as accept those that are content.

What feminism means for each of us can change during one lifetime since we hardly ever remain the same individuals as we travel through time. In other words, the kind of Tibetan feminism I imagine isn’t about asking others to change or not to change. Feminism is about human rights, not what kind of human lives we need to lead. I’m against the idea of being a woman and not a person. There are gendered ideas about femininity, masculinity and/or sexuality when people start arguing what women should be like. Rather, I want to see a feminism that accepts all kinds of womanhood and personhood, that is able to make space and account for the voices of those who may be content –such as our grandmothers, who may enjoy their status as grandmothers and who aren’t necessarily dis-empowered by it.

Each individual journey is different. Just because we share identities as women, doesn’t mean all our subjectivities are the same. Many white feminists are often criticized for ignoring intersectional identities such as race and class when it comes to the experiences of women different from them. We, as Tibetan women, should also not forget the intersectionalities that influence what it means to identify as a Tibetan and a woman. Although most Tibetan women may share the identity of being marginalized either as refugees or as colonized subjects (intersectional realities that mainstream white women don’t have to worry about), that doesn’t change the fact that we all lead different lives. Even within the category of being Tibetan, intersectional identities such as class, sexuality, and/or disability (to name a few) can affect how certain Tibetan women have more or less access to power and/or empowerment and how they understand what this might look like. Intersectional identities are about recognizing the many different ways in which people define themselves and their challenges.

Feminism isn’t about preaching a certain kind of feminism. It’s about accepting all kinds of (intersectional) subjectivities and understanding how these (intersectional) subjectivities are made harder or easier depending on the changing time and those (multiple groups) in power. Yes it’s about making changes, but it’s also about respecting and understanding other ways of being/feeling.

For me as a Tibetan feminist, I don’t want to make the same mistakes white feminists make by telling us what and how to think when it comes to empowerment, instead I want to understand all the many different ways in which Tibetan women have felt empowered in history and in the present.

While Tibetan society, for the most part, has been dominated by patriarchal hierarchies throughout our history, our culture has also offered women, such as Machik Labdron, avenues through which she could achieve empowerment using cultural and spiritual means. Tibetan feminism to me in the present is about engaging empowered ways of being based on new things I’ve learned from mainstream feminism in the west. But my concepts of empowerment are also informed by the number of ways different Tibetan women approached different ways of being empowered throughout Tibetan history to fight against patriarchal (sexist) attitudes. We need to be clear on being against not men, or other kinds of women, but patriarchal attitudes which both men and women engage in, which ends up harming women and queer individuals the most.

In my attempt to engage more historic female figures in Tibetan history, I’ve decided to share a close reading of Janet Gyatso’s Down with the “Down with the Demoness: Reflections on a Feminine Ground in Tibet” (1989). Through an engagement with historic female figures in gendered histories of Tibet, I hope to find out more about Tibetan women and societies of our shared pasts and how we want to go about understanding our histories and ourselves in the present. This is also a continuation of a conversation I began with “On Being Tibetan and a(n) Intersectional Feminist,” to look deeper at Tibetan histories with gendered lens. I hope this close reading brings you the same excitement it brought me.

Srin Mo

Janet Gyatso’s “Down with the Demoness: Reflections on a Feminine Ground in Tibet,” is interested in analyzing both the myth and the gendered aspect of the demoness Srin (1989). According to the myth, as recorded in the terma Mani bka’ ‘bum, the Chinese wife of King Songtsen Gampo, Kong Jo, is troubled by the amount of difficulty she is facing in “transporting the statue of Sakyamuni to the Tibetan court” (37). She has a vision where she realizes the demoness Srin, who represents the Tibetan landscape itself, is causing all the difficulties. To subdue her, they build a total of thirteen Buddhist temples, some of which still stand today in places like Bhutan (39), to pin her down on her back. Four in the inner realm of Tibet to pin her shoulder and hip. Four at the border areas, pinning her knees and elbows. Four at the boarders beyond to pin her hands and feet. And finally, one at the Jo-khang, symbolizing her heart and considered the center of Tibet (38). Thus Srin is subdued and Buddhism can reign over Tibet. Besides Buddhist domination of Srin, what is this myth really about? And why is the demoness gendered as female?

According to Gyatso, this isn’t the first time Srin is referred to as mo, female. In the Tibetan myth of the copulation between a compassionate monkey and a lustful rock ogress, which brings about the birth of the first Tibetan, Srin is portrayed as mo. In this myth, the monkey is portrayed as the male Avalokitesvara and Srin as the female rock ogress (44). Although Srin is portrayed as mo in both of the myths, whether Srin is in fact female is unclear due to a lack of sources from pre-Buddhist Tibet. For David Paul, the feminization of Srin in the Buddhist cannon may have something to do with how Buddhists of that time viewed women. Women according to Buddhists of that time were associated with desire and attachment, which was seen as dangerous and threatening to the celibate Buddhist monk (44).

The Rock Ogress and Monkey

Srin mo, according to Gyatso, “does not primarily represent woman, but rather a religion, or more accurately, a religious culture and world view that is being dominated” (45). In the subjugation of Srin, Srin isn’t killed, she is instead subdued and a new civilization is built on top of her, symbolized by the construction of Buddhist temples (40). Although it is the Bon tradition that is being dominated by Buddhism in the myth, Buddhism, according to Gyatso, may be “mimicking a pattern already established by Bon” (46). In Grub mtha’ shel gyi me long, “a late but well regarded account of the history of the religions of Tibet,” it is Bon that is subduing Srin, but this time, portrayed as Srin-po, male (46). Long before Buddhism, the Bon tradition, according to Erik Haarh, also invaded Tibet; Gyatso writes, “Bon-po text also contains a self-congratulatory account of the disruption and suppression of the earth beings by buildings” (50). Srin, according to R. A. Stein, belongs to an indigenous Tibetan tradition that predates Buddhism and Bon, a tradition he calls the “nameless Tibetan religion” (50). Although there are no explicit accounts of this nameless Tibetan religion, “Srin-mo is actually kept alive” ironically, according to Gyatso, through the narratives of her subjugation by the civilizations that came after and build upon her (50). So what does all this mean?

Srin, according to Gyatso, is a strong reminder to the Tibetans of their indigenous “fierce and savage” roots. Of how Tibetans view their land as a living organism that, as shown through King gLang dar ma’s concern for these beings (49), can be “violated, offended, and even wounded,” but can also be “appeased, protected, heeded, and valorized” (49). Srin also is a testament to strong female figures in Tibetan history, who Gyatso notes, were “notably more assertive than some of her Asian neighbors” (51)—accounts from the Sui shu and T’ang shu in eighth century A.D. and Tibetan texts from fifth century Tun-huang, describe matriarchal “female-dominated” societies ruled by Tibetan women, where “the supreme ruler was the queen, and sons took the family name of their mother. The men were still the warriors, but they were directed by women” (34). Her myth and her associations with femininity and indigeniety were so formidable that, as Gyatso continues, “the masculine power structure of Tibetan myth had to go to great lengths to keep the female presence under control” (50). But perhaps the most interesting aspect of Srin is the non-guaranteed aspect of her subjugation. Although she may be, “pinned, and rendered motionless” for now, “she threatens to break loose at any relaxing of vigilance or deterioration of civilization” (51). I want to draw your attention to, “deterioration of civilization.” Which I take to be a fair warning about Tibetans—especially women—from the past, present, and future.

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Sera Khandro

Sarah H. Jacoby’s Love And Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro (2014) is a close reading by Jacoby on the life and times of Sera Khandro, a renowned female terton (treasure revealer) famous throughout eastern Tibet. She was born in the central Tibetan city of Lhasa in 1881 and died in the eastern Tibetan region of Golok in 1940. On her chosen path toward spiritual enlightenment, Sera Khandro faced many difficulties due to the lowly status of women in the societies in which she interacted. Sera Khandro, who wrote her own namtar (religious autobiography), was an anomaly in a male dominated religious world, where mostly male practitioners authored their own namtars. In the societies in which Sera Khandro lived, she was the exception, not the rule. Due to such facts, Sera Khandro’s autobiography becomes an important historical text that deserves close analysis. Jacoby’s take on Sera Khandro’s life tries to do just that; she writes, “…this book suggests that we can perform a micro-study of gender and life narrative among the particular communities in which Sear Khandro lived,” this in turn, Jacoby argues, “can inform our understanding of a rang of topics, including the positions of women as nuns and consorts, tensions between celibate and noncelibate interpretations of ideal Vajrayana conduct, and public opinion on these sensitive matters” (2014: 14). In the following paragraphs, I focus my discussion on Jacoby’s gendered reading of Sera Khandro’s autobiography.

The book’s chapters mainly focus on her difficult spiritual path, the men in her life, deities from her visions, and her role as a Tantric consort. In chapter one, “The Life and Times of Sera Khandro,” Jacoby does a brief overview of Sera Khandro’s ordeals and accomplishments. Her autobiography, according to Jacoby, can be broken into five phases, “1) her religious aspirations and obstacles during her childhood in Lhasa from birth through age twelve; 2) the difficulties of her departure from Lhasa and entry into Golok from age thirteen through seventeen; 3) her life as Gyelse’s spouse at Benak Monastery in Golok from age eighteen through twenty-seven; 4) her reunion with her root lama, Drime Ozer, from age twenty-eight through thirty-one; an 5) her life afterward based at Sera Monastery in Serta, from age thirty-two on” (24). At each phase, Sera Khandro met and overcame difficulties that arose due to her gendered subjectivity as a woman who dared to choose her own path in a male dominated spirituality.

Aristocratic Women in Lhasa

Although Sera Khandro was born to a powerful aristocratic family—her father was a descendent of Mongolian royalty, and her mother was from Tibetan nobility—meant to live out her life involved in politics and power, she ultimately rejected this lifestyle and chose to run away instead, to embark on her spiritual path. While her parents, who were described as religiously devout, acknowledged Sera Khandro’s affinity to religious life from a young age—having observed auspicious signs and being recognized at seven as an “authentic incarnation of Sakya Tamdrin Wangmo” and not suited for “either a householder or a nun” by Changdrong Druptop Rinpoche (34)—her father ignored such strong signs and arranged for her to be married instead to an influential Chinese district official (representatives of the Qing Dynasty) in Lhasa and intended for her to live her life as an aristocrat. At twelve, in 1904, grief stricken after the death of her mother, Sera Khandro experienced a visionary interaction with dakini Vajravarahi, who empowered her in two treasures, The Secret Treasury of Reality Ḍākinīs and The Ḍākinīs’ Heart Essence—both works would later go on to become her life’s main teachings. Feeling empowered after the interaction, Sera Khandro makes the decision to choose her own path and plans her escape. At fourteen, while at her brother’s estate, where she hatched a plan to escape, she chances upon Drime Ozer and his entourage of pilgrims from Golok being hosted by her brother. Feeling a strong sense of devotion and connection, she decides to follow him to Golok a year after in 1907, thus leaving behind a comfortable lifestyle and rejecting the prospect of becoming the wife of a wealthy and powerful figure—a privileged yet gendered role that she viewed as limiting her spiritual aspirations. Unfortunately for Sara Khandro, the eight month long rough journey from Lhasa to Dartsang, where she caught up with Drime Ozer’s camp, would only prove to be the beginning of a journey filled with obstacles.

From the time she reached Golok, Sera Khandro’s life became entangled with the lives of Akyongza, Yakza, and Gara Gyelse—all three figures later became the biggest hindrances on her spiritual path. Akyongza belonged to a powerful family in Golok; she was also Drime Ozer’s consort. With strong familial foundations, she was a strong figure in her own right. When Drime Ozer brought Sera Khandro, who was sixteen at the time, with him to their estate, she was immediately met with hostility and jealousy. Akyongza banishes Sera Khandro from their estate and prevents any sort of consort relationship from developing between the two. While working as a maid for a local nomadic family and doing her preliminary practices, she is summoned by the treasure revealer Gara Terchen from Benak Monastery. Acting on prophecies he received that predicted Sera Khandro as aiding his deteriorating health (5), she is yet again, prevented from coming by another consort, Yakza—Gara Terchen’s consort. Like Akyongza, Yakza became threatened by the sixteen-year-old Sera Khandro and warned her to stay away with letters. However, with Gara Terchen’s deteriorating health in 1910, Sera Khandro comes to Benak, but is immediately prevented by Yakza from entering their estate, which, in turn, costs Gara Terchen his life. Soon after, Sera Khandro described having a visionary interaction with Gara Terchen, who empowers and entrusts her with his teachings—earning her the highest respect from some of his most devout students. In 1912, at the age of twenty, she agrees to become the consort of Gara Gyelse, Gara Terchen’s eldest son. Together they had three children, one daughter and two sons, however, only her eldest child would survive. Sara Khandro describes her life with Gyelse as tumultuous. During their time together, she continues performing healing powers and revealing treasures, earning followers along the way. Yet Gyelse, according to Jacoby, remained unsupportive—refusing her requests for teachings and belittling her practices, despite being recognized as a khandroma by Gotrul Rinpoche at twenty-three. Gyelse eventually takes up with another consort, Seldron. At the age of twenty-nine, her longstanding struggles with arthritis of the leg becomes severe and she nearly dies; prompting Gyelse to send her off to Drime Ozer for good. Finally reunited, Sara Khandro describes this to be the happiest time in her life, despite Akyongza’s hostility. Together they would reveal great treasures and heal each other’s ailments, eventually leading to each other’s spiritual liberation. However, their time together was short-lived. In 1924, after only three years together, an epidemic kills her son and Drime Ozer. Soon after his death, Akyongza expels Sera Khandro from their estate. However, Sotrul Naksok Rangdrol Rinpoche, a close disciple of Drime Ozer, invites Sara Khandro to live at his estate at Sera Monastery—where she begins to teach throughout eastern Tibet and came to be known as “Sera Khandro.” During her time at Sera, she composed Drime Ozer’s biography and her autobiography, and continued revealing treasures, terma, from Dujuom Lingpa, Drime Ozer, Gara Terchen as well as revealing her own treasures. This made her popular among Nyingma practioners who requested her teachings. Her disciples included students from Jonang, Kagyu, and Bon linages. She taught throughout eastern Tibet until her death at the age of forty-eight, in 1940 at one of her disciples Zhapdrung Tsewang Drakpa’s estate in Riwoche.

Pilgrims near Amnye Machen (Grandfather Mountain)

Although Sera Khandro eventually achieved her spiritual goals, Jacoby points to the gendered nature of her obstacles. Jacoby rightly characterizes Akyongza and Yakza’s reaction to the young and beautiful Sara Khandro as based in jealousy, however, I find this characterization too simplistic and gendered. While the women may have felt jealous, there is not much discussion on Akyongza and Yakza’s sense of threat. Like Sera Khandro, Akyongza and Yaza also inhabited a patriarchal society in which elevated roles for women were scarce and competition for those few options, as exemplified by Akyongza and Yakza’s actions, were at times, fierce. Jacoby describes Akyongza and Yakza as hailing from powerful Golok familial clans, their families would have been patrons who contributed greatly to the treasure revealer’s personal and monastic welfare. Being the main consort of a treasure revealer would constitute high status for the consort among her spiritual partner’s followers and also meant having better access to one’s own spiritual growth. In such a situation, what would it have meant for Akyongza and Yakza to perceive a young Sera Khandro as threatening their established positions as main consorts? Although Sera Khandro hailed from an aristocratic background in Lhasa, none of this mattered, according to Jacoby, in the eastern Tibetan region of Golok. The Golok of Sera Khandro’s time is described as a strongly independent district with its own social hierarchies and norms and paid no attention to the authorities in Central Tibet or China. Regional networks of prestige and patronage mattered to Akyongza and Yakza; yet, Jacoby’s interpretation of the two women as “jealous consorts” misses this analytical consideration. Instead, her simple characterization re-emphasizes the kinds of gendered norms she argues Sera Khandro was up against. While Sera Khandro may have employed this villainizing characteristic of the two women in her autobiography, Jacoby could have extended her gendered reading of Sera Khandro’s life to address the equally gendered challenges faced by the two other consorts in Sear Khandro’s autobiography as they negotiated their own positions as powerful women as well.

In addition to considering a gendered approach to analyzing Akyongza and Yakza’s perceived threats to their status, a class analysis in regards to the mistreatment Sera Khandro received during her spiritual journey would have emboldened Jacoby’s insights. The strong familial connections of Akyongza and Yakza in Golok that Jacoby points to, contributed greatly to both women’s status and safety, and enabled their actions against Sera Khandro, whether in spreading bad rumors or having the power to expel or prevent Sera Khandro from entering their estates. While Sara Khandro’s gendered status does contribute to her misery, as clearly demonstrated by Gyelse’s trivialization of her spiritual achievements, her lack of class and hereditary status in Golok exposed her as an easy target for the other two consorts. Although Jacoby does talk about Sera Khandro’s lack of hereditary roots in Golok later in the chapters in reference to her spiritual achievements, Jacoby fails to do a thicker analysis of Sera Khandro’s lack of class and hereditary status as contributing factors that doubly affected the mistreatment she received in Golok. After all, if Sera Khandro had been from a prominent family from Golok, the other consorts and Gyelse would have had a harder time mistreating her.

Khando Yeshe Tsogyal

In chapters two and three, “A Guest in the Sacred Land of Golok” and “Dakini Dialogues,” Jacoby stresses the important roles dakinis play throughout Sera Khandro’s spiritual journey. Sera Khandro also emphasizes their roles throughout her spiritual autobiography and according to Jacoby, they served to legitimize Sara Khandro’s spiritual path. Sera Khandro was writing her spiritual autobiography during a time when very few female practitioners authored their own namtars. Like her male counterparts, her autobiography also served to authenticate her difficult journey towards liberation, and served as an instructional manual for her students. In chapter two, Jacoby is interested in exploring the reasons behind Sera Khandro’s frequent visionary interactions with Yeshe Tsogyel and other local deities of Golok. Both Drime Ozer and Gara Terchen were recognized incarnations of previously known spiritual teachers; additionally, their lineages were well recognized and respected throughout Golok. Unlike her male partners, Sera Khandro was not a recognized incarnate lineage holder from Golok, yet she was a highly regarded practitioner who trained and taught throughout Golok. According to Jacoby, in her autobiography, Sera Khandro draws heavily from Yeshe Tsogyel not only as a religious model but also makes strong genealogical connections with Yeshe Tsogyel by claiming to be her emanation. In a similar fashion, Sera Khandro’s visionary interactions with local Golok deities such as Anye Machen and Drong Mountain, makes up for her lack of hereditary roots in Golok for the Golok audience. Jacoby writes, “…her inspirations were as local as they were transregional, as tied to Golok society and landscape as more universally Buddhist, and as implicated in sociopolitical dynamics as in spiritual liberation. If Sera Khandro was an emanation of Yeshe Tsogyel, Anye Machen and Drong Mountains’ endorsement also held great value in Golok.” (129). Through her strong identifications with such highly regarded regional and transregional figures, Sera Khandro establishes herself as an incarnate lineage holder.

Amnye Machen

In chapter three, Jacoby takes a closer look at the exchanges between Sera Khandro and the dakinis with whom she interacts with throughout her journey. They appeared to her in both wrathful and peaceful forms, depending on the situation. As previously mentioned, Sera Khandro was attempting to pursue a spiritual path in a male dominated society and spirituality (through its institutional structure); as such, she faced many gendered difficulties. Throughout her autobiography, she repeatedly laments her “inferior female body,” in reaction to all the difficulties she faces as a female practitioner. In addition to giving Sera Khandro teachings, dakinis also appeared when she seemed to give into hopelessness and despair during difficult times on her journey. At such times, she records dakinis as appearing to encourage her forward or reprimand her for self-loathing. In comparison to Dujum Lingpa and Gara Terchen’s autobiography, Jacoby notes, they barely dwell on their gendered bodies as much as Sera Khandro does. However, Jacoby argues that the repeated lamentation of her female body that Sera Khandro employs throughout her autobiography is an autobiographical strategy to demonstrate her accomplishments while remaining humble. For example, whenever she is lamenting her “inferior body,” she uses a dakini or a male partner’s voices to uplift and compliments her for her spiritual achievements; thus, highlighting her own achievements while remaining humble.

In chapter four, “Sacred Sexuality,” Jacoby discusses Sera Khandro’s role as a tantric consort and how she negotiated that role throughout her autobiography. According to Jacoby, there are “three major purpose for engaging in consort practice that we can deduce from Sera Khandro, the Buddhist soteriological goal of attaining enlightenment; the hermeneutical goals of revealing and decoding Treasures; and the pragmatic goal of curing illness and increasing longevity” (191). Although she was celebrated later in life as a Khandroma, secret consort, her autobiography reveals how sensitive she was to that title due to all the negative rumors that surrounded her because of the sexual nature of tantric consortship. In a conversation with a nun, Sera Khandro promises to not have sexual relationships with any lay or religious men unless there was a religious purpose (196). When she refused to engage in meaningful consortships prophesied by dakinis, they reprimand her and is told to “overcome her bashfulness and to differentiate between immoral sexual indulgence and pure spiritual union” (192). In her autobiography, she legitimizes her consortships with multiple male treasure revelers by reasserting the words of dakini and male practitioners, which helped to distance her from appearing lustful, immoral, or arrogant.

Longchen Rabjam (Drime Ozer)

In chapter five, “Love Between Method and Insight,” Jacoby takes a closer look at Sera Khandro’s framing of her relationship to Drime Ozer as that of yab yum. During their time together, they practiced healing one another and revealing treasures together, which eventually led to their mutual enlightenment. Their yab yum relationship implies a relationship of equals; on their spiritual path, he needed her as much as she needed him and thus elevating her status to that of his equal—Jacoby points to an example of Drime Ozer referring to Sara Khandro as “my lama” (302). In the epilogue, “Love after death,” Jacoby concludes by profiling several female tantric practitioners who claim to be the current incarnations of Sera Khandro. Additionally, she highlights Namtrul Jikme Puntsok and Tare Lhamo, a famous tantric couple currently in eastern Tibet. Like Drime Ozer and Sera Khandro, they too occupy a yabyum relationship; choosing to live, practice, and teach together. The two of them are thought to be the contemporary incarnations of Drime Ozer and Sera Khandro (320).

Namtrul Jikme Puntsok and Tare Lhamo

Sera Khandro’s difficult life, Jacoby writes, “cast a pall on arguments that claim Buddhist Tantra is pro-woman or sex-positive, given the many indignities she suffered and the endless talk against her, but they simultaneously speak volumes about women’s potential for liberation through Vajrayana Buddhist methods” (246). I agree with Jacoby’s conclusion, that Vajrayana Buddhist methods offer women, such as Sera Khandro, “potential for liberation.” While it is clear that the mistreatments Sera Khandro experienced is gendered due to the patriarchal nature of the societies and (spiritual) institutions she interacts with, there is no inherent proof that Buddhist Tantra is either pro-women or anti-women. Rather, her experiences speak to Buddhist Tantric institutions and their figureheads, as being influenced by the patriarchal societies in which they operate; which end up promoting a patriarchal version of Buddhist Tantra. However, her liberation through Vajrayana Buddhist methods challenge Tibetan Buddhist institutions that have been shaped by prevailing patriarchal norms of their societies. Rather, her liberation implies the theology itself can be directed or interpreted as part of women’s empowerment and liberation. The task for female practioners of Tantric Buddhism then, seems to be to separate Tantric Buddhism from patriarchy—which is demonstrated beautifully through Sera Khandro’s own struggles against patriarchy and towards spiritual liberation.

This is part of a series I’m continuing in response to my previous post “On Being Tibetan and a(n intersectional) Feminist” in my efforts to engage Tibetan women in historic Tibet who challenged societal norms.

HH Karmapa performing Cham

Cham:

How do Tibetans construct their own space and place, and what does cham have anything to do with this? While there are many socio-cultural ways in which Tibetans construct their own place, I focus my discussion on how Tibetans construct their own spaces through the masculine ritual practice of cham. Masculine because cham is performed by a cast of Tibetan Buddhist monks—and more recently by some nuns, but for the purposes of this discussion, I’ll be focusing on the men who have historically dominated this ritual. Among the many meanings accorded to cham, the ritual is a dance that reenacts the heroic story of Padmasambava (Guru Rinpoche) in Tibet, the popular Indian tantric teacher who came to Tibet, tamed all the deities of the Tibetan landscape and helped spread Buddhism across the Tibetan plateau. In addition to being a historic rendition of Padmasambava, cham is a public ritual performed every Tibetan new year for various purposes too many to list right now. However, during last Tibetan new year’s cham ritual in Nepal, I was told by another Tibetan that one of the things cham addressed was to purify our collective karmas and remove obstacles in preparation for the new year. This perpetual need to purify spaces through cham at every monastery is based on the belief that human and demonic agencies are always infiltrating the purified spaces of the monasteries and the towns that surrounds these monasteries.

Cham Dance

During cham, the Lama, the monastic head, acts, as the initiator of the cham ritual—without him the ritual is not possible. Throughout the cham performance, the Lama places himself at the center, while his assistants surround him, and together they visualize themselves as forming a mandala. The Mandala is a geometric figure representing the universe in Buddhist symbolism. The Lama visualizes himself as King Chakravartin, the benevolent ruler of the universe, who controls both social and political space. After which, the Lama brings down the deities who live in the region’s mountains down to the ritualized mandala ground the Lama has constructed, and begins to embody the deities. Afterwards, using a tantric dagger, the Lama performs the ritualized act of taming the deities. In straddling both human and deity world, he is able to ritually tame the land through the subjugation of its deities, and renew the relationship humans’ share with these deities. Charlene Makley calls this process “mandalization” (2007: 53). Thus, it should come as no surprise that Tibetan Buddhist landscapes both in ritual space and literal place (monasteries and towns) both inside and outside Tibet are always constructed in the image of mandalas. As the initiators of such spaces and places, Lamas become important figures to Tibetans who understand and define their landscape in Tibetan Buddhist terms. Due to their recognized roles as, “divinized embodied agents operating from the center of a mandala,” who have the ability to dominate deities, they are recognized as occupying a higher position than the deities of the land—making them, the ultimate examples of Tibetan masculinity.

Mandalized architecture and landscape

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Labrang:

In Makley’s “Fatherland,” she focuses her discussion on Labrang monastery in Amdo before Chinese forces invaded in 1949. The first Lama Jamyang Shepa founded Labrang monastery in 1709. Due to his hyper masculinized role as the head of Labrang, he determined, as Makley argues, the sociopatial relationships Labrang assumed with its smaller and bigger neighbors, like the Qing Empire. Under the masculine roles of the Jamyang Shepas, who were revered by the public for their spiritual and political abilities, Labrang became a bustling spiritual and economic center (59). This role also allowed Labrang, as Makley argues, to become a fiercely protected autonomous area from Lhasa or Qing authorities. Due to the success of Labrang’s sacredness and trade, nomadic tribes, moved by the desire to be in close spatial proximity to the Lama and his monastery, came to settle permanently outside monastic compounds—forming a ripple effect of settlements outside, that joined the mandalized (infra)structure of the monastery.

Labrang Monastery

During the yearly cham festivals, in additional to the local inhabitants, many nomadic tribes from far converged on Labrang to observe and partake in the two-week festival. In addition to the hyper masculine role the Lama takes on during the cham ritual, Makley highlights other spaces of prestige and masculinity that non-monastic men participated in. Public displays of affiliation and affinity to the monastic and its figures through gift offerings could, as Makley argues, heighten their own masculinities. During the festivals, “tribal leaders vied with one another to demonstrate their political prowess by donating the most and best items of food, butter, meat, and money successfully collected from their constituents” to the monastery (69). Donated food is then redistributed freely to the public during the two-week prayer sessions. Another way the Jamyang Shepas attempted to “recruit and regulate” the participation of lay male patrons from politically powerful families was to appoint them “prestigious supporting ritual roles” to publicly reward them for their patronage. Their responsibilities were to patrol the town and the monastery during the festival. These roles during the festival, writes Makley, “literally mandalized key laymen,” who would ensure their continued loyalty and patronage to the monastery. These prestigious roles, bestowed on them by Lama Jamyang Shepa, further masculinized their stature among the public. However, with the arrival of the Chinese Community Party (CCP), everything changed.

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Destruction of Tibetan Places:

Tibetans were viewed as barbaric and backwards. Unlike the Buddhist Qing, ‘liberation,’ according to atheist CCP, was not achieved through tantric rituals and practices, but through the rationalized idea of modern progress. When the Chinese invaded, they settled in popular Tibetan urban towns, notably Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet and home to the most sacred monasteries in Tibet. They quickly learned that the Lamas lived in these urban towns where the biggest and oldest Tibetan monasteries were situated. During a brief collaborative period between the Lamas and CCP, the first thing Chinese soldiers did, according to Tibetan witnesses, was to build roads and landing strips for airplanes. While Tibetans tamed their landscape through mandalization using tantric Buddhism, CCP sought to tame it using ‘modern’ technology. Lefebvre (1991), Harvey (2006), and Smith (2008) reflect on roads as a technological feat designed by capitalist states to eliminate the obstacles of distance and assist in its project to remake space in its own image. For CCP, roads initially assisted in colonizing the urban spaces of Tibetan elites. After the brief collaboration failed, they went after the Tibetan Lamas; arresting, torturing and killing them, and causing the public to rebel. The Chinese responded by bombing Tibetan monasteries and this, according to Tibetan resistance fighters, meant war. In this space of war, using the roads they had Tibetans build, China deployed troops and weaponry to Tibet, and the war they began, was won. This war on Tibetans and their mandalized places did not end until the end of Cultural Revolution, at which point, they had almost succeeded at destroying all of Tibet’s most sacred monasteries. Under CCP rule, Tibetan places were reincorporated into, what Makley calls, the “communist sociospatial order,” and through this imposed reordering of spaces, existing masculine roles for Tibetan men, attached to the ways in which Tibetans created their own space and place, were eliminated. However, in 2000, China launched its “Go West” campaign to stimulate development and capital accumulation for its peripheral colonized states like Tibet, Uyghurstan, and Inner Mongolia.

Chinese troops building roads

Chinese-built airport

After China’s successful adoption of capitalism in the 80s, and the massive transformation of its urban cities into industrial hubs, China turned its attention to its colonized states on the frontiers. The Go West campaign would intensify existing urbanization programs launched in places like Lhasa and would eventually discover rural Tibet and its natural resources. Under the Go West campaign, Tibetans were allowed to rebuild their monasteries for tourist consumption, for it generated high revenues and tourist initiatives were expanded–with Lhasa, one of the first Tibetan towns to have been urbanized under the CCP control, serving as its blueprint–to incorporate other Tibetan towns with the aim to urbanize them for the purpose of capital accumulation. The town in which my grandfather was born and raised in Kham was renamed Shangri-La from Gyalthang in the mid 90s to attract Chinese-led tourist initiatives. The word Shangri-La is a mispronounced and Anglicized word for the Buddhist Shambala (meaning place of peace) by British orientalist writers who had read too many memoirs on Tibet by British colonial officers who invaded Tibet in 1904, this British invasion would go on to enhance existing Chinese insecurities, which would inspire them to acquire Tibet as its colony—but this is another imperial story for another time. By the end of 2006, China had completed its railway from Beijing to Lhasa, followed by a successful campaign backed with facial incentives to encourage permanent Chinese settlement into cities like Lhasa–which has led to extreme class disparities not only between the Chinese and Tibetans but between Tibetans rich and poor. With ongoing construction of roads and other means of transportation, state owned industries in mining, damning and other enterprises began popping up across the grasslands. Under the banner of development and modernization, the colonial state of China began removing and displacing Tibetan nomads off their communally shared grasslands and forcing the poorer ones into urban enclaves where they become intensive laborers in search of cash-income–something they didn’t depend on before. Justification for these projects, in addition to the invasion of Tibet, were made using the age-old ideological argument that all imperial states have used since time-immoral which painted the ‘backwards’ natives as ‘lacking’ the sophistication to produce surplus value (profit) off their land. These ideological arguments help to justify the construction of laws that Wood (1999), Cruikhshank (2006) and Teaiwa (2014) argues, serve to legalize state colonization of native (ideological) spaces and (literal) places.

Tibet Railway

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Tibetan Responses:

In this process of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2006), Tibetans have responded in a number of ways in varying degrees. These responses can be described as Lefebvre’s “differential” or Harvey’s “alternative” spaces of revolt. In 2008, I witnessed the largest Tibetan revolt ever recorded in Tibetan history. The rebellion lasted for several months; it began in Lhasa, and spread across Tibetan provinces of Amdo and Kham. Chinese military was deployed and the rebellion was forcibly shut down. Then in 2009, monks, followed by nuns, teenagers, nomads, mothers, fathers, old men and women began lighting themselves on fire to protest the Chinese state. As of now, over a 140 Tibetans have self-immolated inside Tibet.

2008 Uprising in Labrang, Amdo, Tibet

In her research in early 2000s, Makley records Tibetan men in Labrang as expressing overwhelming feelings of disorientation and alienation since the Chinese began their management of Labrang. The sociospatial order the Chinese have imposed on Labrang has meant traditional roles have been either eliminated or reordered, resulting in the emasculation of Tibetan masculine roles. This new imposed sociospatial order does not correspond with how Tibetans see their masculinities and landscapes. During the 2008 uprisings, Labrang was home to one of the bigger protests that took place. Many of the self-immolations that followed took place in Labrang. Tibetans outside of Tibet, who still had kinship connections inside Tibet, held public press meetings and protests to address the Chinese state media’s attempt to cover-up or misinterpret these incidents in the international arena. Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal, a precarious group, organized publicly despite bans imposed by their host nations who were being directed by authorities in Beijing—bringing to mind the imperial nature of capitalist control. In response to the differential space of revolt that Tibetans across the plateau and beyond produced, China has extended its development projects more aggressively to include initiatives that aim to reshape Tibetans into capital consuming and producing subjects. In 2009, in the region of Amdo, provincial government launched an educational campaign that succeeded in closing Tibetan run schools, redirecting children from those schools into state-run boarding school systems that favor Chinese capitalist concepts of subject formation. However, in addition to life-risking protests, Tibetans have continued resisting with less risk involving campaigns like refusing to speak Chinese on a daily basis or creating youth groups to assist each other in the promotion of Tibetan identity.

In exploring the practice of cham, we learn one of the ways in which Tibetans have culturally and historically constructed our own sense of place. Furthermore, we also learn that in such spaces of place making, masculinities, femininities, and status are constructed and contested. China’s current move to adopt capitalism as its preferred economic avenue has meant such spaces were erased during the time of invasion and reconstructed for the purpose of capital accumulation during the era of development and modernization. However, more than anything, China’s management of Tibetan landscapes has brought an end to certain Tibetan roles attached to Tibetan concepts of being/identities that have existed for centuries—while others were simply reordered, like the role of the Lamas, to serve Chinese legitimacy and campaigns inside Tibet. These roles, attached to Tibetan place-making, are deeply historical and cultural, and inform, more importantly, ways in which we form our sense of self as Tibetans—these are subjectivities attached to our ideas of masculinities, femininities, and other ways in which we approach our fluid ideas of our identities. The ways in which we construct our own place informs the ways in which we approach our identities as Tibetans. That is why we react so emotively when we see it destroyed and/or are removed from it, for those of us in exile. Our places are carriers of histories that inform our familial histories, histories that shape who we are, who we want to become. Understanding how Tibetans make place helps me understand the alienation my grandfather felt in exile, having been removed from a deeply historical homeland. It also helps me understand why those of us in exile, due to our precarious status at varying levels, always feel, out-of-place, due to the inability to access homeland. Despite China’s modernization projects that aim to destroy and reorder our landscapes and us, what keeps me hopeful are the ways in which Tibetans inside and outside Tibet continue our traditions of place-making old and new, to create spaces of community, family, continuity.

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Works Cited:

Cruikshank, Julie. 2007. Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination. University of British Columbia Press.

Harvey, David. 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Verso.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Wily-Blackwell: Oxford.

Makley, Charlene. 2007. “Fatherland,” in The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China. University of California Press.

Wood, Ellen. 2002. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. Verso.

Smith, Neil. 2008. Uneven development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. University of Georgia Press.

Yogini Ayu Khandro

Ayu Khandro was a highly regarded neljorma, yogini, in eastern Tibet, who was born in 1839 and died in 1953 at the age of hundred-and-fifteen. Unlike Sera Khandro, Ayu Khandro did not leave behind an autobiography. Instead, Namkhai Norbu, a highly recognized Dzogchen practioner who continues to teach throughout Asia and the West, composed a short biography of her life when he was sent by his teacher in 1951, at the age of fourteen, to receive the Vajra Yogini initiation from Ayu Khandro. In the following, I explore Ayu Khandro’s spiritual journey using gender as an analytical tool. Additionally, I use Serah Jacoby’s gendered reading of Sera Khandro’s autobiography, Love And Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro (2014), to supplement my reading of Ayu Khandro’s biography. The copy I am consulting is in Tultrim Allione’s Women of Wisdom, under the title, “The Biography of Ayu Khandro, Dorje Paldron,” the book covers the namtars of several recognized Tibetan yoginis (2000). Initially, when Namkhai Norbu requested Ayu Khandro for teachings, he remembers her being hesitant, claiming she was “no one special and had no qualifications to teach” (2000: 5). However, after an auspicious dream, in which Ayu Khandro’s teacher, Jamyang Khentse Wangpo, advised her to give Namkhai Norbu the teachings of Khandro Sangwa Kundu, his gongter, she finally accepts him as her student. During the months he studied with Ayu Khandro, at his request, she told him about her life and he took down everything, from which, he constructed her namtar, biography, “for her disciples and those who are interested” (159).

Chogyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche

In the prologue, Allione notes several special features regarding Ayu Khandro’s namtar. In addition to Namkhai Norbu’s commentaries on how her biography came into being, Ayu Khandro, according to Allione, made sure to “select…what would be relevant for another practitioner to know” (137). Allione’s suggestion implies Ayu Khandro had a target audience in mind when she told Namkai Norbu her life story. Palden and Khenpo Targyal, Ayu Khandro’s assistant and disciple, confirm this suggestion. After she had begun teaching Namkhai Norbu along with her other students, Khenpo Targyal, an abbot to a monastery, noted the extended teachings she had been giving them in such a short time, and how rare this was. He expressed feeling “afraid” that this meant she would leave her life soon. In addition, Palden told Namkhai Norbu that several months before he had arrived, Ayu Khandro had had a dream. The dream indicated “that she should give certain teachings soon,” and even before Namkhai Norbu had arrived, Palden and her other assistant, a nun, had “begun the preparations” (140) to give certain teachings. After considering everything Palden told him, Namkhai Norbu concludes, “So there was definitely a motive for [Ayu Khandro to be] giving these teachings” to him and other disciples that had gathered. If Ayu Khandro knew, as noted by Khenpo, that she was at the end of her life, and was preparing, according to Palden, to give certain teachings as instructed, then she must’ve selectively chosen, like Allione suggests, what she considered useful for Namkhai Norbu to note down, so that it “would be relevant for another practitioner to know.” While the earlier portion of her namtar provides personal insights on her life and how she came to practice the dharma, the latter parts focus more on her spiritual journey as a traveling yogini practicing chod; the different teachings she received along the way from different practitioners; and how she came to settle in Dzongsa, where she decided to stay in retreat for the rest of her life.

Women of Wisdom

Ayu Khandro was born to the nomadic family of Ah-Tu Tahang in the Kham region of Tagzi, in a village called Dzong Trang. Like Sera Khandro, on the day Ayu Khandro was born, people reported auspicious signs. Togden Rangrig, a yogi who practiced near their village, who was at her home at the time of her birth, gave her the name Dechen Khandro. She was the youngest of eight children. Her mother’s name was Tsokyi but was called Atso, and her father was Tamdrin Gon, called Arta. In comparison to Sera Khandro, who hailed from a powerful aristocratic family in Lhasa, Ayu Khandro came from modest means. She describes her family as neither poor nor rich, her three older brothers became traders and her four sisters did “nomad’s work” (140). As the youngest, she mostly looked after small animals that her family owned. Like Sera Khandro, Ayu Khandro also describes being religiously inclined from a young age. However, unlike Sera Khandro, Ayu Khandro did not have to travel far to seek her spiritual mentors. Her aunt, Dronkyi, was a strong practitioner who lived near Togden Rangrig’s cave. At seven, Ayu Khandro remembers choosing at her own will, to go to her aunts’ in Drag Ka Yang Dzong. During her stay, Ayu Khandro assisted her aunt and Kunzang Longyang, Togden Ranrig’s disciple, with daily chores. Kunzang Logyang taught her and his nephew, Rinchen Namgyal, how to read and write Tibetan. Having participated in reading the Kangyur twice to extend Togden’s life, her reading skills improved.

At thirteen, she received her first initiation and teaching on the Longsal Dorje Nyingpo. Although she admits not having understood most of the teaching, she implies the practice as having elevated her faith. That same year, her parents met the Gara Tsong family, a wealthy family in Kham, who were friends and patrons of her aunt. After her aunt introduced the two families, her parents set Ayu Khandro up to be married to their son, Apho Wangdo. In a similar fashion to Sera Khandro, Ayu Khandro describes having no say in the matter and pointing out her parents desire for “wealth” as the basis for her marriage. Although her aunt tries to intervene on her behalf, asking them to let her chose her own path, they only agree to delay her wedding. At fourteen, she traveled with her aunt and Togden Rangrig to see Jamyang Khentse Wangpo, Jamgon Kongtrul, and Cho Gyur Lingpa, and traveled with them to Dzong Tsho, were she met other great practitioners. During this journey, she receives many instructions and teachings from all the teachers she comes to know. After her return, feeling more confident, she begins the preliminary practices of the Longchen Nyingtig, with instructions from Kunzang Longyang. In 1854, at sixteen, she went with her aunt to see Jamyang Khentse Wangpo (also known as Dzongsar Khentse Rinpoche) who initiates her aunt and her into the Pema Nyingthig and gives her the name Tsewang Paldron. Upon her return, she goes into her first retreat. However, her spiritual path is cut short at nineteen when her parents marry her off to Apho Wangdo. She describes her husband as gentle and kind, but she is unsatisfied. After three years of marriage, Ayu Khandro becomes sick and does not get better for two years. Togden Rangrig is called in to see her and performs rituals and divinities, but makes it clear to her husband and his family that the real cause of her sickness is that she is being forced “to lead a worldly life…against her will” (142). After listening to Togden Rangrig and Ayu Khandro’s own reasons for wanting to go back to leading a spiritual life, Apho Wangdo agrees. As soon as her health improves, Apho Wangdo accompanies her back to her aunt’s cave for her to resume her practices under the guidance of her aunt and Togden.

Despite experiencing a brief interruption on her spiritual path with marriage, the rest of Ayu Khandro’s namtar continues her spiritual path without any worldly interruptions. Following the deaths of Togden Rangrig and her aunt in 1865, Ayu Khandro enters a three-year retreat. After the retreat, at the age of thirty, she decides on becoming a traveling yogini, not returning until she’s forty-three. Over the course of thirteen years, Ayu Khandro travels all over Tibet and is joined on her travels by other yogis and yoginis. On her journey visiting sacred sites and monasteries across Tibet, she meets many highly recognized male teachers who initiate her into different teachings, and instructs her on her practice and journey. When she returns to her original place of practice, she describes having found the place in ruins. After a dream, in which, she sees herself next to an egg-shaped rock in Dzongtsa, she traveled there and experiences a miracle. Although she was across the river from the egg-shaped rock in Dzongtsa, she experiences a dream in which she walked across to Dzongtsa on a white bridge. When she awakes, she finds herself on the other side of the bank; due to the auspicious circumstances she decides to make the spot her permanent place of retreat. In 1953, at the age of hundred-and-fifteen, she passed away, despite pleas from her followers to remain longer, she refused, warning that trying times were headed their way and she would be too old to bear it.

Two Tibetan Yoginis at their cave

In Janet Gyatso’s “Introduction,” of her book, Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiography of a Tibetan Visionary, she discusses the purpose of spiritual autobiographies (2001). Based on Gyatso’s close reading of Jigme Lingpa’s autobiography, Gyatso concludes that the purpose of spiritual autobiographies were to; demonstrate the “authenticity” of the treasure reveler’s spiritual journey (2001: 8) and serve as an “instructive” manual for their students (10). At each phase of her journey, Ayu Khandro makes sure to give specific names of the teachers from whom she received specific teachings from—making sure to give the names of the specific teachings and the practices she incorporated at each step of the way. For instance, after recalling an incident in which her nun friend and travel companion Pema Yangkyi and her come across a distraught nomad woman who’s dead husbands body they helped carry to a cemetery, she comes across Togden Semnyi Dorje–who had been practicing at the cemetery and offers to assist them in the proper funerary practices. During the practice, he teaches Ayu Khandro and Pema Yangkyi the Zinba Rangdrol Chod (Allione, 2000: 148)—in this way, she informs her readers of her spiritual journey not just figuratively, but instructively, as suggested by Allione. While the biography itself serves to authenticate Ayu Khandro’s spiritual journey, especially when the highly recognized Namkhai Norbu composed it, there are several other factors that authenticate her biography further. For example, many highly recognized lineage holders like Jamyang Khentse Rinpoche and Nala Pema Dhondup among many others, legitimizes her path by bestowing on her teachings and instructions on her practice. While she mostly occupies the role of the student during her journey, at times, Ayu Khandro also occupied the role of the teacher—she recalls meeting Togden Trulzhi (a disciple of the famous female practitioner, Mindroling Jetsun Rinpoche), who gives Ayu Khandro and Pema Yangkyi teachings on Dzongchen Terma of Mindroling; later, he asks both women for teachings on the White Tara practice they received from Jamyang Khentse Rinpoche (150). Additionally, she records miracles, such as her dream in Dzongtsa—all of which further authenticates her status as a highly learned practitioner.

While reading Ayu Khandro’s biography, I am astounded by how different it reads from Sera Khandro’s autobiography. Ayu Khandro is much older than Sera Khandro; she outlived Sera Khandro, suggesting both women to have lived through similar timelines. Yet, in comparison to Sera Khandro, who’s life was fraught with lack of familial roots and being a woman, both of which contributed greatly to her suffering, Ayu Khandro, who shared the same gendered subjectivity of being a woman at that time with Sera Khandro, seems to have had less distractions on her spiritual path. Although they did share similar gendered difficulties, such as having to fulfill parental and societal expectations of marriage, this is where their similarities end. Although it is unfair to compare Ayu Khandro’s life to Sera Khandro, since Tibetan woman at that time did not share homogeneous subjectivities, there are several factors that should be considered in understanding why both women had such drastically different experiences on their chosen path to spiritual awakening. Did their radically different backgrounds play a role in the different outcomes of their journeys? For example, unlike Sera Khandro, Ayu Khandro did not need to go far to seek spiritual guidance. With an aunt who was already accepted and recognized by her family as a serious practitioner, Ayu Khandro was not held back from choosing to live with her aunt at a young age to nurture her spiritual interests. In Ayu Khandro’s case, it seems having another spiritual practitioner in the family who was highly regarded by other family members worked to Ayu Khandro’s advantage; both in terms of having access to a spiritual guide and getting permission from family. Sera Khandro, on the other hand, did not share such advantages and ran away in pursuit of her spiritual guide Drime Ozer to Golok.

Additionally, I wonder whether the difference between the two women’s familial backgrounds helped contribute to their different subjectivities. Scholars of Tibet have often noted how men and women of aristocratic background enjoyed less freedom than the men and women of nomadic backgrounds due to their political obligations and aspirations. Sera Khandro was born to a politically active aristocratic family in Lhasa, in comparison; Ayu Khandro was born to a nomadic family. As the daughter of a politically active figure, Sera Khandro did not lack wealth; instead, she accuses her father’s insistence on her marriage as being motivated by “power” and ends up having to run-away in order to escape his decision. While Ayu Khandro’s biography makes no references to her parents as politically motivated, she does, however, accuse her parents of marrying her off in the interest of “wealth.” Although both women’s parents seem to have worldly motivations driving their interests in marrying off their daughters, I wonder whether an in-depth analysis of the different classed subjectivities of both women and their parents, as aristocrat and nomad, could offer new insights regarding the women’s proximity to their spiritual paths. In addition to class and gender, hereditary roots also impacted both Sera Khandro and Ayu Khandro’s spiritual paths—for Sera Khandro, lacking hereditary roots in Golok meant she lacked legitimacy and was more susceptible to harm, while Ayu Khandro’s established familial roots in Kham helped, in some ways, sustain her spiritual path. An in-depth analysis of both women’s lives using class, status, and familial roots, in addition to a gendered analysis, would offer a much more robust understanding of the societies in which these women lived through and how that affected both women’s path towards empowerment and enlightenment.

Tibetan Yogini practicing Chod

Jacoby’s close reading of Sera Khandro’s autobiography reveals the struggles she endured as rooted in her gendered subjectivity as a woman who lacked class and hereditary status; yet, she achieves her spiritual goals despite these difficulties. In Ayu Khandro’s case, it is difficult to tell whether she encountered other forms of gendered difficulties, besides the troubles she had with marriage, since her biography is short and unlike Sera Khandro, is authored not by her. However, aside from her aunt Dronkyi and Pema Yangkyi, her namtar is populated frequently by male practitioners who occupied positions of hierarchies—this suggests Ayu Khandro too, like Sera Khandro, engaged a spiritual world where male practitioners dominated. Yet, both women achieved spiritual gratification through their chosen medium of Vajriyana (tantric) Buddhism despite its male dominated nature. In Hugh Urban’s “What About the Woman? Gender Politics and the Interpretation of Women in Tantra” section of his book, The Power of Tantra: Religion, Sexuality and the Politics (2009), Urban engages essentialized roles that women take on in Sakta Tantra and how they draw power from this. He writes, “Tantric women can and historically have found new room to maneuver and [create] new spaces for agency even within a highly essentialized, heteronormative, and male-dominated system” (2009: 144). While Urban is talking about women in the Hindu tradition of Sakta Tantra, his analysis could apply to Ayu Khandro and Sera Khandro. Both women traversed spiritual paths dominated by male practitioners but they achieved spiritual liberation, affirming Urban’s argument that tantric women can create spaces of agency within male dominated religious systems to empower and liberate themselves.

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Works cited:

On Saturday while surfing Facebook, I came across a video titled “Tibet and Modernity” posted by the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives (LTWA) in Dharamsala. I was immediately interested. The video contains the following description:

“Round-table discussions moderated by Prof. Elliot Sperling of Indiana University, participated by Dr. Federica Venturi of Indiana University and Dr. Roberto Vitali, an independent scholar from Italy at LTWA Conference Hall on 11th March 2016”

I’m currently in a graduate seminar titled “Modernities and Alterities,” taught by Dr. Carla Jones at the University of Colorado. The title of the video alone grabbed my attention since I’ve been thinking a lot about Tibet and modernity. The topic of modernity in reference to Tibet has been on my mind since I began my academic track as a MA student in 2011 (I’m now doing my PhD)—especially since Tibet has so often been narrated by the Chinese state and Tibetans alike as having failed in securing its sovereignty due to having been anti-modern. So the concept has resonated with everything I do since my research is based in Tibetan Studies. Coming from that perspective, I became excited when this video came across my newsfeed. The following are my thoughts on the discussion. But before I begin, I want to thank all three panelists and LTWA for holding such an interesting topical discussion and making it available online, I look forward to more. I view this effort by the speakers and LTWA as an important grassroots public engagement that contribute to broadening Tibetan understandings surrounding our histories, which highlight the diversity of Tibet. I view such engagements as empowering endeavors that could positively impact Tibetan approaches to our futures. As such, I’d like to thank everyone involved.

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Thoughts on the “Tibet and Modernity” discussion:

In the following, I discuss thoughts regarding each speaker’s approach to either Tibet and/or Modernity; I’m specifically interested in how each speaker approaches the concept of the modern. 

The video begins with Dr. Elliot Sperling discussing his newly published article on the biography of Mewang Pola from the 18^th century. Afterwards, Dr. Federica Venturi poses some questions concerning the article and is followed by Dr. Roberto Vitali who responds to both panelists. All panelists agree and disagree on certain ideas concerning Tibetan history and the concept of modernity.

Following Dr. Elliot Sperling’s introduction of his article, Dr. Venturi began. She starts off by stating that Sperling should have included a section that explained what he means by “the modern order” and how European ideas and trade (during colonial times) were somehow “seeping” into Tibet. In other words, how is Sperling employing it in the context of Tibet and what does he mean by modern? Clarification on the concept, she argues, was much needed. I agreed with this part. Yet, she also disagrees that the concept of (colonial) trade and modernity go together (despite multiple researched books over two decades old that look at the connection between modernity and colonial imposed trade, resources extracted from the colonies made European urban metropolitan landscapes). She further emphasizes what she would and would not term modern, without specifics to what her concept of the modern is. She further emphasizes her “strong” belief against the idea of modernities, that:

“humans are all the same, as a consequence, we should employ the same measure, same standard to everybody, so we cannot have a modernity that works for Europeans and a different one that works for Asians, Africans and so on. We need to apply a standard that can be applied to everybody. That can be decided by seeing how humanity developed.”

She continues with a discussion on tribes and how their system “as a unit,” as including the different institutions of social, political, economic, and religion all mixed together as “one bundle.” “Once civilizations developed,” she continues, “than you begin to see the separation of this bundle.”

Scholars of modernity call this the separation of domains (institutions) (see Christian Moderns by Webb Keane on European practices of separating domains during and after colonialism), instituted heavily during European colonialism in order to keep the colony under (bureaucratic) control and simplify management of the colony and its resources (see “Colonial Governmentality” by David Scott). Dr. Venturi’s definition of modernity seems to align with the idea of modernity as a singular category, moving along a linear historical trajectory that moved toward becoming modern civilization–in this assumption, culture is described in evolutionary terms, in which, cultures go from primitive to civilized. Such assumptions have their roots in European colonialism; in order to legitimate its colonial projects in the colony, such discourses surrounding modernity was constructed to justify their presence. (Also, to give the example of Japan as an example of a modern state without acknowledging their ties to imperial powers ignores Euro-American roles in forcing Japan to adopt a form of governance informed by western ideologies, which included the separating of “the bundle.”) This same trajectory was reproduced during the time of decolonization following the World Wars under the guides of western economic institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, and the United Nations who reproduced the evolutionary assumption that to develop into a modern state was to reproduce western ideologies (surrounding governance) and institutions in western fashion in non-western contexts (since the West served as the ultimate example of the modern). Structural adjustment policies, implemented in countries across Latin America, Africa and Asia, operating under the ideology of development, have been criticized for this approach for destabilizing local systems of control (indigenous systems of governance) and contributing to conflicts often resulting in violence. Dr. Sperling seems to highlight this when he argues against Dr. Vitali’s argument that colonialism was prevalent and not specific to Europe, however, Sperling interjects to emphasize that current ideology surrounding modernity (employed as a standard in constructing modern nation-states) has been shaped specifically by the European colonial enterprise.

However, back to the discussion. Following Dr. Venturi, Dr. Roberto Vitali begins his response, in sum, his approach to modernity is that it is “plural.” That to judge the past from the viewpoint of the now, would be to use the wrong “historical yardstick” to measure modernity. To judge the past, he insists on viewing the past as it was happening for people during that time. He further argues for viewing different cultures as producing different advancements over time, rather than comparing specific cultural advancements with another—this suggests that cultures should be given its specificity especially when it comes to time. For example, 17^th century Markham history looked very different from 17^th century Lhasa history, both places produced specific figures who produced specific happenings (histories) that shaped specific locations. Lhasa and Markham may share overlapping features in the form of lamas or institutional affiliates who may have ties to both areas, however, both places had their own specific regional histories that at times diverged and at times overlapped with one another. What is clear is that each specific place was influenced by its own specific time-lines, specific events and/or figures brought along change, whether one chooses to describe such change as “modern” depends on which definition of the modern you chose to employ. Dr. Roberto Vitali seems to critique Eurocentric baggage associated with Dr. Venturi’s idea of the modern; instead, he asks to think of modernity as multiple and as place and time specific. His approach reminds me of Janet Gyato’s article, “Moments of Tibetan modernity: Methods and assumptions” (2011) in which she writes:

“the idea that the phenomenon of modernity is better considered in the plural elicits critical questions about some of the most central issues in the humanities and social sciences today. These include the nature of culture, human agency, progress, the impact of colonialism, how the past affects the present, and the very category of ‘the West’. The consideration of such matters in light of non-Western cases promises to help us fine-tune our larger understanding of what we mean by modernity at all.” (2011: 2)

While Dr. Vitali’s emphasis on modernity as plural rings very close to Gyatso’s elucidations, I do not agree with his assumption that Greek culture should be considered “superior.” This contradicts his emphasis on plurality and comparison of the modern and forgets to consider how such evolutionary trajectory is implied in Euro-American notions of modernity and governance, which historicizes modernity as having been influenced by a mythologized ancient Greece. Both Gyatso and Vitali’s approach seems to go against Dr. Venturi’s assumption that “humans are all the same, as a consequence, we should employ the same measure, same standard to everybody.” This “standard” assumption ignores historical specificity and plurality. Humans do not move along the same time-line, individuals are instead shaped by different historical circumstances (human made or environmentally caused) which affect their perception of their present, and therefore shapes how they approach their futures. This may also help answer Dr. Vitali’s concerns regarding Tibetans in the current moment focusing too much on loss and not enough on the future (or preinvasion past). Loss itself was part of the collective Tibetan experience, thus, it becomes historical (trauma). Loss can also serve to make sense of the present and how to proceed in the future, I don’t think the concept of loss should be so easily dismissed, especially in regards to Tibetan approaches to their present and future–from loss Tibetans of the 1960s built a whole diaspora community, as such, loss becomes a powerful concept in imagining the future.

Gyatso’s approach to modernity isn’t actually new, although kind of new in Tibetan studies, this approach has its roots dating back to the 1970s and 1980s when intellectual movements like the Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Indigenous Studies and Women’s Studies (shaped by criticisms from grassroots intellectuals) began critiquing academia’s ivory towers for its role in helping western colonial and post-colonial powers in its project to promote this singular Euro-American notion of modernity as universal.

While Sperling’s take on Tibetan moderns seem to align with Gyatso and Vitali, his agreement with Dr. Venturi that certain parts of the world are “not modern” conflicts with his consideration for Tibet. He uses the example of the Middle East to demonstrate “fundamentalism,” which he associates with “traditionalism.” Yet, as a historian, he leaves out the significance of imperial histories playing major roles in shaping the recent history of the Middle Eastern states. After all, Afghanistan of pre-war 1970s looked much different from contemporary war-torn Afghanistan. To understand the current Afghani predicament, a close look at the interaction between Afgani history and foreign imperial forces will tell a much different history than the narrow framing of Afghanistan as being just about fundamentalism or traditionalism. Postcolonial scholars like Dr. Talal Asad have done a much better analysis on the association of the Middle East with fundamentalism/traditionalism (a recent modern construct according to Asad) alongside the modern construction of “the secular” (as informed by western ideologies from a particularly Protestant strain) in his works that could be considered for how we approach secularism in contemporary Tibetan discourses.

Sperling further emphasizes different kinds of futures that Gandhi (Traditionalist), Nehru (Post-colonial modern), communism or fascism imagined, yet there’s no discussion of Euro-American dominated capitalist concepts of the modern. This model of modernity is the same kind that went after the Middle East in pursuit of oil to run its capitalist trajectory to modernity back home (which constructed urban landscapes in the form of roads, cars, and oil industries) and how they imposed this foreign version of the modern (notions of secular democracy and freedom) to justify occupation (in a similar way to how the Chinese state imposes its ‘modernity’ in Tibet to justify its colonization and extraction). He also doesn’t discuss scholars of Subaltern Studies who took apart Gandhi and Nehru’s different ideas surrounding modernity—e.g., that they argued for a space in between, that modernity shouldn’t assume a singular meaning, how these two ideas of modernity were limiting and such promotion of modernity backed with state power having brought violence in postcolonial India (ethnic conflict, partition). They emphasize singular ideas surrounding modernity as promoting the belief that we are all moving along together on a single time-line, which, they argue, does not reflect reality. Instead, it leaves out different historical time-lines specific to peoples and places and the role power plays in being able to impose certain versions of ‘modernity.’ They also offered theoretical and methodological approaches that emphasized ordinary peoples’ histories and approaches to the violence both of these forms of modernity brought; how they were able to create spaces for themselves despite the violence (see McGranahan’s Arrested Histories for a Tibetan example). Subaltern Studies’ approach to modernity is aligned with Dr. Vitali’s. He argues Gendun Chopel “never marginalized Tibetan culture; he read [and used] them in a new way,” to create new future possibilities that challenged Lhasa’s state authority and made space for himself and those who he inspired. The same can be argued for Sera Khandro (a Lhasa aristocrat who became a prominent yogini in Amdo, Golog), who also used Tibetan (spiritual) culture in new ways to fight against patriarchy and achieve spiritual liberation.

If modernity should be viewed as plural, then how do we use it when considering Tibetan histories? I propose Janet Gyatso’s approach:

“…‘modern’ refers to what is relatively new, as compared to what is considered traditional or antiquated; ‘modernization’ refers to reforms and transformations meant to facilitate social and technological progress; and ‘modernity’ refers to the larger reified conception of a state of affairs in which modern practices, technologies, or ideas hold sway.” (3)

Such an approach grants specificity to subjective positions and place-specific histories that were particular to that time-line. For example, to understand the kinds of change Gendun Choepel brought and demanded, researchers need to analyze his personal narrative from his point of view and time-line. They have to also take into consideration the different histories associated with the places and people he interacted with and was influenced by, and use that information to understand how that went on to shape the kinds of changes he brought and demanded of Lhasans in Lhasa during that particular time. This position allows for the history of change to be told from the subjective position (for Gendun Chopel, Sera Khandro, or even Mewang Pola), to view specific historical characters from their specific time-lines, as stressed by Dr. Vitali and Gyatso. This grants Tibetan characters (that were place-specific) agency in their ability to shape local histories that may have had broader implications. This sort of subjective approach allows for an objective position to be written, rather than just the top down approach.

I think Dr. Sperling and Dr. Venturi are correct in saying we need to be clear when we use the word ‘modern’ in Tibetan studies. However, in such an engagement, following Dr. Vitali’s warnings, we also need to be careful we do not reproduce the same problems in reifying notions of ‘tradition,’ and assumptions of cultures as belonging on a singular (Euro-American) evolutionary trajectory that is assumed under the banner of the singular modern. This is the same critique that has been launched against academia in general for over 70 years, and something Tibetan studies has only begun to consider. In a way, new scholars on contemporary Tibet in the last decade has begun answering Peter H. Hansen’s question, “Why is there no subaltern studies for Tibet?” with their works (2003). It’s reassuring to see scholars of “old Tibet” contesting assumptions surrounding the notion of the modern too. I view such rigorous theoretical engagements in Tibetan studies to be a move for the better, I believe such a move will enhance Tibetan studies in a direction that not only empowers scholarship on Tibetan pasts, but will also have tangible consequences for Tibetan presents and futures. Thank you to all three panelists and organizers, I thoroughly enjoyed watching and engaging the discussion.

Works mentioned:

Asad, T., 2003. “Secularism, Nation-state, Religion” in Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp.181-204.

Chakrabarty, D., 2002.“Subaltern Histories and Post-Englightenment Rationalism” in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. University of Chicago Press.

Gyatso. J. 2011.”Moments of Tibetan Modernity: Methods and Assumptions,” in Mapping the Modern in Tibet by Tuttle, G. ed.,  PIATS 2006: Tibetan Studies: Proceedings of the Eleventh Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Königswinter 2006. IITBS, International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies GmbH.

Hansen, P.H., 2003. “Why is there no Subaltern Studies for Tibet?” The Tibet Journal, 28(4), pp.7-22.

How do refugees negotiate the terms of relatedness in the space of exile? Recent anthropological works on kinship have taken serious the modern construction of the state and how it has come to transform ways of conceiving relatedness (family) (McKinnon and Cannell 2013). Scholars like Povinielli have made criticisms that problematize European and modern notions of the genealogical grid (kinship) that privilege biological kinship (blood ties) and have become standardized and normalized under the construction of governmentality (2002). But what about refugees? In most cases, refugees are undocumented stateless persons who live in the precarious space of exile. In the eyes of their host nations, refugees do and do not exist. While they are deemed legally invisible, they have to operate under modern ideologies of the countries that host them. Under such conditions, refugee approaches to relatedness, operate both outside and alongside the genealogical grid that Povinelli critiques. In the following, I consider Tibetan refugees and their generational approaches to relatedness to negotiate exile. During exile’s initial construction, orphaned and semi-orphaned Tibetan refugees from the 1960s promoted and practiced terms of relatedness at refugee schools that were fairly open. However, the desire to construct biological family outside refugee schools to safeguard vulnerable conditions of exile caused the terms of relatedness to narrow by the time semi-orphan children from Tibet arrived in the 1990s. What caused such a shift? What happens when a group desires forms of relatedness not contingent on the construction of a family?

Although I am interested specifically in how semi-orphans of the 1960s and 1990s engaged in similar and overlapping approaches to forming friendships and other forms of relations to negotiate exile, this is also a brief discussion that works against the assumption that the exile refugee experience is a homogenous one. While the Tibetan refugee experiences began with the 1959 Chinese invasion, experiences across time and space has been diverse depending on many factors. This essay was not meant to address all the complexities of intergenerational and crossgenerational histories and differences in exile. Instead, its intention is to shed light on a small section of the Tibetan refugee collective to understand complex subject formation as a marginal group within the marginal category of refugee. It is set up as a rough framework for looking at differences over time, which can be filled in later with other important stories and analysis as my research progresses. Semi orphans have had a range of experiences and must not be stereotyped. But their generational narratives can also be understood as part of bigger shifts in exile history. I am excited to hear more from readers about the range of their own experiences to let others Tibetans know how rich and diverse these experiences are and how those experiences have shaped who we have become in the present.

Background:

Tibetan refugees first settled in India following Tibet’s invasion in 1959. Although Tibet had experienced foreign invasion in its past, the kind of invasion the Chinese brought was something Tibet had never experienced before. The military invasion established rule over all three provinces of Tibet (Utsang, Kham, and Amdo) and caused the largest exodus Tibet had ever seen. Large numbers of Tibetans from different provinces escaped on foot and on yaks to South Asian countries to seek refuge. Among them were the 14^th Dalai Lama and his administration. Many followed him to India, where he began talks with the Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to meet the twin crisis of Tibet’s invasion and the rising number of refugees. While Tibetan diplomats were dispatched by the Dalai Lama to handle the problem of invasion in international arenas such as the United Nations, the death toll for Tibetan refugees began to rise. If refugees hadn’t died on the escape route to India, they were dying from unaccustomed heat and exhaustion in the refugee camps. The number grew when they were given employment by the Indian government doing road construction. Among the dead included children, those that survived had become orphaned, prompting the Dalai Lama to act.

In 1960, following talks with Prime Minister Nehru, the Indian government agreed to give the Dalai Lama plots of uninhabited land on which Tibetans were to build settlements for their temporary stay in exile. Additionally, they agreed to help the Dalai Lama establish separate schools to rehabilitate refugee children. Both projects were meant to pull Tibetan refugees out of the precarious conditions of the refugee camps and roadside construction projects, but constructing settlements out of jungles meant other dangers loomed large. Few schools were initially constructed as spaces to harbor children to remove them from such dangers. Although the escape from Tibet to India had uprooted Tibetan refugee families from their homes, most families had remained intact regardless of the number of dying members in camps and road construction sites. However, the growing number of dying children provoked many to send their children off to these schools in order to ensure their lives and future possibilities.

When exile schools were first created, the desired outcomes of such schools were to 1) keep children alive, and 2) rehabilitate them into capable individuals who would contribute to the sustenance of the exile collective in the future. In other words, children were seen as “standins” for the future (Rutherford 2013). Tibetan refugees sought to exercise control over the lives of their children as a way to face the unchangeable condition of exile in India. Thus, schools operated as spaces in which the lives of children, and therefore, exile futures, could be imaged and secured.

Schools as Spaces of Mutuality, Friendships and Continuity:

In terms of design, educational facilities and residential homes were constructed in close geographic proximity. While children age fifteen and over were placed in gender specific hostels, children under that age were placed in a residential home that was managed by adult care-takers who performed the officiated role of the parent. From dusk till dawn, children spent the majority of their time socializing and learning within the compound of their residential schools. Children’s schedules revolved around classes, afterschool activities, scheduled chores, and/or attending social gatherings and functions happening on school grounds or in auditoriums. Because children spent most of their childhoods being raised and educated at these residential schools, many refer to the schools as their childhood homes in their adulthood. It was in boarding school, which doubled as their home, where children from the 1960s made memories together and initiated forms of relatedness with one another that lasted into their adult lives.

From its beginnings, the Tibetan exile administration promoted an open policy towards kinship (family) that relied on a shared experience of loss rather than biogenetics (blood). Administrators engaged in the narrative of loss to talk about the losses the exile collective had experienced together to motivate a unifying identity that was termed Tibetan refugees. This new identity was political and relied on the commonality of the loss that all Tibetans in exile had experienced. The exile administrators promoted a sense of mutuality that Sahlins terms mutuality of being (2011). Mutuality of being involved “the transpersonal practices of coexistence from sharing to mourning” (14), and encouraged the idea that “kinsmen are persons who belong to one another, who are members of one another, who are co-present in each other, whose lives are joined and interdependent” (11). Mutuality of being, according to Sahlins, contributed to enduring solidarity. The administrative promotion of mutuality of being seems to have paid off: “We saw each others as equal,” recalls my father of this period, “we were all refugees.” This new sense of mutuality was narrated to motivate children who had collectively experienced loss to strive on behalf of the collective, to become a capable adult so that they may contribute to the collective good, an exile collective they were to view as their community. At the first few residential schools, Tibetan custom of using kin-terms was mobilized to promote mutuality of being. Although the custom of using kin-terms to show deference had always existed in pre-invasion Tibet, administrators made specific kin-terms official. At the first residential home in Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s mother, Diki Tsering, and older sister, Tsering Dolma, were referred to as Ama la (mother), and children recall how they nurtured them like they were their real mothers. While social kinning customs had always existed in old Tibet—that Carsten terms “relatedness” (2004:17)—the kind of intensification it experienced during the initial stages of exile is new. Such cultural methods were being mobilized in new ways by the administration to encourage a collective that could meet the new vulnerable conditions of exile together. However, using kin-terms alone did not result in relations, instead, children themselves negotiated and initiated terms of social engagement that led to forming relatedness that revolved around friendships at its base.

During his childhood at his residential school in the 1960s, my father recalled a well-liked kinning practice that became popular among his peers. While he did not go deep into such practices, opting to emphasize friendships instead, I found the practice to be an interesting example of one of the many ways in which children at that time engaged in forming friendships. To initiate social relations of kinship, children often wrote letters seeking permission from the person from whom they desired such relations with. They were usually not biologically related to the other. If the person wrote back in confirmation, social relations of kinship had been established, and from then on, they would begin to refer to and treat one another as real brothers or sisters. While such relations were formed between people who had established friendships, the practice was also popular among people who did not necessarily know one another but knew of each other. It was considered entirely normal for children who spent so much time together in the same spaces to have crushes on one another, among such practices, friend crushes and sibling crushes were popular. For example, it was considered normal for a young girl to send letters to an older female student asking permission to officially acknowledge her as her older sister, if the older female replied yes, the two would carry on a relation of sisterhood. In other instances, girls engaged in popular Indian practices of Rakhi, which celebrates siblinghood, with boys to initiate sibling/friendship relations. Whether such relations lasted into adulthood depends largely on the individuals, however, they did succeed for many in forming lasting relations of friendships.

Such kinning exercises, recalls a friend, were still practiced during his childhood at his schools in the 1990s. Although the practice had declined by his time, the continuation of the practice from its 60s beginnings itself indicates its popularity in initiating relations. These kinning exercises demonstrate how children engaged in practices that Weston terms, chosen kin (1995). “Chosen families,” writes Weston, “generally took the form of a network of kin radiating out from the particular [individual] who had done the choosing” (98). Chosen families were often friends who came to be viewed “as more enduring than blood or romantic relations” (95). The emergence of such practices, argues Weston, “formed in the context of a life crisis” (93). Like Weston’s gay subjects, refugee children practices of relatedness emerged during a time of crisis (exile), their mutual experiences of loss gave way to enduring solidarity, and ultimately, these practices succeeded since the majority of children from that cohort continue to enjoy intimate friendships formed during that time. Many went on to marry each other, transforming friendships into marriages, and became the professionals (nurses, doctors, civil servants, seamstresses, cooks, etc.) the exile apparatus desired to produce a functioning exile community.

A Home away from Home:

How refugees remember the 1970s attests to the success of the schools. During the initial exodus, adults and children had been separated. While children were harbored in schools to be cared and educated, adults were sent off to build settlements out of nothing in different parts of India. Many worked on settlements in South India while their children stayed behind in schools located in North India—making visits difficult and scarce. By the time the mid 70s approached, those children had now become adults. They began populating the settlements that were mostly inhabited by adults who had constructed the settlements and had grown old. Their arrival triggered new energy and new roles. The settlements slowly became populated with young graduates whose friendships with each other transformed into marriages. By the end of the 70s, many built homes with one another in which babies born in exile became a regular fixture in the settlements. “Marriages,” writes Carsten, “are the occasion for house-building, renovation, or extension” (2004:43). Children who had left behind the homes of their childhood (school) had now set off to start their own with one another. Houses, argues Carsten, is where kinship is made (35).

Although the invasion and exodus of the 60s had seen the break up of the biological family, by the late 70s, biogenetic kin ties (blood) had been regenerated from social ones (friendships). Family, once again, became a central fixture in the Tibetan life since China’s invasion. This was an important new development that the exile administration had desired since it lacked the legal status and funds to continue supporting children once they became adults. “Houses,” writes Carsten, “are inevitably part of wider historical processes, linking domestic kinship with other political and economic structures” (50). Although the 60s generation had gone to school for free, children born to the 60s cohort paid school fees so that the exile administration could provide for children arriving from Tibet. Joint household incomes not only circulated within the family, they also circulated outside of the home and in the community. Tibetan families bought from small businesses owned and operated by other Tibetan families, as a result, the circulation of their incomes within the family and the community collectively contributed to the economic success of the exile collective—another outcome that the exile apparatus had desired. However, by the time semi-orphans from the 1990s arrived, the open policy of mutuality of being that the exile apparatus had promoted began to slowly narrow.

Semi-Orphans of The 1990s:

The Culture Revolution in Tibet had begun soon after China had succeeded in its 1959 invasion. Refugee numbers had trickled down by the early 1970s. Many did not know the whereabouts of relatives who decided to stay behind, but all that changed in the late 80s. While the Culture Revolution had ended in Mainland China following Mao’s death in 1976, its policies did not begin to diminish in Tibet until the 1980s. Renewed discussions between the Dalai Lama and the new leadership in Beijing brought a period of relaxed border control. During this time, the Tibetan exile community began experiencing a second exodus. Many from Tibet arrived in exile to rekindle relations with families who had left in the 60s. While some chose to stay in exile, others chose to return; many decided to leave behind their children under the care of the exile administration. By the early 90s, parents who had heard about the exile schools chose to send their young children to India so they may receive a modern Tibetan education. During its peak years between 4,000 to 6,000 children were sent on a yearly basis, triggering another period of construction. The exile administration began expanding schools to meet the growing number of children arriving from Tibet.

Like the children from the 60s, this second group also experienced being raised at the residential schools in exile without family. However, unlike the previous group, they attended exile schools with exile-born children who were not separated from their families. Although the exile administration continued to promote mutuality of being, exile-born Tibetans and semi-orphans from Tibet began forming friendships with those who had mutual backgrounds. Although close-knit friendships between exile-born kids and semi-orphans did exist, there were also friendship circles that consisted mostly of children of exile-born or semi-orphan backgrounds. While popular kinning practices from the 60s waned, friendship still continued to play a central theme for children in forming relatedness.

For semi-orphans of the 1990s, friendship operated much like it did for the old cohort. Many continued practices that mirror Weston’s “chosen kin,” with expectations to “‘be there,’ for one another through ongoing, reciprocal exchanges of material and emotional support” (1995:93). While friendships continued to play an important role for exile-born kids, biological family was expected to occupy the higher position. Parents made sure that children knew about the kinds of sacrifices they endured on behalf of the family. “Houses,” writes Carsten, “are involved in the encoding and internalization of hierarchical principles that shape relations between those of different generation, age, or gender” (37). Exile-borns prioritized close friendships, but blood relations, according to their parents, guaranteed enduring solidarity. While semi-orphans continued to engage in practices of relatedness that operated on the basis of “the need to care and to be cared for” (Borneman 1997:580), filial obligations that exile-borns engaged in narrowed the terms of what was previously an open policy on relatedness. Such changes in approach reflected the kinds of friendship circles children chose to connect with.

Children could often tell which child came from a prosperous family versus who did not, based on stuff. Although the economic prosperity associated with the emergence of the family in exile was seen in positive light, it also began instituting visible differences, and so, inequalities. Semi-orphans and exile-borns both recall children who were especially well off due to the child’s access to the latest fashion and gadgets. They could also tell who was poor judging based solely on the quality of children’s clothes—often times the children they described happened to be semi-orphans. While the kinds of relatedness that the 60s cohort desired were based mostly on care and not so much stuff (since most children then were poor), the 90s cohort desired friendships based on care and stuff. Compared to exile-borns, semi-orphans had less access to stuff. These new changes narrowed the terms of friendship and thus relatedness, especially for semi-orphans, many of whom, depending on their access to stuff, began operating in friendship circles that were sometimes exclusively semi-orphans. While semi-orphans were more marginalized than exile-born children, within the category of semi-orphans, some were more marginalized than others. Although all semi-orphans grew up without their parents, other relatives and/or close family friends that lived in exile provided care for some, while others lacked such ties outside of school all together. Marginalization, for those that identified as semi-orphans, depended largely on such ties, or lack there of.

Friendship circles of children who engaged in theft and other activities that broke school rules, were often coded by the school and students alike as bad, these circles often included members who were often from the least well-off semi-orphan backgrounds. The school administration often emphasized choosing the right friend. The right friend was someone who behaved in a way that encouraged you to do better in school, to follow rules, to strive for educational and professional success. Semi-orphans too engaged in the practice of choosing the right friend. Many semi-orphans who were viewed by their peers and administrators alike as successful due to their educational achievements sometimes formed circles with one another, to push each other, to show care. “When children learn how to behave properly in the house,” writes Carsten, “they are internalizing distinctions” (2004:49). For children at exile schools, it was important to make distinction, to choose who would make the right or wrong kind of friend. Oftentimes, children who were considered bad for fighting, stealing, or breaking rules included both semi-orphans and exile-borns, but semi-orphan children from the more marginalized background made up the majority. While the construction of the home signaled a sign of success, of family, of communal economy, of the collective for the 60s cohort; it also caused a rise in marked differences between children who had families versus who didn’t. Thus causing the terms of relatedness to become narrowed.

Desiring a Home:

Between 2014 and 2015, I hung out with a group of men in Dharamsala who had been children when they arrived from Tibet to attend the exile schools in India in the 1990s. The group had few members that were exile-born but most were semi-orphans. Many had flunked out of either high school or college. Most of them had trouble holding down a regular job. A few of them suffered from substance abuse, while others had kicked the habit for some years. One of them had opened a store that did well with tourists in the beginning, but the business began to perform poorly when the owner began neglecting sales. His store operated as a space where they gathered, which ironically led to the poor performance of the store. Most of them had been friends since childhood, while others were more recent. All nostalgically longed for the times they spent together in their childhood home of TCV (Tibetan Children’s Village school), free from the mundane stress of adult life.

In their nostalgia, TCV operated as a home in which semi-orphans “shared understandings, bodily practices, and memories of those who have lived together” (Carsten 2004:37). This nostalgia wasn’t that different from the 60s cohort, however, the intensity of their nostalgia were different. While the 60s cohort were nostalgic for their childhood homes at school, they had also moved on to construct their own homes in which they recreated biological kin. Semi-orphans of the group I hung out with, often engaged in nostalgia to talk about life that was lived better in their childhood homes at schools than the one they were living in the present. Unlike the centralized home of school that they romanticized, many lived scattered from one another at homes that were rarely stable or permanent. Many struggled with unemployment; most had no savings, they often complained about the inability to pay rent and other cost of living. Memories of their childhood home of TCV often revolved around a romanticized time in which they enjoyed their childhood together in their centralized home of school free from the economic burden they now had to bear alone. Like the 60s cohort, the shared home of school had also given way to relatedness that had lasted for this group of friends outside of school and into their adulthood; however, economic challenges of the present and narrowing terms of relatedness practiced in contemporary exile was limiting this new group from constructing their own homes outside school. In many ways, the nostalgia for a shared home that they experienced together in their childhood reflected frustrations in the inability to recreate the feel of that centralized home in their present lives.

Marriage prospects between an exile-born and semi-orphan, an avenue that Carsten argues can lead to house-building, have decreased in recent times. While the 60s group had less barriers when it came to marriage due to similarities in background, the current cohort faces challenges that were not previously considered. For instance, a friend told me about a long-term relationship between a female exile-born and a semi-orphan man. Both had plans to get married but when she brought up the subject with her parents, her parents rejected the proposal and demanded that she cut ties. After some efforts, the relationship eventually came to an end. Many reasons were cited for why this relationship would not work according to her parents, but one that resonated most was his ability to earn. For Tibetan refugees, economic viability, the ability to earn, has been central in being able to secure the life they desire while fighting off vulnerabilities that come with being an undocumented refugee. This is not to suggest that marriages between exile-born and semi-orphan are communally discouraged, it isn’t, in fact, I know plenty of other such couples that have successfully married. However, economic viability makes marriage, family, and thus home, possibilities for refugees. In contemporary exile, marriage prospects for both exile-born and semi-orphan depended highly on their ability to earn—a factor that was true for the 60s cohort too. However, the increased competition for employment and the rising cost of living in places like Dharamsala and Delhi (MT) had made it harder for more marginalized groups of semi-orphans to be seen as economically viable. In other words, those without a successful profession, educational degree, or family network are seen as less desirable when it comes to relations of romance or marriage because their earning capabilities are questioned—throwing doubt on their ability to provide for their family, or worse, becoming an economic liability on their partner’s family, which could put additional stressors for families of low-income background.

In contrast to the group I hung out with, I also knew of other more professional circles of semi-orphan friends who were considered ‘successful’ by others. They had all completed high school and had finished college; some had even managed scholarships to finish their graduate degrees. Many held professional jobs and networked among each other when a semi-orphan friend was in search of employment and needed a place to stay. They often relied on one another for economic and emotional support, and even lived together to refashion a home for themselves—operating much like a family. In many ways, they had been successful at translating relations with each other as chosen kin into adulthood. However, such relationships seem contingent on their individual earning abilities. Friendships could be terminated if one felt the other was taking advantage of their hospitality and limited resources by being unsuccessful at finding employment, overstaying their welcome, and failing to contribute to household work or cost. For semi-orphan friendships to last from childhood into adulthood, economic viability then becomes important since it allowed for friendships to last into adulthood. But for semi-orphans who did not achieve educational or professional success, who continue to have trouble in constructing homes outside of the school, their relations with one another operate much in the way Nozawa describes phaticity (2015). “It signals a feeling of relatedness-as-such,” writes Nozawa, “while the nature, cause, history, or future of this relationality is apprehended in surprise or in ignorance” (392). The guys that gathered at the store never planned their gatherings, they just showed up, socialized, and dispersed, however long or short. Such gatherings were not meant to be productive of any specific long-term goal or future, instead they just touched base with one another and fantasized about their past at school together—to recall happier pasts and lament less happier presents. Yet they were not unproductive gatherings, these engagements were productive in the way Nozawa argues were “productive of a fantasy of sociality.” They were productive enough to have kept most of them coming back to each other at different times over the course of their adulthood—even if no one knew exactly when they’d see each other next since no futures were ever really planned together.

Conclusion:

In the Tibetan experience, refugees initially engaged in practices of relatedness that existed outside of the modern genealogical grid (family) that Povinelli problematizes as heavily reliant on biological factors (2002). Tibetan practices of relatedness depended heavily on what Sahlin’s called “mutuality of being” (2011). The initial group of refugees practiced an open approach to relatedness that downplayed blood ties due to their shared experiences (or mutuality) of loss. Shared background as Tibetan refugees made practices that Weston termed “chosen kin” (1995) possible for Tibetan children growing up as refugees without family at exile boarding schools in the 1960s. These connections, as I’ve argued, were crucial for the overall development of the Tibetan refugee community in the 1970s—when children from such institutions grew up to take on much needed communal roles, including the role of parents to begin families and homes of their own that contributed to the overall sustenance of the exile refugee collective. However, the social, political and economic vulnerabilities implied in the category of refugee, reinforced biological standards of relatedness among Tibetan refugees who believed such biological factors (blood ties) would insure enduring solidarity—a prerequisite for surviving in exile. Such narrowing terms of relatedness, as I’ve shown, disproportionately affects other more vulnerable refugees, such as the group of semi-orphans that arrived from Tibet in the 90s (and more recent groups of low-income newcomers in Dharamsala). Unlike the group from the 60s, who described their experience at school as having been shaped by the similarities all children shared, the 90s cohort felt differentiated from exile-borns due to their lack in (biological) family. While successful semi-orphans continue to engage in enduring relations of relatedness with each other based on mutuality of being (similar backgrounds), the rising cost of living in the present have made the longevity of friendships dependent on economic self-sufficiency. Despite such narrowing approaches, marginalized groups of semi-orphans like the one I came to know continue to challenge and engage in practices of relatedness not productive (of family) in normative ways that connect to economic security and/or prosperity. Instead, they choose brief bouts of contacts that are not reliant on calculated goals or futures that conditions in exile demand, rather, they choose nostalgia to create productive spaces that reinforce friendships (and thus care) not contingent on expectations.

Works Cited:

Borneman, John. 1997. “Caring and Being Cared For: Displacing Marriage, Kinship, Gender and Sexuality.” International Social Science Journal 49(154): 573-584.

Carsten, Janet. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.

McKinnon, Susan, and Fenella Cannell, 2013. “The Difference Kinship Makes.” In Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship, S. McKinnon and F. Cannell, eds. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. 3-38.

Nozawa, Shunsuke. 2015. “Phatic Traces: Sociality in Contemporary Japan.” Anthropological Quarterly 88(2): 373-400.

Rutherford, Danilyn. 2013. “Kinship and Catastrophe: Global Warming and the Rhetoric of Descent.” In Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship, S. McKinnon and F. Cannell, eds. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. 261-282.

Sahlins, Marshall. 2011. “What Kinship Is (part one).” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., 17: 2-19.

Stasch, Rupert. 2009. Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Weston, Kath. 1995. “Forever is a Long Time: Romancing the Real in Gay Kinship Ideologies.” In Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, S. Yanagisako and C. Delaney, eds. New York City: Routledge. 87-110.

This past weekend I presented the following paper at the 2016 University of Colorado Boulder Department of Anthropology Graduate Student Conference  titled “The Ethnographic Turn.”

As I ponder over the question, “What does it mean to be a responsible scholar? Responsible to whom, when, and why?” I am struck by how easy and difficult this question is for me to answer. Easy because I am a Native scholar doing work with my own community—I know to whom I am responsible and my community’s path towards self-determination is closely tied to my own liberation. Thus, the kinds of work I produce impact my community and myself directly, so the question of who I am responsible to is not a hard one for me to answer. However, working with the community with whom I’m from does not guarantee I will not produce works that Dor Bahadur Bista describes as “an insecure and thoughtless mimicry of the West” (1987:9). In fact, Preym K. Po’Dar and Tanka B. Subba make it clear in Demystifying Some Ethnographic Texts on the Himalayas that Native scholars are not free from producing orientalist discourses (1991). However, scholars who work with communities that they are from, I argue, are more mindful of this critique for they have familial and communal ties that can easily be threatened due to works that may be perceived as harmful to the collective. This also brings up questions of intersectional subjectivities for Native scholars that are tied to their community that make them also susceptible to such works of harm which force them to be less blind to perspectives of privilege. Thus, I do not see myself as having a choice over having responsibility; rather, familial and communal bonds demand that I serve my obligation as a member of this community to produce work that is healing. In this response, I seek to decenter the framing logics of anthropological ethics by asking: what happens when the question of responsibility becomes one of obligation; choice becomes necessity, and crisis exists as an everyday reality?

Episodic                                                    Structural (non-Episodic)

Colonial encounters                              (De)colonization

Resistance                                                Refusal

Outsiders                                                  Community member

Ethics                                                        Obligation

Allyship                                                    Marginality

As Dr. Audra Simpson pointed out yesterday, it’s important not to fall into the delegitimizing trap of justifying Native scholarship on the basis of identity politics and justice alone. This matters, but a deeper reason relates to the way in which Simpson engaged the distinction between resistance and refusal, which she argues, has to do with distinction between event/episode and structure. This cuts to the heart of the question. Anthropologists are encouraged to do the right thing through the logic of ethics, but this presumes we all need encouragement to do this; some of us don’t; we are already doing it. However, like refusal, obligation, necessity, and every day realities, Simpson argues, are the non-episodic qualities that structure the daily lives of Indigenous peoples, researchers or otherwise. By naming refusal, Simpson has not presented a new fashionable anthropological turn (Simpson 2014). While her conceptualization is novel and valuable, the reality of refusal, she argues, is something that Indigenous peoples have experienced throughout the history of colonization. If colonization was an event, then as Simpson points out, resistance would be enough. It’s not (Simpson, Workshop 1: Ethnographic refusal 9/30/2016). As Patrick Wolf notes, colonization was and remains structural (1999). Therefore, modes of decolonization must too be structural. If we truly want to decolonize, we must reimagine legacies of episodic conceptualization as structural—moving away from the resisting colonial encounters by ethical outsiders, toward the refusal of colonial structures by obligated stake holders, for whom non-obligatory ethics loses all meaning.

For guidance, I turn to my attention to Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, a groundbreaking book by Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith—another Indigenous scholar doing work with her own community and a leading theorist on decolonizing methods (1999). Smith problematizes Euro-Western approaches to research that she argues has historically served to essentialize communities and assist those in power in their project to further colonization—a system she terms “colonizing knowledges” (59). In order to avoid this, she proposes research that is decolonial in method. For research to be considered truly decolonial, it must, argues Smith, prioritize Indigenous voices, histories, epistemologies, and their struggles against settler colonialism (129)—in other words, research that orients itself around Indigenous peoples and their thoughts and struggles first and foremost. Such an approach that Smith stresses must be collaborative, and can lead, argues Smith, to “healing of the researched and a wider scope of representation for the voices of the dispossessed, disenfranchised colonized Other in the research process” (255). “The goal,” writes Smith, “is to make them visible and integrate them in the academic discourse and the global knowledge economy” (307). Thus, for me to produce responsible scholarship on the community from whom I’m from, my obligation requires me to produce decolonized work that centers them and their struggles and concerns. It requires Indigenous scholars such as myself, argues Smith, to be ethical, critical, respectful, reflexive, and most of all, humble so that they may hear members of their community when they are speaking (1999:139).

In 2012, the number of Tibetans who chose to self-immolation in Tibet began to increase at an alarming rate. Although the first Tibetan to set himself afire to protest in Tibet took place in 2009, following the largest uprising ever recorded across the three provinces of Tibet, the number of Tibetans self-immolating jumped at an alarming rate from one in 2009, to fourteen in 2011, to eighty-six in 2012. There were one or two self-immolations taking place almost every week during the winter of 2012. If one understands self-immolation as episodic, it takes away its deeper relationship with settler colonialism—which is not episodic. Tibetans across the world had been reacting emotionally in unison to this act because this is the physical manifestation of their every day life and history. Tibetans organized at all levels to amplify the voices of the self-immolators so that their protests were seen and heard inside and outside Tibet. During this time, scholars of Tibet and Himalayas stepped forward to take scholarly responsibility to address the misrepresentation of self-immolations of Tibetans in the media. On April 9, 2012 Carole McGranahan and Ralph Litzinger edited a series of essays on the self-immolations titled Self-Immolation as Protest in Tibet on Cultural Anthropology (McGranahan and Litzinger, 2012). Months later, Katia Buffetrille and Francoise Robin edited Tibet is Burning on Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines on December 14, 2012 (Buffetrille and Robin, 2012). I consider these works to be decolonial because they tried to strengthen the voices of the self-immolators by giving their actions socio-economic, religious-political, and historical context—trying to, in Smiths words, “make them visible and integrate them in the academic discourse and the global knowledge economy.” Rather than take an objective stance, scholars came together to use learned knowledges from their subjects to engage larger conversations that contextualized individual self-immolators and their protest as the act took place. This was scholarship that drew on knowledges of the Indigenous pasts to make sense of their individual presents, especially during moments in which the baseline daily structural violence manifested in ways that was read internationally as episodic human tragedy. But where does my work as a Native scholar fit into all this?

In Cheryl Suzack and Shari M. Huhndorf’s Indigenous Feminism: Theorizing the Issue, authors make the argument that for any work to be considered decolonized, such works need to first center settler colonialism (2010:16). As the number of self-immolation in Tibet began to slowly rise in 2011, I began addressing individual self-immolators by intentionally placing them within the discourse of Chinese settler colonial state on Lhakar Diaries, a blog I run with other Tibetans to serve as a platform for Tibetan thought by us for us (Lokyitsang, 2011). However, the alarming rise in numbers in 2012 put me in a constant state of anxiety—especially when I felt so far away from friend and family who were engaged in practices of commemoration and solidarity. I made every effort to bring up self-immolations as they took place in every space I was engaged in. On April 11, 2012, I was invited by a friend to give a special talk on the self-immolations, as these acts were virtually unknown to my university. I felt obligated in the positive generative sense to amplify their calls to action. Following the talk, I wrote another post on Lhakar Diaries giving an outline of the talk I had given for others interested in doing similar talks for public awareness (Lokyitsang, 2012).

In all these posts and talks, I situated individual self-immolators against the backdrop of the Chinese settler colonial state. In Indigenous Feminism: The Project, Hilden and Lee argue that to decolonize, one needs to “reclaim, reread, and rearticulate” Indigenous peoples from the past and the present, whose voices, they argue, are always being misrepresented and/or erased (2010:74). I published the essay Their Burning Bodies Told Histories Never Forgotten (which I recently discovered was heavily plagiarized by someone doing a dissertation on the subject at the University of Sussex) on on December 18, 2013 (Lokyitsang, 2013). The essay was my attempt to write against colonizing narratives on the self-immolations by the Chinese state, as well as to speak with rather than for the self-immolators. Aside from few scholars, which include McGranahan, most reports on the self-immolation in scholarship and media up until then had mostly concerned itself with just the act, and very little attention had been paid to whom the self-immolators were speaking, and the structures that they were speaking about. That article was my attempt to write about the self-immolators and the audiences they were speaking to. It was my attempt to “reclaim, rewrite, and rearticulate” self-immolators and their multiple audiences. In this way, I was able to begin the process of “healing of the researched,” myself included.

The reason I go through this timeline is to demonstrate how my role as a Native scholar requires me to always address present circumstances of the Tibetan community at all times. The position of colonized, refuged, or exiled Tibetan suggests a positioning of crisis that isn’t episodic, but an everyday structural affair. I consider the historical approach I have adopted over the course of my progression as a scholar to be a method to decolonize. It is a method that has helped me center the voices and subjectivities of Tibetans in the present using their memories of the past—a method many Indigenous scholars stress. It also allows me to engage Tibetan pasts in order to make sense of Tibetan presents, so that we may collectively engage in imagining Tibetan futures—an engagement that Grace Dillon (2012) argue preoccupies itself with the project of healing. For my work to be truly decolonizing, it must engage the concerns of my community at all times because it engages the futures of not just myself, but my family and thus, my community. Decolonized works suggests pathways towards individual and communal healing. This is how I view my obligation as a Native scholar doing work with my own community.

In considering yesterday’s discussion of critiques against the dehumanizing Ontological turn; I invite researchers to consider a structurally decolonizing praxis. This would not only involve theories and methods generated by community members with whom you work, it would also employ the genealogy of works produced by Indigenous scholars over the last forty years. The contributions made by such scholars often remain inaccessible in our disciplines, yet they offer ways of approaching questions regarding ethics and responsibility that anthropology often considers important. Having spent the weekend engaging refusal, we might ask a larger disciplinary question beyond the level of the individual; what happens when anthropological ethics become disciplinary obligations embedded into the ethnographic process itself, to refuse the everyday structures of ever-present colonization?

Works Cited:

Bista, Dor Bahadur. 1987. Nepal school of sociology/anthropology.

Buffetrille, Katia and Robin, Francoise. 2012. Tibet is Burning. Self-immolation: Ritual or Political Protest? Special issue of Review d’etudes Tibétaines, 25, 1-212.

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Carole McGranahan’s Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War is an ethnography of heartbreak (2010). A heartbreak that began with the loss of Tibet. Every time I read this book, I am reminded of people from my childhood who were of the generation that was raised in Tibet but later died in exile. The same people who would share stories of Tibet prior to its invasion. These stories often began with joy, but would end abruptly with sadness—a sadness I did not understand as a child, but was taught about and grew familiar with as I grew older. This sadness, heartbreak, is captured and historicized in this book. Central to the book are themes of histories, that McGranahan argues are “arrested.” However, these historical arrests are not permanent, instead, they are histories that await an eventual release (24). The histories that are put on arrest in McGranahan’s book are those of Chushi Gangdruk veterans—the resistant army that fought the Chinese invasion of Tibet. Thus, this book is about contested histories and subaltern subjects.

Chushi Gangdruk veterans piece together a history of resistance using memories of their fight against Chinese invaders. Though the resistance was officiated in Lhasa by leading Lithangpas, the resistance, according to many, had begun in Kham—where Chinese soldiers began their advance into Tibet. Unlike China’s narration of the event as “the peaceful liberation of Tibet,” many recall violent resistance, in which, Khampa men and women mobilized and fought. Yet, resistance history was contested not only by China, but by the Tibetan Government in Exile—the institutional structure that represents Tibetan sovereignty. In many ways, this book is an exploration into the reasons veteran histories are put on arrest, and are contested, and denied. What McGranahan uncovers are veteran memories of homeland and family prior to the Chinese invasion, memories of Chinese soldiers advancing, memories of unorganized fight and flight, memories of alliance building, memories of fighting for homeland, and thus nation. “If history is narrative,” writes McGranahan, “memory is what drives historical narratives; that is memory consists of the stuff and the energy with which histories are forged or forgotten” (19). What McGranahan uncovers then, are memories of veterans and their resistance histories. But why the arrest? According to McGranahan, it was a combination of two things; 1) the agreement that the US would provide assistance only if resistance fighters kept their involvement a secret (a promise honored until British film maker George Patterson made the film “Raid into Tibet” without permission from CG leadership that prompted CIA agents to demand for Gyalo Thondup to replace Baba Yeshi, even though CG soldiers at the time thought of Gyalo Thondup as having no business in structural operations of CG (156)), and 2) the Tibetan Government in Exile (TGiE) launching international efforts that politicized the Tibet movement along human rights ideologies in the 1990s that required the abandonment of resistance narratives that revealed Tibetans as having taken up arms in their resistance against the Chinese invaders—a narrative that worked against TGiE’s framing of Tibetans as peace-loving, and so, deserving of international assistance. The veterans also did not win, due to shifting political relations between the US and China.

For the veterans, Chushi Gangdruk history began with Khampa sovereignty clashing against Chinese ones. It was also about Khampas choosing to become Tibetan—an identity that was resisted prior to Chinese invasion—in order for a united flight against a common enemy that threaded the whole of Tibet: The Chinese. For them, resistance history was about Khampas becoming Tibetan and taking the onus to fight on behalf of not only Khampa families and clansmen, but a nation they recognized as Tibet. Thus, resistance history for veterans, were about the rejection of Chinese colonization in place for Tibetan nationality. Though Chushi Gangdruk history originated in Kham (even before they adopted the name Chushi Gangdruk), and with Khampa men assuming leadership positions, resistance soldiers were Tibetans of all background. However, their nationalist history was being enacted (through resistance) and made during a time when multiple groups were vying to take control of the unfolding Tibet situation with China. “Strains reflected,” writes McGranahan, “the troubles taking place in civilian life between the United Party, the 13^th group, and the government-in-exile” (154).

Invasion was recent, thus, exile was new. Tensions from such fragmentations during this time makes itself visible within Chushi Gangdruk’s own dealings, as well as civilian life. However, deteriorating conditions for Tibetan refugees demanded such consolidation of leadership to address conditions of invasion and exile. In the end TGiE, led by Gyalo Thondup, assumed that role due to the prominence of the Dalai Lama, however, such fast tracked method came at personal costs. This part of exile history becomes important in understanding how leadership in pre- and post-invasion Tibet operated as multiple, diverse, and at times clashed with one another—characteristics that kept certain regions and its leaderships, like Kham, autonomous and under its own authority throughout pre-invasion Tibet. It also reveals how the consolidation of Tibetan authority under one government, the TGiE from central Tibet, was necessitated by foreign invasion and the uniting role the Dalai Lama played for many. Thus, conditions of invasion and exile demanded such fast-tracked consolidation of power. Under such conditions, it became alright for Chushi Gangdruk to be fighting a secret war against the Chinese following the Chinese invasion (when political consolidation had not been in complete effect), but became anti-nationalist when enacting political relations with Taiwan on behalf of the Tibetan nation—when exile governmentality had been consolidated under the TGiE. An event that became framed in the Tibetan community as one motivated by Khampa nationalism and against Tibetan unity, when the leadership themselves make clear that their actions were enacted on behalf of Tibetan sovereignty.

To be clear, for veterans, their history and continued involvements were absolutely about their homelands in Kham, but it was also about obligations to Tibet as a whole and to the Dalai Lama. However, by the time Chushi Gangdruk initiated negotiations with Taiwan, political authority rested under the TGiE. Thus Chushi Gandruk histories and actions becomes misinterpreted and put under arrest for TGiE’s project of unity; “where unity is considered to be of paramount importance,” writes McGranahan, “historical variation is at times a precarious project. Under such circumstances, the possibility and power of alternative pasts to challenge present and future is both empowering and disabling” (205). However, unity should not be taken so lightly, while it worked to shut down certain memories and histories, it also served to sustain newly exiled Tibetan refugees. Sustenance that certain families of the Chushi Gangdruk faction who were excommunicated did not get to partake in.

It’s strange to think of this book as being six years of age, it feels as if it was a year ago that this book came out. It was one of the reasons why I decided to move all the way here to Boulder, CO, to work with someone who doesn’t shy away from Tibetan sovereignty. Skirting away from topics of Tibetan nationalism, as this book shows, is impossible. Veteran history is undeniably about Tibetan nationalism. The way the men and women in this book engage their memories of pasts and presents, propelled them to act as sovereigns (to protect their family, ways of life, approaches to the world) against foreign invaders, so that they may secure Tibetan futures. As McGranahan points out, veteran history has been experiencing release in exile. A release that began with veteran autobiographies in Tibetan, with this book adding to such releasing in English. It is now a celebrated history among civilians in exile (although they may still be on arrest in Tibet) who view such histories of resistance as powerful assertions of Tibetan sovereignty—an assertion that Tibetans continue inside and outside Tibet. Not too long ago, I was reading an article on a Tibetan woman named Gonpo, who had been the daughter of the last serving Khampa King of the village Mei, who now resides in Dharamsala. Along with her history, she talks about self-immolations that had taken place in her town. Gonpo mentions how few of the self-immolators had been the grandchildren of her father’s officers. Having connections to reactionary pasts make living in the present under the Chinese settler state hard. Somehow, I can’t help but think of their chosen acts of self-immolation in connection with such historical pasts. Thus, this book uncovers intersecting histories of imperialism (US), settler colonialism (China), and nationalism (Tibetan) that continue to effect Tibetan lives.

What is most convincing about this book is that it is an ethnography that takes veteran hearbreaks serious and treats them with care. In that, the book is a record of their collective heartbreaks. Tibetan readers will find that the heartbreak recorded are ones we all know too well. Losing Tibet was a shattering experience, both literally and figuratively. Works on Tibet produced in English have always obsessed with the religious element of Tibet, choosing to selectively ignore the political side. Contemporary ethnographies have largely remained in the domain of the religious and either cover historical periods prior to invasion or post-invasion, but never during the period of invasion and its aftermath—this book is rare in that sense that it records historical memories of exactly that time period. Contemporary scholarship on Tibet also tends to focus on Tibetans in Chinese controlled Tibet or exile India as if such political conditions had always been as such–choosing to never disrupt or disturb such assumption by not acknowledging histories of invasion. Works either frame Tibetans as always struggling against the conditions of exile or struggling against modernization developmental projects under the Chinese state as if the historic invasion of Tibet by China was an episodic event, and not a foreign structural force that continues to impact Tibetans on either side of the border. What’s different about this book—aside from that fact there are very little anthropological works on Tibetan exiles—is that it engages that historical period. Thus, the subject of Tibetan politics and nationalism are unavoidable. In fact, it is central to the story of not only Chushi Gangdruk but of exile Tibet—of the messiness of centralizing power, a mess that had been necessary for survival and continuity for Tibetans who had not anticipated becoming refugees. This is why this book becomes unique among its contemporaries.

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This is a chapter analysis from Holly Gayley’s Love Letters from Golok: A Tantric Couple in Modern Tibet (2016). Chapter one is titled “Daughter of Golok: Tare Lhamo’s Life and Context.” I wrote this chapter analysis and thought it would be useful to think with other Tibetans who are especially interested in considering gender in Tibetan Buddhism. This is a continuation of my project to engage historic female figures of Tibet. Tare Lhamo is especially interesting because she was born before China’s invasion of Tibet, she lived through the invasion, followed by Culture Revolution until its end, and was part of the religious cohort in Tibet who began reviving Tibetan Buddhism from the destruction of Culture Revolution. She becomes an important figure to consider when we think about different subjectivities of Tibetan women in Tibetan history. I hope you’ll find the following analysis useful and tempt you to read the book yourself.

How did Tare Lhamo become the figure that she became in a male dominated religious system? To get to the bottom of this, Holly Gayley suggests particular attention to the “social webs” in which Tare Lhamo functioned. This demands acute attention to teasing out Tare Lhamo’s subjective positions in the communities in which she functioned and the socio-political and cultural contexts that shaped who she was to become in the region. Thus, to understand Tare Lhamo, in Sherry Ortner’s words, one needs to pay close attention to the (social-political-cultural-regional) structures within which she functioned, and the type of agency she mobilized in propelling her on the path she envisioned for herself.

So, who is Tare Lhamo?

She was born in 1938 to a prominent Nyingma terton, Apang Terchen Orgyan Trinle Lingpa, in the region of Golok, Amdo in preinvasion Tibet (38). From a young age, she was trained by her father–an accomplished terton in his own right. In addition to accessing teachings through her father, Gayley highlights how she was also able to access other teachers—and their monastic institutions—through her father’s connections . Golok, for much of Tibetan history, had functioned and continues to function within the bounds of kinship. Additionally, the Nyingma lineages transmitted terma, treasures (although not always exclusively) through family. As such, monasteries operated under a clan-based system (48). Thus, for Tare Lhamo, being born in such a place to such a family functioned in a manner that would benefit her. Gayley is clear in pointing out that her birth in an elite family, and the kinds of religious networks her family were active in, contributed to Tare Lhamo’s access to such religious traditions and institution. In other words, her status had everything to do with making her agentive in accessing such religious institutions—despite its patriarchal structuring. Tare Lhamo’s high status allowed her to bypass the gendered restriction usually placed on female practioner from entering such institutions. Her status played a key role in opening the doors to a religious institution that would otherwise restrict based on gender. Thus, status becomes an important analytic to consider when considering gendered subjectivities that might otherwise be undermined.

However, understanding Tare Lhamo’s subjective position only through the lens of status becomes limiting. This is considered by Gayley when she considers Tare Lhasa’s namthar Spiraling Vine of Faith by her hagiographer Pema Osal Thaye (53). She asks, how is Tare Lhamo’s agency framed when considering her hagiography? According to Gayley, her hagiography can be thought of in two parts. The first part considers Tare Lhamo’s past lives and emanations. The second part focuses primarily on Tare Lhamo’s contemporary life. Agency, according to Gayley, is differently framed when considering the two parts. While Tare Lhamo is considered to be the reincarnation of multiple male and female Lamas and dakinis, Osal Thaye chooses to focus on Tare Lhamo’s connection with the daikini, Yeshe Tsogyal, and a prominent well known female yogini in Golok, Sera Khandro. This is a deliberate move, argues Gayley, precisely because all three share the same gender, and so, legitimize Tare Lhamo as a female practitioner equal to those of her previous incarnations. By emphasizing Tare Lhamo’s “extraordinary” birth in combination to her associations with such high female figures in Tibetan Buddhism—especially in the Nyingma tradition—Osal Thaye is able to elevate Tare Lhamo as already exceptional. Gayley calls this “the divinization of female agency,” which “elevates Tare Lhamo by identifying her as an emanation of female deities and simultaneously distances her from ordinary woman and the ‘faults’ (skyon) attributed to them.” (55). While this takes away from portraying Tare Lhamo as choosing her own path own—since her past emanations are assumed to have determined her path in her contemporary incarnation—this works, argues Gayley, to legitimize Tare Lhamo as a religious figure in her own right. In other words, transferred charisma from previous lives works to not only advantaged Tare Lhamo in a male dominated spiritual institution, but it also discouraged others from conceptualizing her based on her gender. Instead, encouraging a reading of her as a spiritual master in her own right. This is highlighted by how Yeshe Tsogyal’s is conceptualized to be on equal standing to that of other buddhas–allowing for the portrayal of Tare Lhamo too to be on par with other buddhas (61). This allows Tare Lhamo to be conceptualized beyond her gender within the patriarchal structures of the religious institutions and beliefs she interacted within. In fact, her associations with such high (female) religious figures allows her to bypasses gendered beliefs that structured the societies and institutions that she was in. Her association to previous incarnations allows her, argues Gayley, to become on par with other buddhas. Thus, her gender does not matter.

For much of Tare Lhamo’s second part of her hagiography, Osel Thaye’s portrays Tare Lhamo’s agency through her own making—rather than having it be transferred to her through previous incarnations. By highlighting Tare Lhamo’s own choices since young age in choosing her own path, the termas she revealed, and miracles she performed, Osel Thaye portrays Tare Lhamo as agentive in her contemporary incarnation. Additionally, her interactions with other “local tertons and their prophetic contents,” writes Gayley, “further confirm her exceptional status and identity with illustrious female antecedents” (71). In other words, in addition to having her past legitimized through previous antecedents, her contemporary activities as Tare Lhamo, especially in treating the sufferings of Tibetans following Tibet’s invasion, further establishes her as an “illustrious female antecedents” in her own right in Golok. Thus, despite the deflection of Tare Lhamo’s agency “by relegating her enlightenment to past lives and identifying her with female antecedents” that prevent Tare Lhamo to serve as “an exemplar” in her current incarnation, her practice and actions in her contemporary incarnation, argues Gayley, further authorizes her agency. “Precisely because of her exceptional nature,” writes Gayley, Tare Lhamo can be portrayed with heightened agency during this period of collective trauma” (73).

Thus, for us to understand Tare Lhamo, Gayley emphasizes the importance in placing her within the framework of her culture (Golok-Nyingma-Amdo-Tibet) and time (preinvasion-invasion-Culture Revolution-end of Culture revolution) so that we may understand the structures within which she functioned, and thus, her agency. Gayley writes, “I propose that it is precisely through this amalgam of social relations with prominent lamas in Golok and symbolic identification with authoritative female antecedents that agency is conferred on Tare Lhamo in her hagiographic representation” (73). By unraveling the complexities of social structures that subjects such as Tare Lhamo function within, we are better positioned to begin comprehending how subjects can bypass and obliterate structurally defined categories like gender, sexuality, etc. to access agentive liberation (both structurally and individually influenced, meaning institutional and societal structures) that are also ironically structurally defined (here I’m specifically talking about super structure, large-scale views of Buddhism that draw paths towards spiritual liberation).

As discussed in previous chapters of Love Letters from Golok: A Tantric Couple in Modern Tibet, Holly Gayley stresses how Tare Lhamo and Namtrul Rinpoche saw their religious engagement and activities in tandem with reviving Tibetan Buddhist culture following the destruction of the Chinese-led Culture Revolution. In the following, I discuss chapter three, “Inseparable Companions: A Buddhist Courtship and Correspondence,” and four, “Emissaries of Padmasambhava” (2016). Before Tare Lhamo and Namtrul Rinpoche began their activities in reviving Tibetan Buddhism during the 1980s and 1990s together as a tantric couple, they began their official courtship by sending each other letters (56 letters to be exact) in the 1970s. Tare Lhamo initiated the correspondence by sending Namtrul Rinpoche the first letter in 1978 (116). These letters from the 1970s played a crucial role, argues Gayley, in shaping the couple’s future activities that came to fruition later. The following chapters engage these letters closely to consider how the couple came to view one another and their future together as a tantric couple through Indigenous and Buddhist idiom. While chapter three explores “the role that gender and voice play” in how the couple “forged their partnership and sense of agency as a couple” (119), chapter four is interested in the different genres of prophecy and bardic verses both employed in their letters to one another to envision future activities which aimed to revive Buddhism in Tibet (169).

Tare Lhamo, who lived in Amdo and China’s Qinghai province, was the first to reach out to Namtrul Rinpoche, who lived in Kham, China’s Sichuan. However, Namtrul Rinpoche was swift in his response. Initially, these letters engaged in establishing a “humanizing self-portrait” to one another (118). In their introductions, both drew heavily on their past lives together as a way to establish their karmic connection in the present. This was important because such recognition led to their union as a tantric couple. Their letters are situated within Tibetan epistolary practices that consisted of “cultural constraints on first-person expression, tantric practices involving sexuality, and folk convention for articulating love” (119). In terms of shifting voice and style, Galey found “at least four different modes” in their correspondence:

“The first is an oscillation between the two, whereby a letter or section of a letter is primarily related to either their prophetic vocation as tertons or the expression of personal sentiment. Here epistolary conventions and literary style play a key role in the way Tare Lhamo and Namtrul Rinpoche construct their personae as a couple by alternating between various authorial stances. The second mode involves the development of a synergy whereby visionary recollections of their past lives elicit affective responses that strengthen their bond in this life. In turn, the affections shared between them encourages their visionary propensities and stimulates further past-life recollections and prophecies about the location of their treasures, thereby inaugurating the revelation process within the correspondence itself. The effect is to blur the boundary between love and destiny. In a third mode, they use folksy pairings of animals and their habitats, like a snow lion and its mountain abode, to depict their shared destiny in worldly terms and portray their personal bond as one of mutual compatibility and reliance. The fourth mode offers a final synthesis of prophetic and personal in references to the tantric rite of sexual union and its role in treasure revelation. This points beyond the correspondence itself to the consummation of their courtship and life together, sharing a single monastic seat, revealing treasure, and teaching side by side.” (120)

In their introductory letters to one another, both employ honorific styles filled with praise as a gesture of deference (121). While Namtrul Rinpoche’s style revealed his monastic training in his writing, Tare Lhamo, who could read but could not write, had her scribe Thopa write in (Gesar) bardic and folk style (123). Eventually, the two switched from formal to folk style at the insistence of Tare Lhamo (125). In their letters, the two list a number of prominent religious and folk figures from Tibet’s literal and mythical historical pasts to indicate their karmic connection with one another. Recognition by Namtrul Rinpoche of Tare Lhamo as Yeshe Tsogyal (128) for example, also revealed the gendered dimension of such courtship. However, this did not mean one viewed the other in a superior or inferior position. In fact, both equally recognized each other’s spiritual status.

In addition to recognizing each other’s spiritual lineage in the past, invoking past reincarnations mostly helped to affirm the couple’s karmic connection to one another, argues Gayley. This was important, according to Gayley, because the activity of recalling their past lives together served as an affective dimension that drew them closer—allowing for the imagining of a shared destiny from the past into the future. The point wasn’t just about claiming past lineages but to cement their karmic past in the present so that they could engage in the project of imagining a future together in which they would revive Buddhism from the destruction of Culture Revolution—a topic closely engaged in Chapter four. In addition to these recollections of previous life, they also used folky pairing between animals and natural habitat to emphasize the naturalness of their union (145). This style allowed the two to be playful and flirtatious (148). “These are humanizing moments,” writes Gayley, “where they present themselves simply as man and woman” (148). In passages that depict each other as “partners in dance,” the couple move from “playful flirtation to the revelation of treasures via tantric techniques” writes Gayley (156). In his liquor song (chang shey) framed in tantric terms to Tare Lhamo in anticipation of her arrival at Nyenlung, Namtrul Rinpoche describes the liquor as “supreme elixir” (bdud rtsi mchog) as “great substance symbolizing method and wisdom.” “The compound ‘method and wisdom’ (thabs shes) is a standard referent for male and female partners who engage in the tantric rite of sexual union” writes Gayley (163). In this mode, sexual union is about treasure revelation, and so, about bringing benefits to others. According to the couple, these revelations would usher in a new era of happiness that would see Tibetan Buddhism restored in Tibet (165).

While chapter three explored “the interplay between the prophetic and personal dimensions of their courtship,” chapter four is interested in how they imagined their future. The practice of imagining the future involves imagining the past. The past becomes a resource for the couple through which their present is explained, argues Gayley. Doing so, thus, allows for the couple to imagine a future together. For Tare Lhamo and Namtrul Rinpoche, the Maoist period (which ushered in the era of death and destruction according to both) is described as “degenerate times” using Tibetan Buddhist idiom.

Drawing on Padmasambhava prophecies, they explain conditions of Culture Revolution within the historical framework of Tibet. This allowed Culture Revolution to be understood not as an all-consuming moment in Tibetan history, but another event regarding degenerate time that Padmasambhava prophesized in Tibetan imperial history. In other words, the Maoist-period becomes yet another moment in the long history of Tibetans surviving degenerate times. For example, in Tare Lhamo’s 22nd letter to Namtrul Rinpoche, she writes about the prospect of cultural renewal through their activities (180). Such a rendering allowed the couple to conceptualize Culture Revolution as temporary and ripe with opportunities for reestablishing Tibetan Buddhism through their own engagements (170). This approach allowed the couple to become agentive not only in interpreting the events of Culture Revolution through their own local and Buddhist idiom, but also allowed the two to become agentive in imagining activities (whether in teaching or treasure revealing together) that would lead to the revival of Tibetan Buddhism and culture—a revival that would heal Tibetan trauma. In short, imagining Culture Revolution through their own cultural and spiritual frameworks allowed the couple to imagine each other as active agents drawing on their own cultural and spiritual resources to shape the future. For the couple, this intervention took shape later through their efforts in treasure revelation and communal teachings as a tantric couple who aimed to heal Tibetans and their cultural, spiritual and physical landscape.

Despite lacking explicit language that critiqued the state for obvious (state-repercussion) reasons, interpreting the Maoist era within Padmasambhava’s prophecy and idiom as degenerate times allowed the couple to critique the colonial state as “barbaric foreigners” without being specific, argues Gayley (177). Within this framework, treasure revelation becomes an important activity that engages regeneration and healing. Thus, they framed tantric activities they would embark on together later as restorative measures they could engage against the degeneration the Chinese state brought. This is important, stresses Gayley, because such a rendering engages Tibetan, rather than Chinese, pasts in imagining restorative measures for the current moment in order to shape Tibetan futures. Doing so also allowed the couple to become agentive in their ability to imagine agentive futures in which they revive Tibetan Buddhism and heal Tibetan suffering. Such an approach, argues Gayley, allowed Tare Lhamo and Namtrul Rinpoche to interpret their current predicament using their own culturally and spiritually developed idioms that stress the continuity of Tibetan history—where the Maoist era under China is yet another bump on the road that can be overcomed like before—in which, they, not the Chinese state, become agentive in imagining healing futures.  In her first letter to Namtrul Rinpoche, Tare Lhamo gives ritual prescription that would bring the appropriate conditions for their union to reveal treasures at specific locations (194). These imaginations in their correspondence with one another came to fruition later in the 1980s and 1990s when they began engaging in reviving Tibetan Buddhism together (alongside other prominent figures like Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok) through their religious activities as a tantric couple in eastern Tibet. Turning their tantric musings to one another in these correspondence in the 1970s into reality.

To end, here’s a music video by singer Dartso who’s singing a devotional song for Tare Lhamo and Namtrul Rinpoche.

This is an analysis from Hildegard Diemberger’s book When a Woman Becomes a Religious Dynasty: The Samding Dorje Phagmo of Tibet (2014).

Samding Dorje Phagmo is the first lineage that was initiated and led by a Tibetan woman named Chokyi Dronma in fifteen century Tibet (2007: 1). This lineage continues to exist in present day Tibet. “She was listed among the highest-ranking reincarnation at the time of the Fifth Dalai Lama, and recognized by the Tibetan government and acknowledged by the Qing emperor” writes Hildegard Diemberger. Thus, engaging this historic figure becomes important in situating Tibetan religious approaches to gender.

Although Samding Dorje Phagmo stands as both “a human being and as a spiritual entity” in the minds of most Tibetans—not to mention being both one and many people at the same time when considering her previous and ongoing reincarnations (2). Hildegard Diemberger chooses to focus her discussion on Chokyi Dronma, the founder of the lineage. Chokyi Dronma’s spiritual path becomes an important intervention through which the positions of female practioners can be considered. Especially when considering last week’s discussion regarding Buddha’s path in choosing his spiritual path. In comparison, Chokyi Dronma’s spiritual path becomes both influenced and hindered by her gender. According to Diemberger, she “had a profound sense of women’s vulnerability and saw Buddhism as a way to address their plight” (123). However, to understand how she came to such a conclusion, it becomes important to consider her spiritual journey. So, who was she?

According to her hagiography, she was the first born with the name Kongchog Gyalmo to a king in southwestern Tibet (120). Although the possibility of her becoming a leader was considered a real possibility, a son was nonetheless born to another wife of her father. The birth of this son, writes Diemberger, caused hers and her mother’s position to become precarious. Watching her mother’s concern regarding their changing position, argues Diemberger, caused Kongchog Gyalmo to become exposed to the types of vulnerabilities her mother, and thus women, faced. This lesson would continue with her own life. Following the birth of her daughter, she becomes sick. After a close brush with death, in which she interacted with the Medicine Buddha (124), she chooses to no longer care for her daughter—citing that the child had enough attendees as her reason. However, the daughter dies. The loss causes Kongchog Gyalmo, argues Diemberger, to break with secular life and pursue a religious life. After facing some pushback from her husband and in-laws, she is eventually given permission by her father-in-law to become an ordained nun at Choding. The types of pushback she faced from her husband and in-laws were particularly gendered—with detractors that included her in-laws and a Lama asking her to observe her responsibility as a householder. Following her ordination by Bodong Chogle Namgyal, she is given a new name, Chokyi Dronma. However,”No other fully ordained woman was present [at that time]” writes Diemberger—although “a whole texts to bhiksuni monastic rules” existed in the prior century (133). While no bhiksuni lineage existed, Bodong Chogle Namgyal choose to ordain Chokyi Dronma, argues Diemberger, so that she could serve as an exemplar who could be followed by other women (134). While her own path to enter the religious path is flanked with gendered complications, her high status played a large role, argues Diemberger, in allowing her access to full ordination (134).

Throughout her hagiography, “the story of Prince Siddhartha,” writes Diemberger, “is a constant theme” (128). Buddha’s life as narrated in the Lalitavistana becomes a constant framework through which Chokyi Dornma and her hagiographer interpreted her life experiences. Like Buddha, she saw herself as walking away from worldly samsaric existence to pursue a higher path that sought to free all being from suffering. However, she is aware that the challenges she faced were particularly gendered and thus considers alleviating the sufferings of women (130). Thus, Buddha serves as the exemplar she uses to inspire her on her path. In doing so, she herself becomes the exemplar that Bodong Chogle Namgyal hopes for. Additionally, like Buddha, she uses her hair to symbolize transitions on her spiritual path. She cuts her hair to symbolize her departure from worldly existence to become a nun. However, following the failure of an attempted nunnery, she chooses to grow her hair following Bodong Chogle Namgyal’s advice to signify her transition from a nun into a wandering yogini (135). As a yogini, she comes to symbolize and manifest as Dorje Phagmo (Vajravarahi). This transition also reflects her different approach to sexuality. Going from a celibate nun to becoming a tantric consort. While it is unclear whether she was in breach of her celibacy vows, Diemberger notes that “conventional limitation attributed to bhikus and bhiksunis could be transcended” (137). “The spiritual master alluded here to a divine level of interaction that transcended the human and allowed for what was unacceptable at a human level” writes Diemberger (137). Thus, her hair serves as a symbol that mark her spiritual transitions.

Although her gendered role as a mother and wife hinders her attempt at getting her feet into the door, ultimately she is able to “transform the challenges of her life into her own empowerment” argues Diemberger. Diemberger continues, “In doing so she followed, […], a Buddhist tantric approach, which seeks to change what is conventionally considered an obstacle into the very means to achieve spiritual liberation” (139). It was her brush with death that prompted her to have an empowering encounter that led her on her spiritual path. Her hagiographer notes how she was known to be an expert at healing people with mental disturbances. Diemberger emphasizes this is due to her own experience dealing with mental illness following the death of her first teacher. Despite the hardship she faced, she was eventually able to turn such disempowering experiences into empowering tools for practice. They also came in handy when she began teaching and healing others. Alleviating the suffering of others, an outcome she set out to achieve when she decided to begin her spiritual path.

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Sonam Peldren was a religious figure from fourteenth-century Tibet. She was the daughter of a nomad. She had no special status, nor had she been trained or recognized by religious authorities during her time alive. She was recorded as not having received formal education and being illiterate. Yet, following her death, she became recognized in her community as the emanation of Dorje Pakmo. Unlike Tare Lhamo, Sonam Peldren lacked the social standing through which she could affirm her religious identity. However, despite such lack in status, Sonam Peldren is affirmed following her death through the efforts of her spiritual community. The following is an analysis of Sonam Peldren’s gendered subjectivity through an engagement with Suzanne M. Bessenger’s Echoes of Enlightenment: The Life and Legacy of the Tibetan Saint Sonam Peldren (2016). I specifically engage chapters 1 and 2, “The Life of Sonam Peldren” and “Composing the Life of Sonam Peldren.”

According to the texts, Sonam Peldren was born to a nomadic family of modest means. While Sonam Peldren’s mother was pregnant, auspicious dreams and occurrences take place—all of which indicated that the soon-to-be-born child is special to her parents. According to Bessenger, her hagiography records her to be a likable and obedient child until her marriage. Instead of marrying the man her parents chose, she opts to marry Rinchen Pel, a nomad from eastern Tibet. Following her life with Rinchen Pel and their community of nomads, she is recorded as having performed and experienced miracles—all of which are downplayed by her husband and her community. Whenever she tries to explain herself, she is recorded as having been ridiculed by all. It’s not until her death—a death she herself predicts which no one including her husband believes—that she is vindicated. Following her death, she appears to Rinchen Pel and reveals her true identity as Dorje Pakmo, and gives him lengthy teachings.

According to the first chapter, Bessenger engages Life (her namtar in Tibetan) to discern the purpose for why her hagiography is written. For Bessenger, the text is preoccupied with the polemical concern of proving Sonam Peldren’s divine identity as Dorje Pakmo. Similar to the rhetorical style of Tare Lhamo’s hagiography, Sonam Peldron’s hagiography also confirms her divine identity by connecting her to Dorje Nenjorma and the “Great Mother” (25). This is followed by accounts of miracles that occurred while she was in her mother’s womb. When it comes time for her to marry, she is presented as assertive in choosing her own path by picking her own husband. While she is with her husband and their community of nomads, she is presented as being generous and performs miracles that demonstrates her advanced religious abilities—despite being met with skepticism by all. Following a vision in which she is requested by female deities to accompany them, she predicts her own death to the disbelief of everyone. However, as time progresses, predictions like that of the death of monk Sonam Lodro comes true (42) and Rinchen Pel begins to believe. Following her death, she appears to him and finally reveals her true identity as an emanation of the female Buddha Dorje Pakmo (48). The purpose for such a textual framework in Life, argues Bessenger, is meant to “demonstrate, via narrative and anecdotal evidence, the divine identity of an unusual candidate for sainthood” (56). Thus, her hagiography is intentionally written in a manner to affirm Sonam Peldren as Dorje Pakmo precisely because she was an “unusual candidate for sainthood” due to her lack of status and connections with religious hierarchies—a point of reference that differs from Tare Lhamo who was born with spiritual status.

Chapter two of Bessenger’s book is concerned with who authored the text. The text’s colophon recognizes three formal authors—Rinchen Pel, Penden Senge, and Shakya Rinchen (62). However, Bessenger suggests that the text was actually produced by multiple authors. An argument she suggests is influenced by Diemberger’s analysis of Chokyi Dronma—a figure who like Sonam Peldron was recognized as Dorje Pakmo in 15th century Tibet. For Bessenger, evidences of multiple authors can be discerned from the text itself by paying specific attention to voices (57). The first clue comes from the chronological ordering of the text. Section titles for portions of Sonam Peldren’s life were “imposed on the text after its composition” argues Bessenger, “to help the narrative ‘fit” (60). This apparent ordering gives away the text as having had multiple inputs. While multiple-authorship is apparent, figuring out who besides the three recognized authors helped in producing the text, Bessenger suggests inputs from her father and Sonam Peldron herself by pointing to clues to the ways in which certain narrative voices differed from others. For instance, the text itself gives accounts of her father recording events that he found significant while she lived at her natal home. There are also evidences in which Sonam Peldren is recorded as “Gego” (the name her parents gave her) or “girl” in the earlier portion of her hagiography. Bessenger attributes such framing to her father who called her “girl” and “Gego” and never Sonam Peldren (66-7). This clue accords earlier portions of Life as having elements of her father’s written accounts. Additionally, the way some of the first-person quotes are written gives clues to Sonam Peldren as having authored parts of the text. Many of the first-person verses are recorded by Rinchen Pel as she spoken them, argues Bessenger. Further, specific attention to “female experiences” in which Tibetan nomadic women’s worlds are recorded, are unusual topics for male authors to record. Such inclusion suggests that Sonam Peldren’s own words were included in the text.

While Bessenger draws on Diemberger’s “collective remembering” to emphasize how Sonam Peldren’s hagiography had been composed as an emergent narrative which involved multiple voices including her own in a similar fashion to Chokyi Dronma’s hagiography (82), this is where the similarities end. According to Bessenger, both hagiographies served different purposes. Unlike Chokyi Dronma, Sonam Peldron lacked status. Chokyi Dronma’s hagiography, argues Bessenger, “served not to convince the community that she was noteworthy, but rather to frame her magnificence within the particular project of establishing the Dojre Pakmo spiritual lineage by ‘defending the fact that Chokyi Dronma, although a woman, was [her master] Bodong Chokle Namgyel’s spiritual heir’” (83). In contrast, “one of the main themes of Sonam Peldren’s Life is not the awe she inspired in her community, but rather the resistance or scorn with which her claim were often met” (83). While both women enjoyed certain similarities whether due to their associations with Dorje Pakmo or the multiple voices involved in producing their hagiographies, status played out differently for both women in defining the terms of their path. Someone like Chokyi Dronma, who was born a princess, who’s religious claims within her community were never doubted, her hagiography served to authenticate the project of establishing the Dorje Pakmo lineage. However, for Sonam Peldren, her hagiography needed to authenticate her to the very community from whom she’s from (her community of nomads) who constantly challenged her spiritual claims. Thus, status becomes another factor, in addition to gender, when spiritual recognition and beyond is considered. It can determine whether a female practitioner can go beyond the project of recognition and towards projects of lineage establishment. In other words, it becomes an important component in determining individual practitioners level of agency to achieve spiritual enlightenment and more.

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Diki Tsering is affectionately called Gyalyum Chenmo, meaning “the great mother,” by Tibetans across the world. She is remembered for being mother to the 14^th Dalai Lama of Tibet. However, in addition to being the Dalai Lama’s mother, Tibetans continue to commemorate her for her dedicated service towards the Tibetan refugee collective in India who escaped China’s invasion. Alongside her eldest child, daughter Tsering Dolma, she managed one of the first nurseries for orphaned Tibetan refugee children in Dharamsala. This school, which was founded in 1960 and was called The Nursery for Tibetan Refugee Children, would later expand into different branches under its new name The Tibetan Children’s Village—one of the two important educational institution that would ensure the precarious lives of Tibetan children who had become refugees and orphans for the first time in India. Songs, events, and awards continue to be dedicated to her in recognition for her services towards the Tibetan refugee collective.

Due to her continued influence over Tibetans as someone who’s exemplary leadership that should be emulated, Diki Tsering becomes an important contemporary figure in Tibetan history. Unlike the female saints I have engaged thus far on Lhakar Diaries, Diki Tsering is not a religious figure. Instead, she’s a secular woman who happened to have given birth to the 14^th Dalai Lama—the most revered Tibetan religious figure in contemporary Tibetan society. Like the celebrated Hindu icon Amma, Diki Tsering is commemorated by her community due to her role as the mother figure. However, unlike Amma, her role as the mother figure is not constructed out of her spiritual practice (Lucia, 2014). Instead, it is Diki Tsering’s secular role as the mother to the Dalai Lama that is celebrated. Secular not because she herself was not religious, but because she had not taken religious vows to lead a religious lifestyle. Also, it’s usually the saint figure who gets thoroughly engaged in the namtars I have read so far. Rarely do these hagiographies engage the parent figures behind the saint. Thus, Diki Tsering presents a unique opportunity to shift the center from the religious figure to the secular figure standing behind them.

So, who was Diki Tsering? Why is she known as “the great mother” in contemporary Tibetan society? I consider this question through the engagement of her autobiography, Dalai Lama, My Son: A Mother’s Autobiography (2000), alongside other secondary sources. In the following, I begin first by giving a short overview of her autobiography, followed by an analysis regarding the text’s authorship and voice. Second, I engage how this autobiography is structured to consider who it was written for and why. Third, I consider Diki Tsering’s changing gendered roles alongside her comments regarding gender in her autobiography to contemplate whether she considered all gendered roles in negative light. And finally, I conclude with thoughts regarding aspects of Diki Tsering’s life that is rarely engaged or left out and compare her alongside other female figures we have engaged thus far.

Introduction: Diki Tsering

Diki Tsering’s autobiography, Dalai Lama, My Son, was published due to the combined efforts of her grandchildren, Yangzom Doma and Kheedroob Thondup in 2000. The autobiography is broken into two parts. Part one and two are titled “Daughter of Peasants” and “Mother of compassion.” The chapters are ordered to reflect a chronological order to her life from birth to death. Chapters under part one, “Daughter of Peasants,” detail her life as a daughter and granddaughter with her family until she is married off and transitions into roles of wife, daughter-in-law and becoming a first-time mother while living with her husband’s family. Chapters under part two, “Mother of compassion,” cover the transition she experienced following the recognition of one of her sons as the 14^th Dalai Lama. The chapters in this section outline her shift to Lhasa, her changed status from peasant to aristocracy, becoming windowed and a first-time grandmother in the same year, and interaction with major political crisis both local and Chinese produced that would lead to her eventual escape to India with the Dalai Lama.

According to Dalai Lama, My Son, Diki Tsering was born Sonam Tsomo to peasant farmers in Churkha, in the district of Tsongkha in Amdo (15). She describes her family as neither poor nor rich. Following a hard but happy childhood at home, she is arranged to be married to Choekyong Tsering by her grandparents at the age of thirteen (58). At fourteen, she officially marries and moves in with her husband and his family in 1917 (61). At her new home, she is given the name Diki Tsering by her mother-in-law. Her mother-in-law also happened to be the sister of Taktser Rinpoche, the abbot to Kumbum monastery (19). Diki Tsering describes her new life as a wife and daughter-in-law to be filled with hard work. Getting between three and four hours of sleep at night. “During those years of hardship,” writes Diki Tsering, “I never told anyone, not even my husband, that I was suffering” (76). She gave birth to daughter Tsering Dolma, her first child, at the age of nineteen. In total, she gave birth to sixteen children, only seven survived passed infancy (87). Among them, two girls and five boys. Three were recognized as high reincarnate lama: Thubten Jigme Norbu as Taktstar Rinpoche (2^nd eldest), Lhamo Tsering as the 14^th Dalai Lama (5^th eldest), and Tendzin Choegyal as Ngari Rinpoche (youngest). Aside from son Gyalo Thondup (her 3^rd eldest) and daughters Tsering Dolma and Jetsun Pema (2^nd youngest), the rest entered the monastic. Her life and status began to change each time she gave birth to a child recognized as a reincarnate lama. However, Lhamo Tsering’s recognition as the Dalai Lama caused the biggest shift. His recognition prompted her family to move from Tsongkha to Lhasa where her family was given an estate that had belonged to the 13^th Dalai Lama. In Lhasa, she and her family were given the aristocratic Yabshi title. This shift in role and place cause many changes in Diki Tsering and her family’s life. She describes life in Lhasa to be filled with “strange” Lhasa customs and (aristocratic) snobbery—all of which makes her appreciate and become nostalgic for her simple life in Amdo. Alongside her family’s elevated statuses came political crisis—during which her husband dies from suspected poisoning and she becomes a grandmother for the first time following the birth and death of Tsering Dolma’s first child. The political crisis ranged from the Reting and Taktra regency controversy (during which, His Holiness’s legitimacy as the real reincarnation of the Dalai Lama was questioned and several tests had to be performed to solidify his legitimacy, a topic covered also in The Noodle Maker by her son, Gyalo Thondup) to the Chinese invasion and occupation of Lhasa, followed by her eventual escape with the Dalai Lama and her family to India. Much of Diki Tsering’s second half of her autobiography covers events that had previously been written about in the 14^th Dalai Lama’s autobiography, Freedom in Exile: The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama (1991). Although the final chapter of her autobiography is titled “Safe Haven in India,” the book ends with Tsering Dolma’s death in 1964 and hers. In 1981, Diki Tsering died at her home, Kashmir Cottage, in Dharamsala (2000:183). According to those close to her, Diki Tsering is said to have never recovered from the stories of destruction and loss of people and places she loved that her sister brought on her visit from Tibet in 1980.

Authorship and Voice:

Although the book is written in English from the point of view of Diki Tsering in her own voice, she neither wrote nor spoke English. Suggesting her autobiography to be the product of multiple authors. The book’s title is clear in acknowledging her grandson Khedroob Thondup as the editor. However, in the book’s introduction, “Memories of My Grandmother,” Thondup gives detail on how the book came about. According to Thondup, it was his older sister Yangzom Doma’s idea to record her grandmother’s life story.

The idea came about in 1979, writes Thondup, when Doma was working as the editor of Tibet Journal at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala, India (8). Doma audio recorded Diki Tsering’s stories in Tibetan, while she transcribed and translated them in English, according to Thondup (11). “They got up to the point where my grandmother left Tibet,” writes Thondup, “and then, in 1981, my grandmother died” (“Tradition is Our Backbone,” 2000). That following year in 1982, Yangzom Doma died in a car accident while on vacation in Tunisia—leaving the project she began unfinished (Tsering, 2000:9). “In 1997, I decided it was time for me to take up the project” writes Thondup (Tradition is Our Backbone,” 2000). Thondup compiled his sister’s transcriptions and published this autobiography of his grandmother in English in 2000. While Dalai Lama, My Son may be an autobiographical account of Diki Tsering’s life, it was by no means, authored by a single person. Instead, it is a product of multiple authors: with Diki Tsering’s recalling memories of her life in Tibetan to granddaughter Yangzom Doma, who translated and edited these accounts in English, to Khedroob Thondup compiling Doma’s transcriptions and editing them down to its published version in 2000. Thus, the book is a product of the collaborative efforts between Diki Tsering, Yangzom Doma and Khedroob Thondup.

In terms of voice, as previously mentioned, the book is written in Diki Tsering’s narrative voice. However, her voice appears alongside postscripts that are authored by someone else throughout the book. These postscripts supplement Diki Tsering’s memories with background information that serve to contextualize her further. While it’s clear that the postscripts are not by Diki Tsering, aside from a few, it isn’t clear who authored specific postscripts—suggesting the postscripts to be a product of both Thondup and Doma. While Thondup makes clear that Diki Tsering’s voice is her own, his acknowledgement of his and his sister’s role in constructing her autobiography makes clear that Diki Tsering’s voice is translated and edited by the both of them. Which leads me to the question, for whom was this autobiography written and what purpose was it written for?

For whom, for what?

Since the book is written in English, the assumption is that the book will be read by English readers. In “New Age Namtar: Tibetan Autobiographies in English,” Lurie Hovell McMillin acknowledges that the practice of writing autobiographies is not new to Tibetans (2001). In fact, Tibet has had a “rich tradition” of namtars (autobiographies) usually written by religious figures to “inspire and instruct their readers and listeners” (155). However, “in the contemporary situation of Tibetan diaspora,” argues McMillin, “new forms of autobiography have appeared […] this time in English” (155). “Published in English in generic forms that are familiar to English readers,” continues McMillin, “these texts address new audiences and offer versions of Tibetan-ness to an eager portion of what is largely an American and sometimes British audience” (155).

The purpose of such autobiographies in English, argues McMillin, is to authenticate Tibetan experiences and transform western readers (158-9). But what do Tibetans gain in return? According to McMillin, the transformation of the western reader requires the reader to objectify experiences of the Tibetan author (160). In return, Tibetans receive patronage in terms of political advocacy and aid. Following China’s invasion of Tibet, the Tibetan apparatus gathered refugee stories in their hope to record Chinese atrocities. However, they were “unused to speaking of themselves and their lives in this way,” and “their stories had to be recast by those with a stronger sense of what the larger world needed to know” (161). Assisted by ghostwriters, “the world would come to know of the situation in Tibet” (161). “It was through these stories that the West was called on to act on behalf of Tibet” argues McMillin (161).

Using McMillin’s framework, it seems possible that Dalai Lama, My Son was written in English with western audiences in mind. However, I argue against the notion that the intended readers of Tibetan autobiographies in English are meant just for western audiences. While the list of books McMillin lists first appeared in English, these books were also later republished in Tibetan—suggesting the book was meant for both Tibetan and western audiences. Additionally, McMillin’s article was published in 2001. By 2001, the Tibetan diaspora had spread to the West. In addition to rising numbers of Tibetan children being raised in the West who read and spoke English, Tibetans who had graduated from Tibetan refugee schools in Nepal and India were trained to read, write, and converse in English too. In addition to westerners, Tibetan audiences were also consuming these “new age namtars” in English. Thus, “new age namtars” were not only being consumed by western readers, they were being consumed by Tibetans also.

While Dalai Lama, My Son addresses an unspecified audience, looking over information on how the book came to fruition gives some context. As previously stated, Yangzom Doma came up with the idea to record Diki Tsering’s life stories into a book. Through her initiative, Diki Tsering recounted memories of her life to Doma while she transcribed these stories into English. This suggests Diki Tsering’s original audience was her granddaughter. Although the book makes clear that Yangzom Doma wanted to record Diki Tsering’s life story for an autobiography, it isn’t clear whether this autobiography was meant for the family, the larger Tibetan audience or an international audience. What is clear, however, is that Diki Tsering agreed to have her stories recorded by her granddaughter and trusted her with them. Who’s to say that her recordings were not also meant for family, alongside its assumed Tibetan and western audiences?

Interior/exterior:

Following the death of both Diki Tsering and Yangzom Doma, Khedroob Thondup took up where his sister left off and published the finished version in 2000. Looking at the way the book is structured—which alongside its chronological overview of Diki Tsering’s life, gives brief commentaries on traditions and observations of Amdo and Lhasa—the book serves the purpose of introducing Diki Tsering as a public figure, and affirms the political turmoil she and her family lived through. While the book includes some intimate information regarding her life in part one, much of the events detailed in part two had become public knowledge by the time her book was published. Thus, I would argue that part one of the book details the interior portion of Diki Tsering’s private life, while part two details her exterior life as a public figure due to her role as the Dalai Lama’s mother.

For instance, in addition to the inclusion of intimate details of Diki Tsering’s early life in part one, the book also includes other intimate details that are encapsulated in stories regarding dreams and ghosts. In stories involving dreams, she reveals she had had dreams that revealed the specialness of some of her children who would become recognized as reincarnate lamas following their birth. When considering female saints in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition that I have engaged thus far (such was the case with Sera Khandro, Sonam Peldren, Tare Lhamo, and Chokyi Dronma), special dreams are cited as evidence by parents to indicate the specialness of their child before their birth. Diki Tsering’s dream echo a similar pattern.

Before Lhamo Tsering’s birth, Diki Tsering recalls a special dream she had. “[T]wo green snow lions and a brilliant blue dragon appeared […]. They smiled at me and greeted me in the traditional Tibetan style: two hands raised to the forehead. Later I was told that the dragon was His Holiness, and the two snow lions were the Nechung oracle (the state oracle of Tibet), showing His Holiness the path to rebirth” (2000:90). She also recalls unusual events surrounding Lhamo Tsering’s birth that further indicated his specialness. For example, Diki Tsering notes how fast her husband recovered from an illness that had nearly killed him following Lhamo Tsering’s birth (89). While such accounts can serve to legitimize the 14^th Dalai Lama further in the eyes of her audience as a special person, they also work to affirm her as his mother. A role that indicates her specialness.

Additionally, the book acknowledges the loss she suffered in loosing nine children. Although the book does not directly engage each loss she experienced, Diki Tsering is shown to be speaking on it through stories involving the kyirong in chapter nine, “Haunted by Ghosts” (51). While the narrative style of this story indicates her in the role of someone who is explaining what the Kyriong is to Yangzom Doma, she also uses her interactions with the Kyirong to explain the deaths of four of her children. Blaming the death of her children to her encounters with the Kyirong (52). This narrative style allows Diki Tsering to speak on her loss without necessarily giving away too much on such loss. Thus, an explanation on Kyirong becomes an avenue for Diki Tsering to acknowledge and speak on the loss she experienced without having to divulge intimate details of such experiences.

Overall, much of the first part of Dalai Lama, My Son, I argue, is structured to introduce Diki Tsering as the simple peasant child who transitions into her role as a wife, daughter-in-law, and mother. However, it is her role as the mother to the 14^th Dalai Lama that is highlighted most to confirm his special birth and her specialness in being his mother. A role that granted her the name, “the great mother,” due to her maternal association with the 14^th Dalai Lama. Thus, part one ends with a chapter dedicated to Lhamo Tsering’s birth.

Part two of the book engages her exterior role as the public figure she became following Lhamo Tsering’s recognition of Dalai Lama. More specifically it deals with her changed role from a private figure in Amdo to a public figure in Lhasa. Along with her move to Lhasa, Lhamo Tsering’s recognition causes Diki Tsering’s status to change from a peasant woman of Amdo to a Yabshi of Lhasa—one of the highest ranked status among Lhasa aristocrats. However, the intrigue of high status is short lived. Following the death of her husband in 1947, she witnesses a series of political crisis that include the Chinese occupation of Lhasa (129). A period that she remembered as testing since she had become the Yabshi family’s matriarch following the death of her husband and His Holiness, and thus her entire family, were put through a series of trying circumstances involving her son Lhamo Tsering’s legitimacy as the Dalai Lama and the Chinese invasion. The book ends with her escapes to India with the Dalai Lama, followed by daughter Tsering Dolma and her deaths.

Much of the political crisis covered in part two, however, are events that had previously been written about in published autobiographies by other members of Diki Tsering’s family (Dalai Lama 1990, Thubten Jigme Norbu 1986, Jetsun Pema 1997). While other members of her family had already written on these same events, Diki Tsering offers her own take on the events she witnessed and lived through (2000:129). However, many of her account confirm events that other members of her family had already written about. Suggesting the second half of the book to confirm family history that had previously been published.

Much of the book’s second half indicates Diki Tsering’s public role as the great mother of the Dalai Lama and shows her interacting with complex political dangers that her role brought. Her commitment to her family and humility serve to highlight her agency in how she dealt with such dangers to keep her family, and so, the Dalai Lama safe. This agentive quality reaffirms her role further as Gyalyum Chenmo. However, this time, it is through her own agentive role in decision making and political maneuvering as the Dalai Lama’s mother that her greatness is reaffirmed. Additionally, recalling events in Lhasa following China’s invasion, serve also to further confirm her family’s history regarding Chinese invasion and escape to India. This is important since events she recalls serve to affirm the Dalai Lama’s own accounts of the same events he had earlier published on.

Affirming Diki Tsering’s recollection of the political crisis following the Chinese invasion serve to confirm Tibet’s national history due to the Dalai Lama’s duel role as Tibet’s spiritual and political leader. This brings me back to McMillin’s point regarding the production of “new age namtar” by Tibetans following China’s invasion (2001). According to McMillin, these new age namtars served to authenticate Tibetan experiences and encouraged its audiences to engage political advocacy on behalf of Tibetans. In many ways, Dalai Lama, My Son serves to not only authenticate Diki Tsering’s experiences as Gyalum Chenmo, it also serves to authenticate the Yabshi family’s own recollection of their family history. A family history that is closely tied to Tibet’s national history due to the 14^th Dalai Lama. Thus, the book seeks to authenticate the Yabshi family history, through which, Tibet’s national history with China is authenticated. It also invites its readers, as McMillin suggests, to act on the writer’s behalf to defend and advocate on behalf of Tibet.

Gender:

From the beginning, Diki Tsering’s autobiography does not shy away from making explicit gender critiques. For instance, she is critical of the value placed on boys versus girls in the Amdo peasant community she is from. In chapter two, while reflecting on her life as Sonam Tsomo, she writes, “Even when I was still quite little, the fact that I was a girl weighted heavily on my heart. From very early in life we were aware of the different roles and aspirations of males and females and the preference families had for sons” (2000:23). She continues, “As girls we were taught that our only future and hope were marriage and a life of hard work” (55).   Following her marriage, she is critical of how daughters-in-law are treated like servants by members of their husband’s household—arguing about the “rigorous life” they led (55). She is unflinching in describing her mother-in-law as “bossy and domineering” (73). She also critiques husband-wife relations, describing it as “[…]not one of equality. The woman was always subservient to the man, even though she was supreme in domestic matters” (74). She goes on to describe her husband as “upright and honest,” but also says “Like his mother, he did no work” (74). As can be seen, her generalized critiques regarding gender is framed within her own experience as a female.

While she is critical of the gendered roles she went through as a girl, wife, and daughter-in-law, she seems proud of her role as a mother. Especially when three sons whom she birthed became recognized as incarnate lamas. A whole chapter is dedicated to the birth of Lhamo Tsering, who became recognized as the 14^th Dalai Lama (Chapter 15). Although chapters in part one of the book are filled with gender critiques, Diki Tsering offers interesting gender observations following her move to Lhasa from Tsongkha. For instance, in chapter nineteen, she observes different gendered rules being applied to new mothers. She writes, “In Tsongkha women were not permitted to attend rituals immediately after childbirth because they were considered polluted, but in Lhasa women took their newborn infants to temples and monasteries three days after birth” (118). She also notices the difference status made in determining a daughter’s capabilities. Compared to Tsongkha, “In Lhasa,” writes Diki Tsering, “aristocratic daughters did not have to do much work, except perhaps a little embroidery; domestic chores were not emphasized. Girls were sent to school to be educated” (118).

Her observations on the way gender is conceptualized differently in Lhasa than Tsongkha offers a critical analysis of how gendered subjectivities across Tibet should not be assumed to be homogenous. Instead, her observations suggest otherwise, especially when considering the difference status makes. While part one of Dalai Lama, My Son gives explicit gender critiques. Surprisingly, part two lacks as many critiques. I suggest this has to do with her changed role from an ordinary peasant householder in Amdo to becoming an aristocrat of Lhasa due to her role as the mother of the Dalai Lama. As previously noted, part two of the book covers this transition. Aside from her general observations of Lhasa, which includes gender observations, the rest of the chapters focus on the political turmoil.

When searching for secondary sources on the internet regarding Diki Tsering, I noticed how much of the reviews and summaries of Dalai Lama, My Son focused specifically on her negative gender critiques—claiming them as feminist critiques. While this suggests her critiques were not lost on readers, their interpretation of her overall critiques as a condemnation of all gendered roles in Tibet suggests a misreading. For instance, on modernity and tradition, she writes, “Traditions are so easily broken and forgotten. Today, when I see young people, I often think they are reacting against their traditions in order to overemphasize their modernity. I am proud to be, despite my resilience and ability to change, a very traditional woman. Does this make me archaic and anachronistic? I don’t think so. […] My traditions, my roots as a Tibetan, have fortified me. Traditions cannot be denied or forgotten. They are the creators of your spirit and your pride and the backbone of your sensibilities. They make you what you are and define what you want to be” (17). Here, Diki Tsering warns against reading her critiques as all consuming. While she is critical of some gendered practices, she is clear that her traditions, her roots, “have fortified” her, and that “Traditions cannot be denied or forgotten.” Suggesting she is reluctant to abandon all Tibetan practices due to her critical stance on certain beliefs and practices, especially when those same practices define who she is. Her reluctance to reject all Tibetan practices whole heartedly warns against a simplified reading of her critiques. In fact, she never makes a whole-sale argument for the abandonment of all gendered practices in Tibet.

This all-consuming critique that many readers presumed also suggests that they missed how Diki Tsering never spoke of gendered role as static. For instance, she is critical of how girls are devalued overall in Amdo, however, she also complicates this critique by sharing stories of her grandfather, who valued her for her. “Many a time” she writes, “I asked my grandfather whether he would have preferred a boy. […] Instead, he’d tweak my ears and say, ‘Would I have said you were a girl even before you were born?’ Then I was transported into the great joy. It meant a great deal to me to be wanted for myself and not for the practicality of my sex” (23-4). Drawing on Sherry Ortner’s “Making Gender,” I want to highlight individual agency in being able to determine how subjects situate and negotiate the terms of the patriarchal structure they live within (1996). While she points to prevailing gendered norms regarding the devaluation of girls in her society as a whole, she also points to the way her grandfather cherished her to counter such societal assumptions. Rather than internalize all these gendered assumptions passively, her grandfather is agentive in how he decides to interact with such prevailing gendered structural assumptions.

Further, the assumption that Diki Tsering was overall negative about Tibetan approaches to gendered roles also fails to consider the empowering position of her role as mother to the Dalai Lama. As mentioned, becoming mother to reincarnate lamas elevated her overall structural position in Tsongkha, followed by Lhasa. It is due to her secular role as the mother to the Dalai Lama that she is celebrated in contemporary Tibetan society as “the grate mother.” Prior to becoming the mother to the Dalai Lama, Diki Tsering describes herself as a simple peasant. She belonged to neither religious nor secular hierarchy. It was her son’s recognition as the Dalai Lama, through whom, Diki Tsering and her family were conferred elevated status. Her autobiography is clear in marking this status transformation in relation to the recognition of her son as the Dalai Lama. Although her autobiography lacks in-depth discussion regarding her feelings on being the Dalai Lama’s mother, her dedication towards servicing him, even while he was residing at the Potala and in exile, suggests she took that role serious. In addition to considering Lhamo Tsering her son, she also took serious his spiritual role as the Dalai Lama—elevating his status above hers due to his spiritual prowess. Thus, she considered her role as mother to the Dalai Lama, a gendered role, empowering. Here, I speak of empowerment through Buddhist frameworks which conceptualize it within the context of merit (karma)–where good merit is accrued when servicing a Bodhisattva (the Dalai Lama) on their path. This framework of empowerment through her role as a mother to a religious figure is barely engaged in reviews of Dalai Lama, My Son.

What’s missing?

While becoming mother to the 14^th Dalai Lama is highlighted in the first half of the book, the book isn’t necessarily dedicated to emphasizing that role any further. In other words, the book does not try to convince its reader that she is the Dalai Lama’s mother. Instead, the second half the book assumes readers are already convinced of her role as the mother. That’s why the second portion of the book covers events that are closely tied to the Dalai Lama’s own journey from that historical period. To repeat, while I have argued that the first portion of Diki Tsering’s autobiography introduces her as the girl who became the Dalai Lama’s mother, the second portion of this autobiography covers events that serve to reemphasize a family history that is closely tied to Tibet’s national history regarding invasion, escape and exile. Thus, Diki Tsering’s autobiography serves the purpose of introducing her, while reemphasizing Tibet’s national history through her own personal narrative. However, due to this overall commitment, her autobiography fails to shed light on other aspects of her life.

For instance, though memories of her life as a daughter and granddaughter in her maternal homeland is shared, readers barely get much information of her family beyond her grandfather. Other members of her family are barely engaged in her autobiography. Similarly, her autobiography acknowledges her husband, Choekyong Tsering. However, readers are not given insights into the type of relationship the two shared. Like her husband, Diki Tsering’s children make also appearances throughout the book. Aside from learning that she is close to them and interacts with them often, no additional information regarding her personal relation with each is offered. In fact, it is through her grandson’s personal memories of her in his postscripts, that we get a more intimate reading of familial relations.

Additionally, Diki Tsering’s involvement in refugee rehabilitation activities that she is commemorated for in exile is barely engaged. Aside from a few anecdotes that Thondup remembers as a child regarding Diki Tsering’s charitable interactions with other more vulnerable Tibetan refugees, the book lacks detailing her involvement in refugee rehabilitation efforts in India following their escape. This makes sense since Khedroob Thondup’s interview indicates that Diki Tsering and Yangzom Doma were only able to record events up to the point when Diki Tsering left Tibet (“Tradition is Our Backbone,” 2000). Her involvements in refugee rehabilitation seems to have been left out due to the fact she had died before she could recall events following her escape to India. This is why the book ends with a postscript that details Diki Tsering’s death in 1980 (2000:183).

Rather than point out the types of information that is lacking in Diki Tsering’s autobiography, such lack should be read within the context of this autobiography’s overall goal. As previously stated, Diki Tsering’s autobiography serves to give her a formal introduction while reaffirming her family history which is closely tied to Tibet’s national history. While the book gives both known and unknown intimate memories that are particular to the Yabshi family and Diki Tsering herself, this autobiography was not meant to be an intimate portrayal of her. Instead, it was to serve its overall goal of affirming Tibet’s national history through the telling of her own personal and familial history.

Observations:

In conclusion, Diki Tsering’s autobigography, Dalai Lama, My Son, was written to introduce Diki Tsering formally to a large and diverse audience. Her recollection of her life served to affirm Tibet’s national history. Though this book claims to be the autobiography of Diki Tsering, in addition to her own voice, we learn the book was translated and edited into English by her granddaughter Yangzom Doma. The book is further edited and ordered due to the efforts of her grandson Khedroob Thondup. Suggesting this autobiography was produced from the collective efforts of all three. Multiple authorship, especially regarding the postscripts, as I’ve pointed out, is also the reason why voicing becomes confusing.

Though Diki Tsering’s critique regarding the devaluation of the female gender should be taken seriously. I’ve also argued against such flat and static reading of her critiques. Instead, I argued for an approach that considers such critiques within the larger framework of such figure’s life to reveal gendered subjectivities that are moving and changing. While she is critical of the structural positioning of girls overall in Tibet, stories of her grandfather cherishing her counters the assumption that such disempowering notions of girls are internalized without question. Additionally, the book’s chronological order emphasizes Diki Tsering’s changing status (peasant to aristocrat) and role (child/girl to wife/daughter-in-law/wife/mother). Such an approach encourages against reading her gendered role as static. Diki Tsering does not speak of the gendered oppression she experienced statically. Instead, they are framed chronologically to show how certain gendered roles, like that of the wife and daughter-in-law, brought oppression; while other roles, such as that of the mother (especially of reincarnate lamas), brought her joy, prestige, and power. This reading also reemphasizes the gender argument I have been engaging so far in my other posts. That many of the female saints I have engaged thus far, make gendered critiques that specifically targets institutional and cultural patriarchy, rather than make whole scale critiques against whole cultural traditions. Especially when it’s the same cultural traditions that brought many elevated status and liberation.

Similarly, as we’ve seen in my other examples with female saints, status makes a difference. Like Chokyi Dronma (2014) and Tare Lhamo (2016), who’s elevated family status helped to alleviate the gender discrepancies they faced on their paths towards spiritual liberation, Diki Tsering’s changed status as the Dalai Lama’s mother and an aristocrat, is also shown to have made the difference in how her gendered role as the mother becomes celebrated. For Diki Tsering, her status as the mother of a high spiritual figure, made all the difference for the public to envision a gendered subjectivity, such as that of the mother, in empowering terms. This is why she is continually celebrated and commemorated in contemporary Tibetan society as “Gyalyum Chenmo.”

In many ways, Diki Tsering’s autobiography serves to iterate lessons I’ve stress in my other post regarding structural patriarchy. We have learned that while gender has been used to hinder and deny empowering pathways for female subjectivities, ultimately, it’s patriarchal structure (and belief) that hinders, not gender or gendered roles themselves. This understanding provided women in many different religious traditions to embrace their gender and still seek and achieve spiritual liberation. Like them, Diki Tsering is also critical of structural patriarchy that devalues women. However, she does not see such devaluation in terms of her gender. Rather, the fact she is celebrated for her role as the great mother suggests gendered roles are not themselves the problem. The problem is prevailing patriarchal structural beliefs that devalues feminized roles that are placed on women. In short, Diki Tsering’s gender critique does not seek to critique Tibetan society and culture as a whole. Instead, her critique targets patriarchal beliefs that have been allowed to function structurally. Besides, it was Tibetan spiritual and cultural beliefs that prompted Diki Tsering to be celebrated for her role as the mother. A role that continues to empower Tibetans, especially those who are or aspire to become mothers in contemporary times.

Works cited:

Diemberger, Hildegard. 2014. When a woman becomes a religious dynasty: The Samding Dorje Phagmo of Tibet. Columbia University Press.

Gayley, Holly. 2016. Love Letters from Golok: A Tantric Couple in Modern Tibet. Columbia University Press.

Lama, Dalai. 1991. Freedom in exile: The autobiography of the Dalai Lama. Harper Collins.

Lucia, Amanda J. 2014. Reflections of Amma: devotees in a global embrace. Univ of California Press.

McMillin, Laurie Hovell. 2001. “New Age Namtars: Tibetan Autobiographies in English.” In English in Tibet, Tibet in English, pp. 113-136. Palgrave Macmillan US.

Norbu, Thubten Jigme. 1986. “Tibet Is My Country: Autobiography of Thubten Jigme Norbu, Brother of the Dalai Lama.” Wisdom Publilcations.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1996. Making gender: The politics and erotics of culture. Beacon Press.

Tsering, Diki. 2000. Dalai Lama, my son: a mother’s story. Penguin Books India.

Pema, Jetsun. 1997. Tibet: My Story, an Autobiography. Element Books, Limited.

“‘Tradition is Our Backbone’: Khedroob Thondup, nephew of the Dalai Lama, on roots, exile, and frying eggs for his uncle.” In Beliefnet. Retrieved April 10, 2017, from http://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/buddhism/2000/05/tradition-is-our-backbone.aspx

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Drawing by Luna Enriquez

What is (neo)liberal feminism and what are its dangers? How can decolonial and intersectional theories and praxis counteract and refuse the cooption of feminism by neoliberal ideologies promoted by nationalist imperialist governmentalities? To address these questions, I engage the emergence of Tibetan feminism with neoliberal characteristics. This particular focus will allow me to animate my argument that (neo)liberal feminism’s focus on gender as an identity category fails to consider decolonization and intersectionality. Without such analytical considerations, feminism not only loses its liberatory potential as a praxis, but can become mobilized by nationalist imperialist governmentality to serve as the basis for racialized policies that target certain citizens within state purview and justify imperial occupations abroad. While neoliberalism feminism has been correctly assessed as a strain influenced by white feminism, it is wrong to assume that only white women practice neoliberal feminism. In fact, brown women practice it too. In the following, I engage Tibetan women practicing neoliberal feminism. Thus, this post tries to contextualize (neo)liberal feminism and its potential dangers, while at the same time outline how decolonial and intersectional feminism can counteract such dangers. For analytical considerations, I turn to Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (2003), Jasbir K. Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), and Ann Stoler’s Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (2016) alongside other readings.

Over the course of few years, the Tibetan diaspora has seen a sharp rise in the number of Tibetan women who claim a feminist identity. What is Tibetan feminism, and how did it emerge? In the following, I track the rise of Tibetan feminism through the development of an online initiative called Tibetan Feminist Collective (TFC) based mostly in the west. Although TFC does not represent the diverse viewpoints of all women who identify as Tibetan and feminist, their version of feminism nonetheless becomes important to engage due to the initiative’s choice in leading and representing discussions regarding Tibetan feminism in Tibetan and non-Tibetan cyber and/or real worlds. Even though I use TFC as a Tibetan example of neoliberal feminism, they are not the only ones influenced by it. Other Tibetan women (alongside their male peers) not affiliated with TFC are also engaging neoliberal ideologies in shaping their individual pathways towards favorable professional outcomes that benefit themselves alone. Today we live in a world where the commodification of identities and activism, thanks to neoliberal ideologies, are so pervasive. Thus, it is important to think critically about the way neoliberalism shapes feminism (and other frameworks), and compromises their liberatory potential.

TFC has been influenced by Tibetan Women’s Association (TWA)—a prominent exile women-led organization based in the Tibetan refugee community in Dharamsala, India. Elsewhere, I’ve outlined how TWA’s embrace of western-produced liberal feminist ideologies worked to assist in politicizing and centralizing women’s issues in the exile political arena (Lokyitsang 2014). In the following, I address how the popularization of Tibetans feminism in the virtual world (Internet) was influenced not only by TWA in India, but also by western based feminist discussions and debates between feminists-of-color and white feminists.

(Neo)Liberal Feminism:

To understand what (neo)liberal feminism may look like, I turn first to Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (2003). In this book, Mohanty offers observations and interventions against, what she calls, “Colonizing, U.S.-and Eurocentric privileged feminism.” She identifies three “problematics within U.S.-based [radical and liberal] feminisms” (6). The first, careerist feminism, are those using feminism to advance individual careers whether in political and private sectors, rather than understand feminism as “a call for fundamental and collective social and economic transformation.” Second, neoliberal, consumerist (protocapitalist) feminism, are those concerned with “women’s advancement up the corporate and nation-state ladder.” She says this feminism is “symptomatic of the ‘Americanization’ of definitions of feminism” and is “profoundly individualistic.” And finally, “narrowing of feminist politics and theory” resulting from “critique of essentialist identity politics and the hegemony of postmodern skepticism about identity” that often dismiss and misunderstand Indigenous sovereignty movement as identity based nationalist movement rather than anti-colonial sovereignty movements.  She goes on to argue, “whereby either exclusionary and self-serving understandings of identity rule the day or identity (racial, class, sexual, national, etc.) is seen as unstable and thus merely ‘strategic.’ Thus, identity is seen as either naïve or irrelevant, rather than a source of knowledge and a basis for progressive mobilization” (6). To counteract this form of feminism, Mohanty suggests demystifying, decolonizing, and reorienting feminism.

In the section, “Decolonizing Feminism,” Mohanty critiques the monolithic construct of Third World Women found in Western feminist discourse. In such narratives, Third World women are nearly always framed as victims of their patriarchal cultures. Choosing to focus solely on the category of women, such narratives draw on dispersed examples of women experiencing gender oppression across cultures to paint a universalizing portrait of the oppressed women in Third World countries. This unspecific anti-historical approach constructs a homogenous characterization of Third World women devoid of agency. Instead, they are portrayed as passive recipients of their community’s patriarchal dominance.

Conversely, such narratives portray western feminists as agentive figures who are called upon to support their non-agentive oppressed “sisters” against their men in the Third World. She writes, “we see how Western feminists alone become the true ‘subjects’ of this counterhistory. Third World women, in contrast, never rise above the debilitating generality of their ‘object’ status” (39). Such discourses, argues Mohanty, “colonizes and appropriates the pluralities of the simultaneous location of different groups of women in social class and ethnic frameworks; in doing so, it ultimately robs them of their historical and political agency” (39). Though Mohanty does not directly engage neoliberal feminism and war, Jasbir Puar briefly mentions how this discursive tactic, which politicize gender, gets mobilized by (neo)liberal feminism in the west to justify waging wars against Muslim men within their own states and in the Middle East to save Muslim women.

In her book, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Puar also articulates how sexuality, like gender, becomes mobilized by the white nationalist imperial projects to justify violence and the colonization of Muslim people and their worlds (2007). Further, such narratives, argues Puar, also confuses Sikhs who are not Muslim but are marked as terrorist-look-alikes (because race) as backward heteropatriarchs, who also become targets of state sanctioned violence in the name of national security in the west. Puar’s focus is on norms of white-hetero-patriarchy. She explains how through racialized nationalist imperial projects, queerness, which is about experiences and positions that resist mainstream norms in every way, becomes narrowed down to just sexuality—in which case, male Sikh immigrants in the West, who are ‘queer’ due to their citizen status, religious orientations, appearance (Turban), culture, politics and so on, become just their supposedly dangerous racialized sexuality. This ends up narrowing queer theory in general. Narratives about conservative brown-skinned apparently ‘Arab look-alikes’ justify racialized and imperialist projects against queered subjectivities of Muslims and Muslim-mistaken Sikhs who either refuse to or do not fit into state sanctioned forms of masculine norms (this is why following the announcement of the Muslim Ban, the US saw a sharp rise in racialized violence against South Asians and their ‘look-alikes’). Overall, Puar tells us, such narrow-minded frameworks—which emphasize categories of just gender or sexuality—not only work to racialize Third World peoples as non-agentive collectives, they also serve to justify violence against Muslim men within western states and imperial occupations abroad. But how does this discussion contribute to understanding the emergence of Tibetan feminism?

Tibetan feminisms: Liberal feminism

In “Conflict of Desires: Female Tibetan Leaders and Gender Advocacy,” I write on the subject of Tibetan women’s leadership roles in exile India (Lokyitsang 2014). The essay tracks exile Tibetan women’s political involvement in constructing and shaping the exile community in India following China’s invasion of Tibet in 1959. Initially, due to a lack of people with professional training to cater to a growing number of Tibetan refugees flowing into Nepal and India, women of aristocratic backgrounds were recruited by a male dominated apparatus to cater to the growing needs of Tibetan refugees. Such figures later went on to become the faces of the newly instituted Tibetan Women’s Association—a non-governmental organization that promoted the political careers of many of its own members. Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, following increased engagements with western feminism through international women’s conventions—where TWA represented the political interests of Tibetan women—TWA began embracing and promoting notions of women’s empowerment influenced by liberal ideologies. These ideologies stressed women’s empowerment in terms of becoming flexible individuals through the embrace of modern education and professionalism. According to TWA, such pathways would provide refugee women with the skills needed to become independent and self-producing—a crucial skill needed in surviving the precarious conditions of refugee life. This organization’s embrace and promotion of liberal feminist ideologies worked to elevate some women into political careers within the male dominant apparatus of the exile administration and created space for female politicians to voice gendered concerns. However, I am ambivalent about the wholescale adoption of such liberal ideologies. The lack of a critical stance towards liberal ideologies failed to consider the devaluation of other gendered subjectivities (such as Indigenous produced subjectivities), thus producing subaltern female subjects.

In 2015 a new blog named Tibetan Feminist Collective (TFC) came into existence (http://www.tibetanfeministcollective.org/). Prior to this blog’s emergence, feminist was a word that many Tibetan women used to describe themselves. However, public proclamation of one’s identity as a feminist was not necessarily the norm. Tibetan women proclaiming their feminist identity who were mostly based in the west (although women in India and Nepal also participated) emerged during a time when gender as a topic was experiencing intensified engagements both within the Tibetan diaspora community and the west (Lokyitsang 2014). On the one hand, heated debates on gender violence and equality became prominent in the Tibetan diaspora’s virtual world for several years, during which, many began proclaiming their feminist identities to counter prevailing patriarchal beliefs publicly on different social media platforms. At the same time, on the other hand, feminist conversations and debates between white and women of color feminists in the west were intensifying especially on Twitter—influenced mostly by feminists of color who were advocating against state sanctioned violence against Black, Muslim, and Native communities who critiqued white feminists who they saw as complicit in the structural violence such communities were continuing to experience. It was during this period that TFC emerged on the Tibetan virtual world.

While it’s unclear who started the blog, it was clear that more than one individual ran the site. Under their “about” section, they’ve written that TFC is “a multimedia platform comprised of an Editorial Board of Tibetan women” (http://www.tibetanfeministcollective.org/about/). Initially, the “editorial board” was made up mostly of women who are born and/or raised in the U.S. with one living in India being the exception. Since its inception, the blog has lacked a mission statement. Instead, it operates as an editorial. Publishing personal narratives written by women sharing gendered experiences. However, the editorial board has not maintained consistent leadership—with the regular entrance of new members while old ones leave.

Presently, it is unclear what the retention rate is and how many of the old cohort remain. In addition to publishing personal narratives, the blog also runs Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts under the same name. According to their blog, they use their social media platforms to promote their “multimedia projects” that highlight their hashtag campaigns: #BurningFeminist, #TIBFCF (Tibetan Feminist Crush Friday), and #NepalQuakeRelief (http://www.tibetanfeministcollective.org/multimedia/). While the #BurningFeminist campaign posted pictures of Tibetan and non-Tibetan women on their social media accounts alongside this hashtag, the editorial board “choose a Tibetan feminist who inspires” every Friday to feature on its social media platforms using the hashtag #TIBFCF. The #NepalQuakeRelief was a twitter campaign that encouraged its followers to donate to ACHA Himalayan Sisterhood—another organization made up of Tibetan women in the US who periodically flew to Nepal to volunteer in relief efforts (https://achahimalayansisterhood.org/category/campaigns/). While TFC has a functional board and blog, it is not a registered NGO. However, on their blog they have a donation section that encourages supporters to give money to help expand “advocacy further” (http://www.tibetanfeministcollective.org/donate/). As of March 10^th, 2017, the blog has no new content. TFC’s twitter account, which consists mostly of retweets, has been inactive since February 26^th 2017 (https://twitter.com/TibetanFeminist). Although their Instagram account seems to still be active (https://www.instagram.com/tibetanfeministcollective/).

Neoliberal Feminism:

So, why is TFC important to this discussion? As previously stated, while claiming feminist identity was not new to Tibetan women, TFC formed a “collective” based on a feminist identity and encouraged supporters to proclaim their feminist identity loud and proud. Encouraging followers to politicize and display their feminist identity. To date, this is the first Tibetan-led initiative to include the word ‘feminist’ in their title. Thus, began the cohesive emergence of a Tibetan feminist collective on the virtual public arena of the Tibetan diaspora—a space where the diaspora community converge to publicly discuss a range of topics with one another through different social media platforms with Facebook being the main site for such diasporic/communal engagements. Initially, this group was welcomed and encouraged by the Tibetan virtual world. However, it soon became confusing what function TFC served beyond being a platform for sharing personalized gendered narratives through its blog. In the following, I consider how TFC’s brand of feminism was particularly neoliberal.

In terms of structure, TWA is a community based organization with a structural body consisting of board members and a physical office with paid staff. All of whom are answerable to members and chapters spanning across the diaspora. Their work consists of political advocacy on behalf of women within the exile political arena and women-oriented welfare projects meant to alleviate vulnerable conditions that refugee women face. In comparison, TFC is a virtual initiative that exists only on the internet. The only structural body it has is in the form of its “editorial board,” which consisted of several women who are answerable only to each other who decided on the content and direction of TFC’s virtual presence. Their work consists of editing and posting blog entries and hashtag activism. Like TWA, few members of TFC have found opportunities in advancing personal careers by representing Tibetan feminist views to participate on different speaking and/or writing engagements based in and outside the Tibetan community. Unlike TWA, however, TFC does not organize nor engage grassroots projects within the community that focuses on the well-being of Tibetan women. This has much to do with TFC being a new initiative only several years old.

However, many of my peers became confused when they created a donation section on their blog soliciting monetary cash. There was also the problem with calling themselves a “collective”—which implies there’s a collective supporting this initiative—when it was only a select group of women as “editorial members” who were answerable to no one but each other. Although blog entries that consists of personal narratives and thoughts on communal approaches to gender could be considered community engagement. Their Twitter and Instagram activities, however, aimed to introduce Tibetan women they felt were exemplary feminists—an activity that TWA too engages in through their publications, although they shied away from using the word feminist and preferred ’empowered’ instead. The branding of TFC as a collective that represented a select few, the ability by certain members to promote individual careers, and the soliciting of monetary donations without clear objectives outlining projects that orient the Tibetan community, is what I argue makes this, in Mohanty’s words, neoliberal, consumerist (protocapitalist) feminism (2003).

While there was some ambivalence regarding TFC, it was the personal narratives that they published on their blog early on that many applauded and encouraged. Among an array of topics, TFC began publishing personal narratives focusing on gender violence experienced at the hands of community and family. The intention of such posts are to make visible different forms of gendered oppressions that Tibetan women continued to face. The purposes of these narratives seemed to be to encourage the larger diaspora to acknowledge the on-going gender oppression that women faced at the hands of men within the community and possibly encourage actions. However, such narrative angle, which emphasized just gender, began losing appeal for Tibetans who felt such narratives failed to contextualize gender alongside other precarious circumstances that Tibetans faced and continue to live through due to colonization and refugee status. In other words, the sole focus on gender, failed to consider intersectional subjectivities in the past and present that Tibetans move through—a challenge that Black feminists originally posed against white feminism (The Combahee River Collective 1997, bell hooks 1989, Kimberle Crenshaw 1995, Audra Lorde 1993).

The lack of intersectional consideration placed gendered oppressions experienced by Tibetan women (past and present) in a vacuum. Where the story being told is a simplified version that ultimately suggests the main problem of Tibetan women is Tibetan men. In this narrative format, Tibetan women and men, like their Muslim counterpart, become separate categories of a homogenized “collective” with a singularized story that empties them of agency both in the past and present. Within the Tibetan context, such narratives also fail to account for vulnerable subjectivities like that of semi-orphans—individuals who grew up at Tibetan refugee schools in exile away from their families in Tibet and are now adults living challenging present circumstances (Lokyitsang 2016). Unlike those of us with families, semi-orphaned Tibetan’s gendered experiences are compounded by worries over the need for familial care and security. In their narratives, it isn’t just men in the community that commit violence against them, it is their precarious circumstances, brought on by China’s colonization of Tibet, being a refugee, lacking family and finances, among other precarious circumstances, that cause vulnerabilities that are not exclusive to their gender. A critique that centers just gender in the Tibetan diasporic community fails to contextualize multiplicities of oppressions that semi-orphaned Tibetans, for example, have lived through and continue to do so. It also fails to account for vulnerabilities that are specific to semi-orphaned males that I do not face despite being a woman due to many of the privileges I enjoy because of my access to a family, and thus, security. So, how might Tibetan feminism proceed?

Intersectional Feminism:

I turn to Mohanty’s intersectionality (2003) and Puar’s assemblage (2007, 2012). For Mohanty, intersectionality serves as the basis for understanding solidarity not in terms of sisterhood but actual solidarity. In critiquing sisterhood, Mohanty writes, “To define feminism purely in gendered terms assumes that our consciousness of being ‘women’ has nothing to do with race, class, nation, or sexuality, just with gender.” For solidarity to be actualized, she insists on acknowledging “the idea of multiple, fluid structures of domination that intersect to locate women differently at particular historical conjunctures, while insisting on the dynamic oppositional agency of individuals and collectives and their engagements in ‘daily life” (55). However, for Puar intersectionality must be supplemented by assemblage theory (2012:50)—assemblages “For Deleuze and Guattari,” writes Puar, “are collections of multiplicities” (2007: 211). Without which, argues Puar, it inadvertently ends up constricting different intersectional identities as fixed, rather than as assemblages—a perpetual process of becoming. In Puar’s Terorrist Assemblages, she looks specifically at how femonationalism and homonationalism assembles the Muslim body as heterosexist patriarchies and thus deserving of (biopolitical (Foucault 2008) and necropolitical (Mbembé 2003)) violence and imperial conquest (2007). Further, in such makings, other brown bodies, such as those of Sikhs, also become assembled as terrorist-look-alikes, who are also deserving of the same violence, argues Puar. “I rearticulate terrorist bodies […] as an assemblage that resists queerness-as-sexual-identity (or anti-identity)—in other words, intersectional and identitarian paradigms—in favor of spatial, temporal, and corporeal convergences, implosions, and rearrangements” (2007:205). Like Mohanty, Puar too warns against the fixity of identity categories such as gender and sexuality into assumed generalities. Rather, intersectionality considered alongside assemblage theory, forges ways of thinking about intersectional identities as always in fluctuation depending on the different temporal frameworks it’s working within. Thus, identities for Muslim and terrorist-look-alike bodies that the nationalist imperialist project construct end up defining and justifying how such bodies will be treated in the present and future.

If Tibetan feminists were to consider intersectionality alongside assemblage theory, then gender as an identity category would lose its fixedness that presumes general assumptions about all gendered experiences of Tibetans past and present. Rather, it insists on understanding gendered subjectivities as always in fluctuation alongside other subjectivities that are directly impacted by “collections of multiplicities” that are “spatial, temporal, and corporeal convergences, implosions, and rearrangements” (Puar 2007). It also suggests gender itself, is not a static singular category. Instead, it is a social category that is malleable, fluid, and multiple. According to Linda Nicholson, the category of woman should be thought of as always emergent rather than assumed based on biological features (1994). Such an approach would account for multiplicities of Tibetan experiences in the past and present. It would account not only for male-produced gender violence in the community but also how it connects to on-going Tibetan circumstances of having become colonized in Tibet, or refugee in India, or undocumented illegal immigrant or working-class immigrant in the west, among other experiences. Additionally, it would also account for engaging subaltern female figures of Tibet’s pasts as mediums not only to engage gendered pasts but also Indigenous informed pathways for liberatory frameworks that can be considered alongside existing frameworks in the present that we continue to be influenced by in our multiple locations (Lokyitsang 2015). More importantly, the emphasis on multiplicities also suggests Tibetan feminism isn’t singular but plural. Acknowledging multiplicities of Tibetan feminisms accounts for intersectionality. However, such an intersectional assemblage approach cannot proceed without engaging decolonization theories and praxis.

Decolonization:

Decolonization has become a mainstream vocabulary, but what does it actually mean? According to decolonization scholars, to decolonize is to identify and dismantle historical legacies of imperialism (for more, see my article “Decolonizing Ethnographic ‘Responsibility’). In the current political climate of US and Europe, right-wing conservative political parties have coopted rights-based discourses to advance racialized policies that target citizens-of-color and immigrant communities in the name of national security and advancement. Popular figures, such as Trump in the US, Le Pen in France, and Milo Yiannopoulos in England, have successfully platformed the rhetorics of racialized identity (whiteness) favorably towards personal and political gain—Trump won the presidential candidacy in the US 2016 elections. In addition to platforming whiteness, Le Pen and Milo Yiannopoulos have also won political and social influence by politicizing their other identities as feminist and queer. While Mohanty’s Feminism Without Borders (2003) outlines the problems of individualistic driven notion that essentialize collections of people and empowers just the self, Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages (2007) helps us understand the ability of such identity based notions of feminism-as-gender and queerness-as-sexuality to mobilize and justify racial and imperial based violence against groups of people not considered the norm.

Part of the problem, according to Ann Stoler’s Duress, is the durability of colonial logics that continue to function anew as “common sense” in, what we consider to be, a postcolonial era (2016). For Stoler, this durability has much to do with the discursive promotion of aphasia (128) and occlusion (10) that the neoliberal university and its researchers promote. Scholars that advance notions of linear time as though we’ve entered the era of “postcolonial” nation states (ix), for example, serve to occlude ongoing patterns of “imperial formations,” argues Stoler (190). According to Stoler, the epistemology of race and racism and practices of racial states—like that of the US, Israel, and France—continue to function from its Enlightenment and modernity beginnings (342). However, such unchallenged notions of “common sense” are identified with the past, instead of reflections of an “ongoing quality of processes of decimation, displacement, and reclamation” (56), that Puar outlines in her book. Thus, Stoler suggests the importance of decolonization that she tasks for “a renewed (post)colonial studies,” that would sharpen, “how to track the tangibilities of empire as effective histories of the present. […] to refocus a sharper and finer historical lenses on distinctions between what is residual and tenacious, what is dominant but hard to see, and, not least, what is emergent in today’s imperial formations—and critically resurgent in responses to them” (378). The challenge, according to Stoler, “is to track how new formations in our social fabric and new forms of debris work on matter and mind to eat through people’s resources and resiliencies as they embolden new political actors with indignant refusal, forging insurgent vocabularies and unanticipated, entangled, and empowered alliances” (378-79).

Much of Stoler’s critique is shared by Indigenous feminists who also highlight the aphasia that is structurally embedded. Like Stoler, Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill also calls out the neoliberal universities, but particularly gender and sexuality studies and ethnic studies for their role in occluding the ongoings of colonialisms. To decolonize, Stoler suggests a focus on ruins of empire, which she argues would “emphasize less the artifacts of empire as dead matter or remnants of a defunct regime than to attend to their reappropriations, strategic neglect, and active positioning within the politics of the present” (350). Arvin, Tuck, and Morill, on the other hand, suggest an active engagement of, what they term, Native feminist theories (also plural, not singular) as a way to actively engage colonial presents (2013). Native feminist theories “demonstrate that feminisms, when allied with other key causes, hold a unique potential to decolonize the ascendancy of whiteness in many global contexts,” argues Arvin, Tuck, and Morill (11). Further, they content that “Native men are not the root cause of Native women’s problems; rather, Native women’s critiques implicate the historical and ongoing imposition of colonial, heteropatriarchal structures onto their societies” (18)—a claim that gets taken up by Nivdita Menon who outlines how patriarchy becomes legalized under the nationalist state. According “Family,” Menon showcases how colonial policies that redesigned India’s heterogeneous ways of conceiving family (and so, gender) into standardized versions, which forced families into becoming nuclear and patrilineal, were reincorporated and normalized under the nationalist government following independence (2012). In this, Native feminists are not making the argument that men are not a problem but rather that toxic masculinities need to be considered in terms of the historical, structural conditions that produced them and that whole communities have lived through. Centering settler colonialism Arvin, Tuck, and Morill argue, brings into the present histories of colonial invasion, its hetero-patriarchal state structuring, and continuity under the modern national order. Doing so, according to Arvin, Tuck, and Morill, denaturalizes settler colonial governmentality and its logics—that the nationalist state continues to promote as “common sense,” argues Stoler (2016). Further, a focus on Native feminist theories also serve to center Indigenous temporalities prior to and beyond colonial invasion in which Indigenous epistemologies not only decolonizes Indigenous pasts, but also presents and futures. Thus, Arvin, Tuck, and Morill, argue that “there cannot be feminist thought and theory without Native feminist theory” (2013:14). For Tibetans, this becomes especially important since we too continue to aspire for anti-colonial futures in a Free Tibet. (A notion I explore in my “Conflict of Desires” essay, through the ways in which feminist and anti-colonial politics have been divorced in exile by some Tibetans.)

Decolonial and intersectional theories and praxis not only become imperative for Tibetan feminisms but feminism in general. Without such a praxis, feminism can easily become colonized by neoliberal ideologies that not only essentialize, homogenize, and commoditize, but also function anew under the nationalist imperialist project to justify racialized policies that target non-white bodies and countries for imperial conquest. Thus, to prevent feminism from becoming coopted by the nationalist imperialist project, it must be intersectional and decolonial. Native feminist theories offer an avenue through which such a praxis could be realized. Such a feminism would also ensure feminism continues to be a liberatory framework that elevates society.

Works Cited:

Arvin, Maile, Eve Tuck and Angie Morrill. 2013. “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy.” Feminist Formations. Volume 25, Issue 1, Spring.

Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1995. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Critical Race Theory, (New York: The New Press).

Foucault, Michel. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France.1978-1979. Spring.

hooks, bell. 1989. “Feminist Theory: A Radical Agenda.” Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press). 35-41.

Lokyitsang, Dawa. 2016. “Tibetan Refugees and the Negotiation of Relatedness: Semi-Orphans of the 1960s and 1990s.” Lhakar Diaries. Retrieved May 8, 2017. https://lhakardiaries.com/2016/05/18/tibetan-refugees-the-negotiation-of-relatedness-semi-orphans-of-the-1960s-1990s/

Lokyitsang, Dawa. 2015. “On Being Tibetan and a(n Intersectional) Feminist.” Lhakar Diaries. Retrieved May 8, 2017. https://lhakardiaries.com/2015/04/15/on-being-tibetan-and-an-intersectional-feminist/

Lokyitsang, Dawa. 2014. “Conflict of Desires: Female Tibetan Leaders and Gender Advocacy.” Hysteria. Retrieved May 8, 2017. http://www.hystericalfeminisms.com/conflict-of-desires-female-tibetan-leaders-and-gender-advocacy/

Lorde, Audre. 1993. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”

Menon, Nivedita. 2012. “Family.” Seeing Like a Feminist. Penguin UK, 2012.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Zubaan.

Mbembé, J-A., and Libby Meintjes. (2003). “Necropolitics.” Public culture 15, no. 1: 11-40.

Nicholson, Linda. 1994. “Interpreting Gender.” Signs. Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 79-105.

Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press.

Puar, Jasbir K. 2012. “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory.” PhiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2.1: 49-66.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Duke University Press.

The Combahee River Collective. 1997. The Combahee River Collective Statement.

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Over the last few months, conversations taking place on Tibetan social media consisted of topics regarding secular modernity, concepts of Tibetan purity, and by the seeming lack of interest in turning to lived Tibetan histories as a way to engage these topics. To be fair, I noticed some participants try to actually stress Tibetan histories to acknowledge that these topics are nothing new when viewed through our historical framework as a people, and also how these concerns can be engaged using our own historical knowledges as lessons. In agreement with these concerns, I’ve dug up an old essay from 2015 that looks at Tibetan histories across time, space, place, and figures that were dealing with notions of Pan-Tibetan identities and governmentalities, with the restructuring and mixture of old and new traditions, and with notions of the secular and the religious, all of which take place in different places and times across the Tibetan plateau.

I begin with scholarship by Janet Gyatso (1987) to engage notions of Srin, an indigenous non-human being that represents our land, who is converted first by the invasion of Bon and later by Buddhism. Such a notion challenges current concepts of purity and mixedness (not to confuse its association with just race) as new. Instead, Srin suggests a continual process of change and hybridity that is present in Tibetan histories that current conversations on both sides need to acknowledge and engage. Following Gyatso, I turn to Buddhist scholar Jacob Dalton (2011) who uncovers King Yeshe O’s history from the 990 C.E era. Dalton looks at the way King Yeshe O deals with emerging new religious figures and traditions that he saw as threatening the possibility of a united Tibet. The King introduces secularism as a way to counteract and balance the power between the state and religious order as a way to return Tibet to its united form under the “Great Kings” of Tibet’s past. Through this approach he achieves a way forward that allows local religious and secular power to intersect with religious state power to produce autonomous regional governance. This example could redirect contemporary CTA conversations regarding how a united front regarding fragmented Tibetan political interests can be achieved. King Yeshe O’s dealings challenge current conversations by Tibetans—both at the government and civil level who argue for the need for an applied way of dealing with our democracy using (liberal) secular ethics—to engage with past Tibetan historical intersections between the secular and religious. And finally, I end with anthropologist Charlene Makley (2007) who looks at the secular and religious leadership shared between the brothers Jamyang Shepa and Apa Alo in Amdo Labrang in the twentieth century. Their contemporary spin on religious and secular leadership made real autonomy historically possible for their region. Secular and religious leadership under Jamyang Shepa and Apa Alo suggests the ongoing life of the structural changes King Yeshe O introduced centuries back. That is, these changes were not just happenings of the past, but continue in the recent present. Overall, the lessons in this scholarship encourage the liberal oriented voices so prominent in the Tibetan social media landscape to consider actual histories of Tibet. If pundits are invested in these topics as they claim, they should engage such historical conversations rather than stick to symbolic statements made just for the sake of making them. It would do us all better to engage and learn from our dynamic histories of the ancient and recent past in shaping present-day conversations that could have real, positive effects for our hoped futures.

***

Janet Gyatso’s “Down with the Demoness: Reflections on a Feminine Ground in Tibet” analyzes both the myth and the gendered aspect of the demoness Srin (1987). According to the myth, as recorded in the terma Mani bka’ ‘bum, the Chinese wife of King Songtsen Gampo, Kong Jo, is troubled by the amount of difficulty she is facing in “transporting the statue of Sakyamuni to the Tibetan court” (37). She has a vision where she realizes the demoness Srin, who represents the Tibetan landscape itself, is causing all the difficulties. To subdue her, they build a total of thirteen Buddhist temples, some of which still stand today in places like Bhutan (39), to pin her down on her back. Four temples in the inner realm of Tibet to pin her shoulder and hip. Four temples at the border areas, pinning her knees and elbows. And, four temples at the borders beyond to pin her hands and feet. Finally, one temple at the Jo-khang, symbolizing her heart and considered the center of Tibet (38). Thus Srin is subdued and Buddhism can reign over Tibet. Besides Buddhist domination of Srin, what is this myth really about? And why is the demoness gendered as female?

The Ogress and the Monkey

According to Gyatso, this isn’t the first time Srin is referred to as mo, female. In the Tibetan myth of the copulation between a compassionate monkey and a lustful rock ogress, which brings about the birth of the first Tibetan, Srin is portrayed as mo. In this myth, the monkey is portrayed as the male Avalokitesvara and Srin as the female rock ogress (44). Although Srin is portrayed as mo in both of the myths, whether Srin is in fact female is unclear due to a lack of sources from pre-Buddhist Tibet. For scholar David Paul, the feminization of Srin in the Buddhist cannon may have something to do with how Buddhists of that time viewed women. Women according to Buddhists of that time were associated with desire and attachment, which was seen as dangerous and threatening to the celibate Buddhist monk (44).

Srin mo, according to Gyatso, “does not primarily represent woman, but rather a religion, or more accurately, a religious culture and world view that is being dominated” (45). In the subjugation of Srin, Srin isn’t killed, she is instead subdued and a new civilization is built on top of her, symbolized by the construction of Buddhist temples (40). Although it is the Bon tradition that is being dominated by Buddhism in the myth, Buddhism, according to Gyatso, may be “mimicking a pattern already established by Bon” (46). In Grub mtha’ shel gyi me long, “a late but well regarded account of the history of the religions of Tibet,” it is Bon that is subduing Srin, but this time, portrayed as Srin-po, male (46). Long before Buddhism, the Bon tradition, according to Erik Haarh, also invaded Tibet. Gyatso writes, “Bon-po text also contains a self-congratulatory account of the disruption and suppression of the earth beings by buildings” (50). Srin, according scholar R. A. Stein, belongs to an indigenous Tibetan tradition that predates both Buddhism and Bon, a tradition he calls the “nameless Tibetan religion” (50). Although there are no explicit accounts of this nameless Tibetan religion, “Srin-mo is actually kept alive” ironically, according to Gyatso, through the narratives of her subjugation in both Buddhist and Bon texts by the civilizations that came after and build upon her (50). So what does all this mean?

Srin, according to Gyatso, is a strong reminder to the Tibetans of their indigenous “fierce and savage” roots. Of how Tibetans view their land as a living organism that, as shown through King gLang dar ma’s concern for these beings (49), can be “violated, offended, and even wounded,” but can also be “appeased, protected, heeded, and valorized” (49). Srin also is a testament to strong female figures in Tibetan history, who Gyatso notes, were “notably more assertive than some of her Asian neighbors” (51). Accounts from the Sui shu and T’ang shu in eighth century A.D. and Tibetan texts from fifth century Tun-huang describe matriarchal societies ruled by Tibetan women, where “the supreme ruler was the queen, and sons took the family name of their mother” (34). Her myth and her associations with femininity and Indigeneity were so formidable that, as Gyatso continues, “the masculine power structure of Tibetan myth had to go to great lengths to keep the female presence under control” (50). But perhaps the most interesting aspect of Srin to me is the non-guaranteed aspect of her subjugation. Although she may be, “pinned, and rendered motionless” for now, “she threatens to break loose at any relaxing of vigilance or deterioration of civilization” (51). Which I take to be a fair warning about Tibetans—especially women—in the past, present, and future.

***

In Jacob Dalton’s “The Taming of the Demons,” chapters four and five consist of King Yeshe O’s historical background “somewhere around 990 C.E,” and concerns discussions on a “fragmented” Tibet (2011:97). Chapter Four, Sacrifice and The Law, looks at how Yeshe O dealt with the challenge of fragmented areas in his kingdom that he had no control over. According to Dalton, this is a time when, “Tibetans emerged from a century and a half of political fragmentation, Yeshe O’s new western court was striving to assert its authority over various local forms of Buddhism that had taken root in the preceding years of chaos” (97). Using the analogy of British colonial rule in India, which had also tried to control and outlaw ritualistic aspect of Indian belief systems, Dalton employs a similar method to understanding Yeshe O’s strategy in asserting his authority over what he saw as a weakened state.

In his attempt to restore “rule of law,” he introduced four different proclamations that took affect right after one another. The first proclamation declared Buddhism to be the official State religion. The second, “Legal Decree” in 988, designates two different leaders, “a secular king (mnga’ bdag) and a religious grand lama (bla chen),” in addition, “[d]espite this nominal separation of powers, Yeshe O ensured that both secular and religious authority remained entirely in the hands of the royal family” (102). This move, as Dalton argues, would insure “the groundwork for the Kadam and Geluk schools’ later success” (103). This decree also aimed to change the legal system that would combine “religious law (chos khrims) with secular law (rgyal khrims)” (103). The third proclamation “gathered all the regional leaders of Tibet at the new Guge court to issue a further ‘pronouncement’ (bka’ stsal), emphasizing the need for Tibetans to emulate the early imperial kings by following the laws of both Buddhism and the state” (103). And finally, the fourth proclamation was his public edict, which “addressed [against] the tantrikas of Tibet” (103). However, “the king was not opposed to the tantras per se, just to what he saw as their malpractice, and tantric practice was therefore permitted to continue within these new monkish, and more easily controlled, institutional settings” (105). Tantric rituals, according to Dalton, “was thus worked into monastic training and firmly grounded in Buddhist logic and ethics” (105). Liberation rites would be performed on effigy, instead of live victims (106). Under these changes, Tantric violence is channeled through acceptable and controlled form, and influenced an “array of Tibetan innovations, from new artistic forms to unprecedented systems of myth and ritual,” and more importantly, “the bloody violence of the age of fragmentation,” Dalton argues, “moved increasingly from the real to the symbolic” (109).

Chapter Five, “Foundational Violence,” takes a closer look at tantric rituals that have Indian origin or influence, and their taming, which, according to Dalton, gave rise to the “pan-Tibetan Buddhist identity” (110). Dalton attributes most of the myths and tantric rituals as originating from or brought to Tibet by Indian Buddhist influences. The myth about Kongjo, wife of king Songtsen Gampo, is repeated here, except in this version Srin-mo, from Gyatso’s reading, is called raksasi-demoness. This myth, according to Dalton, was similar in a lot of ways to the “Indian Puranic sources” (115). The construction of Buddhist stupas/temples as a way to pin down the demoness is similar to the Rudra myth, in which, “stupas are built over the demon’s body parts” (117). Even Vajrakilaya, tantric ritual dagger, used in tantric rituals of subjugation (118), and ritual text on building stupas and mandalas (119) are also influenced by India. The purpose of reviving Songtsen Gampo’s historic activities through the Piller Tastement’s, according to Dalton, was to employ a strategy that Yeshe O had already begun in order to revive Tibet as a new Buddhist landscape to that of the time during the “great kings” (121). This was a time when many monasteries were being constructed, as was the case in India according to Dalton. The demonization of Tibet and Tibetans seemed to be employed in a way, according to Dalton, to safeguard the new transition of the Buddhist monasticism. It was also a way to emphasize the dark centuries during the “fragmentation” that chapter four concentrated on to better situate this new movement to reframe tantric rituals in a more controlled monastic arena. The construction of monasteries in regional areas also, in regards to previous chapter, sustained Yeshe O’s hope for societies ruled between religious and secular heads. Heads of monasteries had close ties, according to Dalton, to regional heads. This was also a way, according to Dalton, for Tibet to retain a new Buddhist identity. For this new identity to be accomplished a narrative of self-demonizing accounts was needed to juxtapose itself against the purity of Buddhism in Tibet.

***

In the chapter on “Fatherlands” in her book The Violence of Liberation, anthropologist Charlene Makley focuses exactly on what Dalton touches upon in his chapter five: the Buddhist constructed landscape through mandala initiations (2007). Makley’s discussion is interested in the masculine roles of Tibetan male Lamas who construct the Buddhist sociospatial space as the initiators through their expertise in tantric rituals and mandalization. Using similar description from Dalton, Makley points out the importance of Lama Jamyang Shepa in Labrang as the tantric initiator and monastic head of Labrang monastery. He was highly respected and regarded in the region for his masculine role—masculine because most Tulkus, according to Makley, were male—in being able to subdue and purify the area. Because of such importance, he determined, as Makley argues, the sociospatial relationships Labrang assumed in regards to itself and their neighbors—other ethnic minorities in the area and the Qing Empire. This masculine role of the lama or tulku is what made Labrang, according to Makley, a bustling spiritual and economic center (59). The role is also what made Labrang, as Makley argues, an autonomous space.

Public display of affiliation and affinity to the monastic and its figures through gift offerings could, as Makely argues, heighten non-monastic lay masculinities—with the giving of the honored status of Namtisay by Lama Jamyang Shepa to “‘heirs of the ‘six earliest households’” who acted as the nonmonastic guardians (69). In the later years, when Labrang is threatened by incoming Nationalist war lord Ma Qj, and later the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the role of the fifth Jamyang Shepa and his older brother Apa Alo, who acted as, “the lay military commander,” is heightened (50). This combination of the religious and secular role between Jamyang Shepa and Apa Alo is reminiscent of the edict Yeshi O brought into existence. Apa Alo’s masculinity is heightened for his role in handling the incoming foreign intruders and was remembered as the, “incarnation of Namtisay himself” (75). However, unlike the Bonpos and Buddhists invaders in Gyatso’s work, this new foreign invader, CCP, does not seek to tame the demoness Srin-mo. Liberation is not achievable, according to the CCP, through religious tantric rituals but through “rationalized modern progress” and impose, “a communist sociospatial order west from the ‘old [liberated] regions’ into Tibetan areas” (52). This new incorporation of Labrang into the “Communist sociospatial order,” is what Makley argues, is emasculating and alienating Tibetan men who feel unfamiliar with this new imposed sociospatial order that does not correspond with how they have historically seen their masculinities and landscapes.

***

Taken together, these readings insist that contemporary concerns over secularism, religion, purity, and the need for political unity are not topics just of this moment. Instead, Tibetan histories suggests these topics are old concerns that were dealt with differently over time. If pundits engaged these histories alongside contemporary concerns, they can offer ways for us to move forward rather than become caught up in debates with no constructive conclusions. Tibetan histories should not have to stay unused in the past just because they took place in the past; instead they have the potential for thinking about the current political moment. Thus, I hope readers walk away insisting on the importance of Tibetan histories in making sense of the current moment. However, it is our responsibility to engage such histories, refusing to do so could put us at a disadvantage where we end up addressing the same problem in a cyclical manner with no clear resolution in sight.

Works cited:

Gyatso, J. (1987). Down with the demoness: reflections on a feminine ground in Tibet. The Tibet Journal, 12(4), 38-53.

Dalton, J. P. (2011). The taming of the demons: Violence and liberation in Tibetan Buddhism. Yale University Press.

Makley, C. E. (2007). The violence of liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist revival in post-Mao China. Univ of California Press.

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Are Tibetans Indigenous? It depends who you ask. Although the People’s Republic of China (PRC) recognizes the rights of Indigenous people by voting in favor of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 (UN General Assembly 2008), they also claim there are no indigenous populations in China. Instead, Tibetans are categorized as minzu (ethnic minority) under the PRC. In popular print media, Tibetans have been framed by non-Tibetan photographers, writers, or journalists as indigenous. But what about Tibetans? Do they identify as Indigenous?

In Emily Yeh’s article “Tibetan Indigeneity,” Yeh engages the question of indigeneity in the Tibetan context (2007). Yeh argues the framing of Tibetans as indigenous has largely been imposed by western and Chinese environmentalists due to Tibetan assertion of environmental stewardship and ecological wisdom. However, Tibetans in exile, according to Yeh, have largely rejected identification with indigeneity due to the term’s limitations. For Tibetans living in the PRC, the limitation of indigeneity manifests as their classification as minzu under the state, which makes it legally impossible for them to identify as indigenous. For Tibetans in exile, indigeneity was understood as “sovereignty without secession,” which limited separation from China. However, Yeh does not dismiss the possibility of change on Tibetan stance regarding indigeneity since she acknowledges shifts in the category. My presentation will emphasize this shift to propose indignity as an evolving terminology fluctuating through time with political consequences depending on who is doing the defining. I use Tibetan rejection of indigeneity in the late 1990s to illustrate this fact. This will involve an analysis of indigeneity as a legal and theoretical concept contested between settler-states and Indigenous movements.

Indigeneity:

If the term Indigenous, Native, or Indian, emerged in tandem with settler colonialism, then the term was itself a colonial construct. This is stressed by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, who argues that the category of “Indian” was a colonial invention (2015). According to mainstream Indigenous discourse, prior to colonial invasion, no one introduced themselves as “Native” to one another. Instead, many identified and continue to identify based intersectionally on names of clans, tribes and/or homelands. Similarly, prior to the Chinese invasion, Tibetans too identified based on clan names, hometowns or regions. No one went around introducing themselves as Native. Under the settler state, argues Moreton-Robinson, the category of the “Native” or “Indian” was invented and assumed new and changing legal and discursive meanings. These meanings, which framed Indigenous peoples as backward and incapable of producing surplus value off their land, sought to reframe them as primitive and/or other. These reformulations of indigenous populations provided settler states with the basis for taking Native territories. In other words, the racial category of the “Native” or “Indian” had no real implication for how specific tribes actually identified. Instead, the construction of this category provided settler states with the legal and discursive justification to take possession of Native lands and bodies. Thus, early political concepts of Indigeneity revolved around settler state definitions, which sought to racially define Indigenous peoples within settler state hierarchies who granted Indigenous populations rights to their own previously sovereign lands and life ways. In Tibet, racializing Tibetans under the “autonomous” settler territorial governance as a backward minority in need of Chinse modern civilizing development provide the legal and discursive framework through which settler elimination/assimilation of Tibetan lands and bodies are justified and achieved.

As Yeh stressed, it was the confusion surrounding rights versus sovereignty that Tibetan organizational heads in exile found complexing. For them, the political movement for Tibet seeks complete sovereignty, not (settler given) rights. According to Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson, a rights based politics seeks recognition from the settler colonial state. Indigenous sovereignty refuses settler state recognition, and instead orient themselves towards Indigenous systems of authority and recognition (2014). In other words, sovereignty becomes the basis through which Indigenous communities refuse the settler state.

To understand why Tibetans from Yeh’s discussion refused the categorization of Indigeneity, it is essential to consider how they understood the term. The Tibetan political organizations that Yeh chose to focus on happen to be based in India. Their understanding of Indigeneity is partially influenced by how India defines indigeneity. I turn to Sara Shneiderman’s Rituals of Ethnicity, to consider Thamgmi performances of indigeneity in accordance to Indian state definition in Darjeeling, India. Shneiderman explores the ways in which Thangmi leaders struggled to perform a version of Thangminess that would qualify them under India’s state category of “Other Backwards Classes” (OBC) in the 1990s (2015). India’s OBC category, influenced by colonial British definitions, is reserved for groups that consider themselves Native to a province. State recognition as OBC allows groups to access certain state given rights reserved specifically for groups that the state identifies as indigenous. In order for Thagmis to qualify for OBC, they had to also accept being classified as “backwards” (143). Alongside performing traditional and ritual versions of themselves, Thangmis also felt compelled to perform forms of backwardness that they thought would help their OBC qualification. For example, during their bid for OBC, Thangmi leaders asked community members to begin consuming rats because an early ethnographic book on Thangmis stressed how rats were considered a staple in traditional Thangmi food. Even though, Thangmi ethnologists later debunked that assumption by pointing out how rats were consumed during a particularly bad time when crops failed and starvation prevailed. Despite this clarification, the Thangmi group in charge of applying for OBC promoted the eating of rats as an incentive towards OBC qualification.

Ethnic Tibetan groups living along the Tibet-India border are recognized officially by India as Bhutia. Bhutias are categorized under “Scheduled Tribe” under the Indian state. On the one hand, the OBC category stressed indigeneity as backwards. On the other, the Scheduled Tribe category recognized groups as tribes rather than sovereign entities. For the Tibetan leadership in exile, both definitions were unacceptable. Alongside considering Indian definitions, Tibetans were also thinking about indigeneity as a legal terminology trafficked in the international arena. The UN declared 1994 “International Year of Indigenous Peoples” to recognize indigenous people’s “human rights.” According to Carole McGranahan, this was the first time such a group was internationally named and recognized (2016). In accordance with UN action, the Tibetan Government in Exile understood indigenous peoples as just tribal rather than people with their own states. McGranahan was told by Tibetan government officials at the time not to use the term when describing Tibetans due to this limitation.

From this vantage point, it becomes clear why the Tibetan leadership in exile rejected this terminology in the 1990s. Accepting such definitions meant accepting an inferior classification of themselves. Further, it also degraded the Tibetan political goal for sovereignty. Rather than reject current understanding of indigeneity as defined by Indigenous sovereignty movements that roots itself in claims of sovereignty and decolonization, Tibetans in exile were rejecting indigeneity as defined by institutions such as the UN and modern states. Such institutions defined indigeneity as backwards and tribal, and rooted their politics in terms of rights rather than Nationhood. This is what major Indigenous sovereignty movements stress, that their movement is often misconstrued as seeking civil rights from the settler state rather than challenging violation of treaties, and thus Indigenous sovereignty, that the settler state signed with Indigenous Nations during settler state inception. The Tibetan example demonstrates that the term indigeneity operates under different discursive frameworks depending on who’s the one doing the defining, whether modern settler states or Indigenous movements. As such, Indigenous group’s rejection or acceptance of indigeneity as an identification depends largely on such definitions.

Native Indigeneity:

While the term Indigeneity has been defined by settler colonial states since its inception, continued Indigenous refusal through discourse and movements with legal impacts have consistently challenged such definitions. In so doing, they have decolonized the term in order to mobilize possible alliances and Indigenous anticolonial sovereignty movements that circumvent settler states and other capitalist institutions. Because the terminology was produced during settler colonial invasion, the term has become useful for Indigenous scholars in challenging settler state attempts to hide itself under neo/liberal discourses that erases settler colonial histories in efforts to rebrand itself a liberal modern state.

In the current era, Glen Clouthard argues that articulations of setter colonialism have moved on from colonial domination to governmentality (2015:15). Clouthard argues that the emergence of “Indigenous anticolonial nationalism […] force colonial power to modify itself from a structure that […] explicitly oriented around the genocidal exclusion/assimilation [my italics] double, to one that is now reproduced through a seemingly more conciliatory set of discourses and institutional practices that emphasize our recognition and accommodation.” He continues, that “[r]egardless of this modification, however, the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state has remained colonial to its foundation” (6). The result is that you have two opposing forces, on the one hand settler states seeks to continually change its systematics while remaining steadfast in their original goals towards eliminating Indigeneity. On the other, Indigenous activists and scholars seek to continually challenge such structural changes through legal and discursive interventions that continually decolonize. Because settler state institutions continue to use and define the terminology of indigeneity to serve its own goals, Indigenous peoples have challenged such use with their own decolonized definitions through the interrogations of treaties signed between Native Nations and settler-states. This back and forth suggests that the terminology cannot be tossed out so easily, instead it becomes a discursive site for legal contestations between settler states and Indigenous Nations. It is a high stakes play that involves the right to define sovereignty, a concept that Michelle H. Raheja describes “as an open-ended process that involves critical and kinetic contemplations of what sovereignty means at different historical and paradigmatic junctures” (2015: 30). For Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, “At the heart of Indigenous peoples’ realities, then, is nationhood. Their very survival depends on it” (2005: 124). Indigeneity described from this vantage point becomes about sovereignty.

Tibetans and indigeneity:

Another reason Indigenous movements and scholars have not completely thrown out the terminology is due to its salience in generating global solidarities between Native peoples and their anticolonial stance against settler state encroachment. Judging from its evolutionary trajectory, indigeneity has gone from being a colonial construct to a terminology operationalized by global Indigenous movements to advance solidarities and sovereignty claims against settler nations and capitalist institutions in cahoots.

In “Analytics of Indigeneity,” Maile Arvin’s articulation of Indigeneity “refers to the historical and contemporary effects of colonial and anticolonial demands and desires related to a certain land or territory and the various displacements of that place’s original or longtime inhabitants” (2015: 121). Arvin’s concept of indigeneity stresses colonial histories and territorial expulsion of native inhabitants, a framework Tibetan political movements in exile also stress through their insistence on Tibetan sovereignty. It could be argued that Tibetans can actually identify as indigenous. However, my purpose is not to insist whether Tibetans are in fact indigenous. Instead, recent trends among Tibetans in exile suggests that indigeneity, as defined by indigenous nations and movements as mobilization against settler-states and imperial capitalism, has become an important framework for considering the Tibetan political movement for sovereignty.

Tibetans living in North America, for example, have contemplated these possible solidarities by promoting Indigenous movements such as the Idle No More in Canada, and recently the No Dakota Access Pipeline campaign in the US in communal spaces. These movements also became avenues for Tibetans like myself to reflect on indigeneity as a decolonial praxis that could prove useful for Tibetans in addressing settler colonialisms, sovereignties, refusals, and potential solidarities. While the Tibetan leadership in the recent past have turned away from settler-state construct of indigeneity due to its sovereignty limitations, non-organizationally based Tibetan civilians in North America are presently considering indigeneity as defined by Indigenous movements to address Tibet’s recent histories of settler colonialism and ongoing histories of Tibetan Nationhood. Suggesting indigeneity as a terminology has been experiencing shifting definitions, and because of such shifts, Tibetans have rejected it in the past and accepted it now.

So, can we assume Tibetans identify as indigenous? It depends. But my point isn’t to argue whether they do or don’t. A more interesting question is to ask where, when, and why Tibetans do or don’t identify as indigenous. As I have shown, indigeneity is not just about categorizing people symbolically, but leveraging international movements and creating strategic solidarities for Native Nations mobilizing against the mechanics of settler governmentality. It is this political potential of indigeneity that civilian Tibetans are presently considering.

[I presented the following essay at the 2017 American Anthropological Association conference for the panel, “Asian Settler Colonialisms and Indigineities,” which I organized. I’ve decided to share it due to a few requests. However, I do plan to work on this further. In the mean time, I’m making it available for those who asked. If my arguments resonate with your work, feel free to use. But do make sure to source. Thank you]

Works Cited:
Arvin, Maile. 2015. “Analytics of Indigeneity.” Native Studies Keywords, p.119.

Coulthard, Glen. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press.

Lawrence, Bonita, and Enakshi Dua. 2005. “Decolonizing Antiracism.” Social justice 32, no. 4: 120-143.

McGranahan, Carole. 2016. “Refusal and the Gift of Citizenship.” Cultural Anthropology 31.3: 334-341.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2015. The White Possessive: Property Power and Indigenous Sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Raheja, Michelle H. 2015. “Visual Sovereignty.” Native Studies Keywords, p.25.

Shneiderman, Sara Beth. 2009. “Rituals of Ethnicity: Migration, Mixture, and the Making of Thangmi Identity across Himalayan Borders.” PhD diss., Cornell University.

Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus. Duke University Press.

Yeh, Emily T. 2007. “Tibetan indigeneity: Translations, Resemblances, and Uptake.” Indigenous Experience Today 2:69.

I have decided to make this article which was published at the end of 2018 Book Tibetan Subjectivities on the Global Stage: Negotiating Dispossession public. Readers who wish to draw from this article for their own work, please source as follows:

Lokyitsang, Dawa. 2018. “Who is a Pure Tibetan? Identity, Intergenerational History, and Trauma in Exile,” in Tibetan Subjectivities on the Global Stage Negotiating Dispossession, edited by Shelly Bhoil and Enrique Galvan-Alvarez. Lexington Books. p195-212.

Who is a pure Tibetan? Who decides? According to scholars of Tibet, Tibetans are a collection of people who share overlapping cultural and religious histories and traditions from the geographic region of Tibet.^[1]While certain groups in particular regions of central Tibet have historically identified as Bodpa (bod pa, Tibetan), according to the prominent Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya, the Chinese invasion of 1949 and continued colonization caused Tibetans in or from the eastern regions of Amdo (A-mdo) and Kham (Khams) to also begin calling themselves Bodpa.^[2]Today, Tibetans of different backgrounds, living across the Tibetan plateau and in exile, collectively identify as Tibetans. 

How do Tibetans themselves conceptualize being Tibetan? Here, I explore this question through an ethnographic illustration of recent public discussions between Tibetans online, and the kinds of reactions these exchanges provoke. Their discussions were often about purity—what makes someone a pure Tibetan? Purity was needed, argued many, to preserve the Tibetan identity. For Tibetans inside and outside Tibet, preservation was a project that Tibetans collectively began after the Chinese invasion. Many saw purity as necessary to promote the project of cultural and identity preservation in colonized Tibet and exile-diaspora. Purity offered possibilities for survival and continuity of the culture. But what does this purity look like? And what are the consequences when certain members of the Tibetan collective feel they cannot fulfill such notions of Tibetan purity? 

I begin this essay by examining discussions on Facebook which took place in 2014 following a Voice of America (VOA) Tibetan segment interviewing Tibetans of mixed heritage. I consider this new media discourse, alongside intergenerational exile, as history. Through a historical exploration of purity conversations in the Tibetan exile community, recorded in ethnographies on Tibetan exiles or in public discussions spaces online, I reveal how contemporary discussions of purity are extensions of older conversations concerned with Tibetans’ fears of cultural extermination. To better situate such fears,I turn to academic theories of purity and deconstruct Tibetan notions of purity. I argue that Tibetan [conversations around] purity are not actually about purity. Instead, purity conversations reveal lived experiences of loss and trauma suffered by Tibetans who became refugees in exile following Tibet’s invasion. Purity thus became a vehicle through which the preservation of culture in exile was enacted, securing continuity of the Tibetan collective. [However, notions of purity that posits authenticity to be based only in the past, which I explore further in this chapter, narrow Tibetan avenues towards cultural continuity and futurity.] Instead, I [turn to insights on indigeneity and continuity by Indigenous Studies scholars and] propose an approach that conceptualizes Tibetanness as “rooted and routed”.^[3]  

Looking Tibetan

On March 24, 2014, VOA Tibetan posted a segment from their aired program titled “Mixed Parentage Tibetans and Tibetan Society” on its official website and Facebook page.^[4]In the segment, Tibetans of mixed heritage living in the West were interviewed about the challenges and struggles of being racially mixed. The post on Facebook quickly generated much discussion in its comment section by both Tibetans and non-Tibetans. The subject that received most attention was mixing—whether linguistically, culturally, or genetically. A commenter named Tenzin had this to say: 

I totally disagree with mix[ed] parentage. I have valid reasons for my stan[ce]. I [am] really concern[ed] about this issue from long ago. Nevertheless I consider the Himalayan people from Ladakh to Arunachal as of Tibetan racial stock. If upcoming Tibetan generation [sic] feel that this new phenomena of mix[ed] parentage is acceptable then people like me resign from Tibetan social life in order [for the] surviv[al of] our racial identity because it is a part of our whole identity. And we are going to do it even at the cost of Tibetan unity because it is worth doing. [This] might sound like hindrance for Tibetan unity but I am sure it will be good for Tibetan unity in a real sense. I am well aware of the global changes. I am not talking out of narrow mindedness in my approach[,] rather out of concern for my racial identity and long term and sustainable Tibetan interest. I have given considerable amount [sic] of time and energy to this issue and I think Tibetan[s] need the holistic approach on it. Remember, westerniz[e] is not modernize. I believe in racial differences but I certainly, certainly don’t believe in racial supremacy. So I don’t think you can put me in the category of so called racist. BOD GYALLO.

While Tenzin’s views are not representative of all exile Tibetans, they reflect the sentiments of Tibetans who are against mixing. Tenzin bases the purity of Tibetanness in terms of race; pure Tibetans did not racially mix. Instead, Tenzin cites racial mixing as promoting a “hindrance for Tibetan unity.” While some commenters cited cultural degradation as a reason to avoid genetic mixing, others recognized existing populations of mixed Tibetans, arguing that such comments were promoting disharmony and discrimination amongst Tibetans. The discussion generated so much heat that the site administrator began deleting comments that were deemed too inflammatory. 

Following this post, Tibetan friends of both mixed and non-mixed backgrounds expressed to me in private conversations how racist they thought some of these views were. Sonam, an activist (name changed), who is of mixed Tibetan heritage, told me how she was not surprised by some of these purist comments. For Sonam this was nothing new; she explained that similar comments were made to her throughout her childhood by other Tibetans. Surprised, I asked how she handles her grassroots political activism work, which requires her to work alongside Tibetans who hold purist views. Sonam said that she no longer entertained such comments, that she was “over it,” because she knows who she is. 

In a private Facebook messenger conversation with Dhondup (name changed), also of mixed heritage, he wrote, “I’ve become increasingly disillusioned about the ‘Tibetan cause’ in general over exactly this [purist sentiments] matter.” Although Sonam and Dhondup expressed no surprise at such purist sentiments coming from other Tibetans, I could sense their feelings of hurt. For Dhondup, these purist conversations—which dictate politics of belonging that exclude Tibetans who look like him—were enough for him to distance himself from the “Tibetan cause.” While comments like Tenzin’s, which argues against racial mixing, reveal the pure Tibetan ideal—racially pure—such discussions are not limited to just looks. According to this purist ideal, a pure Tibetan is also required to speak Tibetan in a pure way too. 

Speaking Tibetan

In 2011, my friends Pema (Padma) Yoko, Tsering Lama, and I uploaded a video on YouTube titled “Shopping in Little Tibet,” to the Lhakar Diaries blog.^[5]The video shows the three of us speaking English while exploring Tibetan businesses in Jackson Heights, New York. The purpose of the video was to encourage Tibetan and non-Tibetan viewers to shop at Tibetan businesses in New York. While Pema Yoko is of Tibetan and Japanese heritage, Tsering Lama and I are of non-mixed Tibetan parentage. Soon after we uploaded the video on YouTube, we received the following comments:

456inthemix: Now speak Tibetan than it will be perfect!

Nemo Ramone: Speak in Tibetan! My aku said why you guys speaking in English when both of you are Tibetan!!

As can be seen, commenters Nemo and 456inthemix tell us to “speak Tibetan.” While the VOA post generated comments that rejected racial mixing, comments on our YouTube video criticized our choice to use English when speaking. This suggests that purity must be retained not only in the way Tibetans look but also in the way we speak. 

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.^[6]In the video, they have the following dialogue:

Pema Yoko:

I can’t speak Tibetan, yet I demand cultural genocide [in Tibet] to be stopped.

Allow Tibetans to be Tibetan, yet in a free country I still talk English.

In a free country my father is still demanding me to be more Tibetan

Boekhe gyab kukpa, speak Tibetan stupid!

How can I fight for the right of Tibet yet I can’t even speak Tibetan? Right dad?

I want this relationship to work out. And we even talked about it before

Before and after mom died and before you got [re]married.

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.

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.

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 a part of Tibet, of the Tibetan community and things that you wanted me to be. Nothing’s ever good enough for you, or you just don’t appreciate it.

Cut me some slack, man. Please.

Pema’s Tibetan Dad:

Right now I enter the house. Khando [Pema’s half-sister who is full Tibetan and much younger] just walked in. And she looked back and smiled. And that made me very happy, at the same time made me sad.

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?

It’s, there is no way. You are in my heart. In other words, you are in my heart.

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.

So what I was saying is, you sort it out.

If you cannot speak Tibetan, it is you, your fault only.

And you have to learn to adjust and think again.

Near the end of Pema’s monologue, she 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 a part of Tibet, of the Tibetan community and things that [he] wanted [her] to be.” However, she concludes, “nothing’s ever good enough for you, or you just don’t appreciate it,” followed by, “Cut me some slack man. Please.” In her father’s response, he clarifies that his frustrations with Pema’s lack of spoken Tibetan is not about his love. Rather, he asks she take his critiques as encouragements towards improving, “I care and I want you to improve, that means.” Yet, his comments seem to ignore the circumstances that Pema outlines in explaining that her lack of proficiency in Tibetan is not solely her fault.  

When discussing the politics of spoken Tibetan, politically active friends who were born and/or raised in the West from mixed or non-mixed background frequently expressed feelings of discouragement. When involved with Tibetan community organization, they often complain of encountering senior members of the community who tell them sometimes gently, and other times in a hostile manner, how shameful it is that they do not speak pure Tibetan. These encounters, they report, often leave them feeling frustrated, disempowered, and discouraged. Lhamo (name changed), a Tibetan friend who was born and raised in a predominantly white town in Canada, told me once that she even preferred not to speak Tibetan in front of other Tibetans. She explained that she did this not because she was ashamed, but because she is afraid of “messing up” when speaking Tibetan. According to Lhamo, she saw herself as incapable of speaking good Tibetan because she mixed it with English and pronounced certain Tibetan words with an accent that sounded too Canadian and foreign. 

Jane Hill’s work in linguistic ethnography examines how Mexicano elders engage in testing or judging the language purity of younger Mexicanos by using purism rhetoric as “a toll of dominance”.^[7]Hill finds that these sorts of behaviors are “linguistic terrorism,” creating fears and insecurities that conversely discourage, rather than encourage, the use of Mexicano language.^[8]I find similar fears being expressed by Tibetan youth. Linguistic terrorism caused Tibetans such as Lhamo to forgo speaking Tibetan in public because she believed her spoken Tibetan would invite criticism from purist advocates who either knowingly or unknowingly challenged Lhamo’s approaches to her Tibetanness. 

Being Tibetan

At the end of her video, Pema leverages phrases that express her identity. One of these reads “British Tibetan.” When I first saw this video in 2007, I remember being surprised at seeing the words “British” and “Tibetan” together because the Tibetan community was only beginning to grow in London and it was the first time I heard a Tibetan call herself as “British Tibetan.” Back then, she was also the only British Tibetan I knew. 

In Ana Celia Zentella’s ethnographic look at young children in a bilingual Puerto Rican community in New York, she writes, “changing 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”.^[9]Pema, a racially mixed Tibetan who speaks English interspersed with Tibetan, cannot quite fit the ideal Tibetan image that her father proposes. She plays with that image by presenting herself, in one instance, wearing traditional (Dbus-gtsang) Tibetan clothes against a backdrop which depicts the Tibetan landscape with prayer flags and a yak. She also presents herself wearing jeans and hoodie against a backdrop depicting the streets of London. Both images express her identity. At the end, Pema declares she is “British Tibetan,” choosing to define herself instead of letting others define her, thus, echoing Zentella’s emphasis that she is a “product of [her] concrete reality.” Contrary to the purist advocates who are against racial and linguistic mixing, Pema’s redefinition of her identity as a British Tibetan allows her to embrace her Tibetan identity and history without compromising her personal history in London. 

As Sonaia Neela Das explores in her ethnography “Between Convergence and Divergence”,^[10]which focuses on the Tamil community in Montreal, “Diaspora children and youth, who are seen as the sole inheritance of a dispersed Sri Lankan Tamil nation, are […] 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.”.^[11]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 Tibetan spaces offer children the chance to engage in speaking the Tibetan language and to hear it spoken by other members of their community. 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 another European language) is the norm. The fact that Tibetan children born and/or raised in the West spend their lives socializing in complete western environments is partly the reason why Tibetan children (racially mixed or not) in the West may engage more in linguistic mixing than a child in, say, Lhasa or Dharamsala, where Tibetan children interact in a bilingual social world and where Tibetan can be heard and spoken outside the home. 

Despite having been raised in predominately Western spaces, in the video Pema says that she tries her best “to be a part of Tibet, of the Tibetan community and things that you wanted me to be.” For her, effort in being part of the Tibetan community can be reflected in her choice to remain active in campaign work for the Tibetan political movement. For other young Tibetans, mixed or not, born and/or raised in the West, their efforts to engage with their Tibetanness take on multiple modes. For example, artists like MC Rebel choose to articulate their Tibetanness by rapping about Tibetan history in English.^[12]Others enact their Tibetanness through political advocacy during the yearly “lobby for Tibet” event in Washington D.C. – a gathering of Tibetan Americans who lobby their state representatives in the Senate and Congress to advocate on behalf of Tibet by supporting certain bills and proposals beneficial to the Tibetan collective. Some take yearly or seasonal trips to Dharamsala to learn written and spoken Tibetan at Tibetan institutions in order to learn more about their Tibetanness. These are but some examples of how Tibetan youth in the West try to engage, as well as meet the challenges of, being Tibetan. Purity advocates ignore such efforts, focusing on the need for the preservation of Tibetan purity to ensure continuity. Why such disconnect? To get a better understanding, I turn to intergenerational history. 

History

In “Transidiomatic practices,” Marco Jacquemet examines ethnic minority groups that move into multicultural and urban-global spaces.^[13]In a place such as London, English language and culture has a dominant reign. Within such spaces, argues Jacquemet, ethnic groups become threatened at the realization of becoming a minority:

[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. 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.^[14]

While migration for Tibetans from India and Nepal to the west means that they were becoming “deterritorialized,” this shift from the East to the West, however, is not the first time Tibetans have faced the effects of deterritorialization. As previously mentioned, the Chinese invasion forced large numbers of Tibetans to become refugees as a collective in Nepal and India. Tibetans built refugee communities in the host nations of Nepal and India not just in response to having become ethnic minorities in Tibet but due to the loss of their homeland to foreign invasion. As refugees, they faced precarious conditions, some of which were harsh enough to cause many deaths in the early days of exile. 

In response to the destabilizing conditions of having become refugees, Tibetans reconstituted life and community through the construction of refugee settlements and schools. The land for such settlements was given by the Indian and Nepali governments. John F. Avedon details this construction period in his book In Exile from the Land of Snows.^[15]Avedon records an incident in the 1970s regarding an individual named Tempa (Bstan-pa) who escaped the Chinese invasion of Tibet with his parents in the 1960s. Following the deaths of Tempa’s mother and sister soon after their arrival in India, Tempa’s father places him in a Tibetan boarding school to ensure his safety. Tempa reunited with his father when he became an adult following his high school graduation, in South India, at a refugee settlement which his father had helped build. At this settlement, Tempa says he was not the only young graduate rejoining his family, but there were others too like him. They enjoyed wearing bellbottoms and listening and dancing to the Beatles.^[16]However, the adoption of such sensibilities was seen as negative by the older generation because these new habits and tastes ignited their fears of cultural extinction. 

Tempa remembers being reprimanded by his father, and other elders, for adopting foreign sensibilities. The generation of Tempa’s father had been born and raised into adulthood in Tibet; many of had married and started families too in Tibet. No one had anticipated the Chinese invasion; no one had anticipated becoming refugees. When Tempa was placed in a boarding school to secure his survival, his father joined other recently arrived Tibetan refugees, many of whom were parents, to begin working together to build refugee settlements—counteracting the precarious conditions of refugee camps. By the time the generation of Tempa’s father began building refugee settlements in South India, they had already experienced the traumatic losses of their homeland, family and everything they had. Many in exile were forced to start over with nothing. All of these experiences, including having to live as refugees in a new country, provoked fears of further loss. While the Chinese destroyed Tibetan institutions in Tibet, the Dalai Lama and his administration used the concept of culture preservation to reestablish Tibetan institutions and communities in exile.^[17]Culture preservation became a conceptual avenue through which Tibetans actualized projects of cultural continuity and thus peoplehood. For refugees of the generation of Tempa’s father, the experience of the losses endured following China’s invasion generated fears of cultural extinction in exile—a destruction that was continuing to take place inside Tibet under Chinese militarization. 

Tempa seems to have acknowledged the immense loss his father’s generation had experienced because he remembers choosing to stay quiet while his father scolded him. For the older generation, returning to Tibet was only a matter of time. Culture preservation had to be initiated to allow them to resume their lives upon return to Tibet—a return many assumed would be soon. Though Tempa chooses to stay quiet out of respect in response to his father’s fears over cultural contamination, Tempa makes clear that his increasing passion for and involvement in Tibetan politics in later years was due to his strong identification with being Tibetan. Tempa did not see his adoption of foreign sensibilities as a deterrent to his overall commitment to Tibetan politics, a commitment he saw as being intimately tied to his Tibetanness.   

Following the construction period of the 1970s and 1980s, in which Tempa grew from a traumatized child into a politically active adult, the 1990s were a period of prosperity. Others from Tempa’s generation had begun populating the settlements with families, allowing Tibetans to reproduce society and community successfully by the 1990s. Keila Diehl records this period in her ethnography Echoes from Dharamsala.^[18]Similar to Tempa, the adoption of foreign sensibilities by Tibetan youth born and/or raised in India and gsar ’jor pa (gsar ‘byor pa) who were born and raised in a Chinese-colonized Tibet provoked fears of cultural extinction for Tibetan elders in Dharamsala, India. The elders in Diehl’s ethnography were the same generation as Tempa’s father, and by the 1990s they had become grandparents. Many in Dharamsala were unsettled by the adoption of Chinese sensibilities in music and fashion by gsar’jor pa. They interpreted their linguistic abilities in Chinese and their musical taste to be representative of the success of Chinese assimilation policies in Tibet. Similarly, elders saw the adoption of rock music by the Yak Band—who were represented in the book as stand-ins for Tibetan youth born and/or raised in India—as negating efforts towards culture preservation. Despite efforts from both groups who chose to express their Tibetanness through Tibetan lyrics set to musical styles of rock and roll and Chinese pop music, elders became more concerned with the musical styles rather than the lyrical content, because they deemed such styles as being foreign. Any sensibilities considered foreign were being interpreted by the older generation as contaminants, deterring the project of culture preservation. For many, preservation was a project being conceptualized through the framework of developments taking place inside Tibet. While they saw Chinese colonial policies inside Tibet as forceful interventions that sought to transform Tibetans into Chinese subjects, they saw the adoption of foreign sensibilities by exile Tibetans as voluntary. It was the voluntary aspect of such adoptions that they critiqued most as obstacles for the project of cultural preservation. 

Such anxieties over culture preservation against prospects of cultural annihilation in the host nation still dominate in exile as Timm Lau’s ethnography shows in “Tibetan Fears and Indian foes”.^[19]According to Lau, adoption of any foreign sensibility has been 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”.^[20]Such themes of fear surrounding cultural extinction traveled with Tibetans when many shifted to the West in large numbers for the first time by the mid-1990s. In Emily Yeh and Kunga Lama’s “Hip-Hop Gangsta or Most Deserving of Victims?,” they uncover similar anxieties between the young and old in San Francisco, CA, during the early 2000s regarding different Tibetan reactions to the adoption of hip-hop culture by the youth.^[21]While hip-hop was becoming mainstream in the United States, it was foreign to Tibetan parents who were born and/or raised as refugees in India or Nepal. Self-described Tibetan rappers rapped in English at community events about their marginalized racialized experiences in which they were coded as Asian-American immigrants, refugee Tibetans, and survivor-victims of the Chinese invasion. And yet, Tibetan parents could make little sense of this chosen American medium through which their children enact their experiences of being Tibetan. Many rapped in English about the strength they found in being Tibetan despite experiencing different forms of marginalization. Yet Yeh and Lama record elders’ disdain over the youth’s choice to adopt black masculinities, as popularized by hip-hop, rather than Tibetan ones. Overall, they conclude that elders viewed their children’s adoption of hip-hop sensibilities as dilution of the Tibetan culture, and thus, as threat to the overall project of culture preservation.

When we view the current manifestation of purity conversation regarding Tibetans who are racially mixed or speak Tibetan mixed with other languages alongside its previous manifestations, it becomes clear that this current version draws from older notions embedded in Tibetan discourses surrounding culture preservation. In the 1970s, Tempa’s taste in bellbottoms and the Beatles provoked fears of cultural erosion in Tempa’s father and those from the generation of Tempa’s father. In the 1990s, it was the adoption of musical styles from rock and roll and Chinese pop that stoked such fears from the same generation of elders, now grandparents. In the 2000s, it was the adoption of hip-hop music by children that provoked fears from parents who were of Tempa’s generation. Now, in the era of social media where racially mixed Tibetans or Tibetans who mix Tibetan with other languages are more visible, such mixing provokes the same old purity conversation, reigniting old fears. While purity conversations remain the same, what is new, however, is the growing visibility of racially mixed Tibetans both in the diaspora and inside Tibet. Like many before them, racially mixed Tibetans that I interviewed enacted their Tibetanness through personal mediums—whether in familial engagements, political activism, community engagement, cultural revival activities, or simply identifying themselves as Tibetan—despite misrecognition from purist advocates. 

Culture Preservation

Based on the intergenerational history of Tibetans and purity politics in exile over the decades, we learn that Tibetan notions of purity have emerged in relation to the real and lived experience of cultural extermination that Tibetans had faced during China’s invasion of Tibet, followed by the large number of deaths in the exiled community. Although different notions of purity may have existed in Tibet prior to China’s invasion, the post-invasion collective approach to purity by Tibetans from differing regions and backgrounds makes this current version new. It claims that Tibetan cultural purity has existed prior to the Chinese invasion and contamination. Thus, current conversations regarding purity have resulted from real Tibetan experience with China’s physical and cultural destruction of Tibet during and following the Chinese invasion. Notions of purity should, therefore, be historically situated and contextualized. Purity conversations reveal that they are not only about negotiating the politics of communal belonging. Instead they shed light on the persistence of traumatic historical memories, and how such memories continue to (re)produce the Tibetan refugee community in diaspora. Doing the work of historicizing purity helps to contextualize why older generations of Tibetans born and raised in a free Tibet reacted in the way they did to Tempa and his generation’s embrace of foreign taste in India during the 1970s. 

Decade after decade, this same fear resurfaces. Yet, each time, it is conceived as new. During the 1990s it was the Yak-Band and gsar ’jor pa that provoking such fears of cultural contamination among Tibetans. In the 2000s, it was youth who enjoyed performing hip-hop. Now it is those Tibetans who are either racially mixed, or mix Tibetan with other languages, in the West. With each new generation of youth, the fear resurfaces. This fear seems to heighten when Tibetans engage new frontiers of exile. For instance, the group of Tibetans that Yeh and Lama engaged with were part of a growing number of Tibetans who had begun moving to the United States from India and Nepal starting in the 1990s. Many of the youth Yeh and Lama engaged with were children born in India or Nepal who were being raised in the United States. Parents of these youth in California were born either in Tibet or South Asia but had been raised to adulthood, married off, and began family lives in Tibetan communities in South Asia. Because these parents had been born and/or raised in Tibetan enclaves in Nepal or India, their sensibilities reflected those select countries; sensibilities that were different from their children, who were being raised in the United States. Their different sensibility, was thus, being seen as foreign. This rings true for Tempa’s father who had been born and raised in Tibet before the invasion. As such, his cultural sensibilities, which were shaped by his personal development in Tibet, diverged from those of his son. This divergence of Tibetan cultural life between generations is what causes fears of cultural degradation. As a result, decade after decade, old fears of cultural degradation experienced during China’s invasion and occupation resurface every time Tibetans move into new frontiers of exile. In the current moment, purity conversations are resurfacing again due to the growing visibility of Tibetans who are racially mixed and/or mix spoken Tibetan with other language in the West—a new diaspora space for Tibetan exiles. Such changing conditions of exile are acknowledged in different ethnographies I have cited; however, those changing conditions are barely historicized together. This is one of the reasons why purity conversations, I argue, resurface decade after decade as new. 

Theorizing Purity

Although it is essential to approach Tibetan concepts of purity historically, as cases from different decades demonstrate, purity politics narrow, rather than broaden, the politics of belonging for Tibetans of diverse backgrounds. Purity politics positions Tibetans who mix and/or are mixed in a polarizing framework that views them as becoming something else, something not Tibetan. But what does a pure Tibetan look or sound like? According to purity advocates, a pure Tibetan is neither genetically mixed nor mixes Tibetan with any other languages. As previously mentioned, the Tibetan vernacular has always been mixed, even the Tibetan alphabet is acknowledged by Tibetan history as having been adopted from the Indian alphabet following Tibet’s adoption of Buddhism from India. The Tibetan language is also diverse, with dialectal differences based on regions and villages that have changed over time. According to Tibetan religious history from prior centuries, Mongolians were not only prominent in our history, but they were also recorded as having settled in different parts of Tibet and intermarried with Tibetans. Neither genetically pure Tibetan, nor a pure version of any spoken Tibetan dialect exists. Rather, Tibetans have always had a heterogeneous culture that acknowledges hybridity—a notion acknowledged in the Tibetan origin story that suggests Tibetans were the result of the copulation between a compassionate monkey and a lustful rock ogress (Gyatso 1989). Hybridity also makes room for recognizing Tibetan histories as diverse, continuous, and moving. Prominent scholars of modernity such as Bruno Latour have argued against the notion of purity as nothing but fictitious constructs of modernity.^[22]However, Tibetans do not need to turn to other philosophical traditions to know this fact. The logic of impermanence in Buddhism argues against the existence of purity in the physical world. Instead, purity is conceptualized as a goal that can be achieved outside the physical world through spiritual enlightenment. 

As previously mentioned, current conversations of purity in the Tibetan community have resulted from lived traumas of the older generation. Such traumas have led to collective efforts towards culture preservation, taking on a homogenous version of Tibetan culture with an aim to secure the future of Tibetans. Yet, the logic of purity demands that the project of culture preservation be enacted in a manner that keeps aspects of Tibetan culture pure. Under such circumstances, aspects of Tibetan traditions are forced to remain static and one-dimensional. This promotes the false notion that Tibetan cultural traditions were never diverse or subject to change. The purity politics in the current moment frames Tibetan cultural traditions prior to the Chinese invasion as pure and monolithic. Thus, culture preservation projects undertaken by Tibetans, following Tibet’s invasion, called for authentic recreation of traditions in exile as a preventative method against foreign culture contamination. Those who enact Tibetan subjectivities different from the prescribed notions are thus accused of mixing and of being inauthentic and impure. 

Tibetans have not been alone in gamut of debate on cultural purity. The genre of salvage anthropology, for example, has long been critiqued for promoting notions of authentic culture through its conceptualization of the term as an unmoving static category. Much of the scholarship generated by anthropologists on Tibetan culture between 1960 and 1980, for instance, followed the salvage anthropology model. For such anthropologists, the project of preserving classic kinship structures of Tibetan society or recording traditional nomadic way of life in the refugee camps of India and Nepal became important projects for preserving the authenticity of Tibetan cultural knowledge before it would become non-existent. They viewed the dilution of such authenticity as inevitable due to Chinese colonization inside Tibet and Tibetan adoption of foreign sensibilities in exile. This view promoted a notion of authentic Tibetan culture that existed only inside Tibet before it became colonized by China. As a result, some scholars of classic Tibetan culture interpreted cultural hybridity taking shape for Tibetans in exile or in colonized Tibet as inauthentic, and in the process, promoted the existence of cultural purity. 

However, such views have not gone unchallenged. For instance, such a view of purity, argues Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith, promotes “a belief that indigenous cultures cannot change, cannot recreate themselves and still claim to be indigenous. Nor can they be complicated, internally diverse or contradictory”.^[23]Change is interpreted as contamination. That is why, decade after decade, Tibetan adoption of any foreign sensibilities are interpreted as impurities threatening Tibetan purity. On the one hand, purity advocates promote the false notion that authentic Tibetanness exists only in the past. According to this logic, Tibetans of the present who fail to re-enact Tibetanness from the past fail to enact authentic versions of their cultural identity. On the other, those who call themselves mixed or T+, which Lhadon Tethong translates as Tibetans of mixed heritage on her Facebook page, as a new identity marker publicly in response to Tibetans who call them not-full-blooded, also inadvertently ignore ongoing histories of Tibetan hybridity and end up promoting the existence of purity. Instead they too, like purity advocates, need to acknowledge the ongoing histories of Tibetan hybridity, an acknowledgement that proves the fallacy of the pure/impure dichotomy.

Rather than a view of Tibetan culture that is static, I propose a view from the Hawaiian scholar Stephanie Nohelani Teves, who writes “I think of tradition like indigeneity, rooted and routed, moving, evolving, and gesturing toward its past and its horizon”.^[24]Such a view recognizes Tibetans and their cultural traditions and histories as fluid and moving. This depiction allows Tibetans of all backgrounds to be seen as subjects continuing to interact with changes, resulting from the Chinese invasion without being assumed to have compromised their Tibetanness. This way of conceptualizing Tibetanness moves away from centering the Chinese invasion as the beginning of the end. Instead, it centers Tibetanness as routed and routed. It recognizes Tibetanness as always having been continuous, both before and after the Chinese invasion. This way, different enactments or performances of Tibetanness no longer have to cater to purity or impurity binaries. “All performances,” argues Teves, “contain both residual and emergent elements… if we see Native identity or indigeneity as containing both residual and emergent elements of ‘the Native,’ Nativeness is immediately made into something this is connected to the past as well as the future… [and is] no longer obsessed with being pure, authentic, or traditional”.^[25]Under such circumstances, Tibetans enjoying The Beatles, rock and roll, Chinese pop, or American hip-hop, do not have to be thought of as having compromised their Tibetanness. Rather, for Tibetans singing in the style of rock and roll or hip-hop about their current circumstances can be thought of as enacting their Tibetanness—a performance that is both residual and emergent. This framing allows the focus of Tibetanness to shift away from mixing and towards the recognition of the diversity and dynamics of Tibetan cultures, histories, and identities. This way, contemporary performances of Tibetanness—through enactments as diverse as hip-hop or narrating shopping at Tibetan shops in New York in English—can be thought of as adding to the dynamic aspects of Tibetanness that continue to thrive and flourish. Rather than define Tibetan identity with narrowed terms dictated by the politics of purity, this approach embraces historical and contemporary multiplicities of Tibetan identities.

The solution lies in aiming for authenticity, without opposing hybridity. Hybridity and authenticity are not mutually exclusive, as some purists mistakenly think. A hybrid approach allows Tibetanness to be in conversation with change or what is new. Doing so allows Tibetan culture and identity to be seen as multiple and continuous, and in the process, discourages static notions. Such an approach also ensures the futurity of Tibetan identities because it allows room for changes that will continue to shape different subjectivities of Tibetans living in different lands and under different conditions as displaced or colonized people without assuming they have compromised their Tibetanness. 

NOTES

1. The name of all study participants are pseudonyms. 
2. Stein, “La Civilisation Tibetaine.” 
3. Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows.
4. Teves, “Tradition and Performance,” 257. 
5. VOA Tibetan Facebook Page, “Mixed Parentage Tibetans and Tibetan Soceity.” 
6. Lhakardiaries, “Shopping in Little Tibet.” 
7. Pema Yoko, “British Tibetan.” 
8. Hill, “The Grammar of Consciousness and the Consciousness of Grammar,” 734. 
9. Ibid, 735
10. Zentella, Growing up Billingual, 54
11. Das, “Between Convergence and Divergence.” 
12. Ibid, 14.
13. Tenzin Choephel, “March 10^thProtest & Performance.”
14. Jacquemet, “Transiomatic Practices.” 
15. Ibid, 263
16. Avedon, In Exile from the Land of Snows.
17. Ibid, 100. 
18. Dalai Lama, Freedom in Exile.
19. Diehl, Echoes from Dharamsala.
20. Lau, “Tibetan Fears and Indian Foes.” 
21. Ibid, 87. 
22. Yeh and Lama, “Hip-hop Gangsta or Most Deserving of Victims,” 809-29. 
23. For more examples, see Diehl, Echoes from Dharamsala; and Yeh, “Hip-hop Gangsta” 
24. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. 
25. See Shakya, “Introduction.”
26. Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 266-67. 
27. Teves, “Tradition and Performance,” 262. 
28. Ibid, 261. 

Bibliography 

Avedon, John. In Exile from the Land of Snows: The Definitive Account of the Dalai Lama and Tibet Since the Chinese Conquest. New York, New York: Perennial, 1998. 

Dalai Lama. Freedom in Exile: The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama. SanFrancisco, California: Harper Collins, 1991.

Das, Sonia Neela. “Between convergence and divergence: Reformatting language purism in the Montreal Tamil diasporas.” Arlington, Virginia:Journal of Linguistic Anthropology18, no. 1. 2008.

Diehl, Keila. Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Hill, Jane H. “The Grammar of Consciousness and the Consciousness of Grammar.” Arlington, Virginia: American Ethnologist12, no. 4. 1985.

Jacquemet, Marco. “Transidiomatic Practices: Language and Power in the Age of Globalization.” Amsterdam, Netherlands: Language & Communication25, no. 3. 2005.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Lau, Timm. “Tibetan Fears and Indian Foes: Fears of Cultural Extinction and Antagonism as Discursive Strategy.” Toronto, Ontario: vis-à-vis: Explorations in Anthropology9, no. 1. 2009.

Lhakar Diaries. 2011. “Shopping in Little Tibet.” YouTube video. Posted [December 2011]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwwQm9aMYKY

Pema Yoko. 2014. “British Tibetan.” YouTube video. Posted [April 2014]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj0QJ80n0ww

Shakya, Tsering. The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet since 1947. New York, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London, United Kingdom: Zed books, 1999.

Stein, Rolf Alfred. “La Civilisation Tibétaine (Paris, 1962).” London, United Kingdom: Engl.: Tibetan Civilization. London, 1972.

Tenzing Choephel. 2010. “March 10^thProtest & Performance (Yes We Can, Free Tibet).” YouTube video. Posted [March 2010]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UArlUhs2I8w

Teves, Stephanie Nohelani. “Tradition and Performance.” Tucson, Arizona: Native Studies Keywords, 2015: 257.

VOA Tibetan Facebook page. 2014. “Mixed Parentage Tibetans and Tibetan Society.” Accessed November 29, 2016. https://www.facebook.com/voatibetan/posts/273740689459772

Yeh, Emily T., and Kunga T. Lama. “Hip-hop Gangsta or Most Deserving of Victims? Transnational migrant identities and the paradox of Tibetan racialization in the USA.” Thousand Oaks, California: Environment and Planning A38, no. 5, 2006.

Zentella, Ana Celia. Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997.

This past weekend I presented the following paper at the 2016 University of Colorado Boulder Department of Anthropology Graduate Student Conference  titled “The Ethnographic Turn.”

As I ponder over the question, “What does it mean to be a responsible scholar? Responsible to whom, when, and why?” I am struck by how easy and difficult this question is for me to answer. Easy because I am a Native scholar doing work with my own community—I know to whom I am responsible and my community’s path towards self-determination is closely tied to my own liberation. Thus, the kinds of work I produce impact my community and myself directly, so the question of who I am responsible to is not a hard one for me to answer. However, working with the community with whom I’m from does not guarantee I will not produce works that Dor Bahadur Bista describes as “an insecure and thoughtless mimicry of the West” (1987:9). In fact, Preym K. Po’Dar and Tanka B. Subba make it clear in Demystifying Some Ethnographic Texts on the Himalayas that Native scholars are not free from producing orientalist discourses (1991). However, scholars who work with communities that they are from, I argue, are more mindful of this critique for they have familial and communal ties that can easily be threatened due to works that may be perceived as harmful to the collective. This also brings up questions of intersectional subjectivities for Native scholars that are tied to their community that make them also susceptible to such works of harm which force them to be less blind to perspectives of privilege. Thus, I do not see myself as having a choice over having responsibility; rather, familial and communal bonds demand that I serve my obligation as a member of this community to produce work that is healing. In this response, I seek to decenter the framing logics of anthropological ethics by asking: what happens when the question of responsibility becomes one of obligation; choice becomes necessity, and crisis exists as an everyday reality?

Episodic                                                    Structural (non-Episodic)

Colonial encounters                              (De)colonization

Resistance                                                Refusal

Outsiders                                                  Community member

Ethics                                                        Obligation

Allyship                                                    Marginality

As Dr. Audra Simpson pointed out yesterday, it’s important not to fall into the delegitimizing trap of justifying Native scholarship on the basis of identity politics and justice alone. This matters, but a deeper reason relates to the way in which Simpson engaged the distinction between resistance and refusal, which she argues, has to do with distinction between event/episode and structure. This cuts to the heart of the question. Anthropologists are encouraged to do the right thing through the logic of ethics, but this presumes we all need encouragement to do this; some of us don’t; we are already doing it. However, like refusal, obligation, necessity, and every day realities, Simpson argues, are the non-episodic qualities that structure the daily lives of Indigenous peoples, researchers or otherwise. By naming refusal, Simpson has not presented a new fashionable anthropological turn (Simpson 2014). While her conceptualization is novel and valuable, the reality of refusal, she argues, is something that Indigenous peoples have experienced throughout the history of colonization. If colonization was an event, then as Simpson points out, resistance would be enough. It’s not (Simpson, Workshop 1: Ethnographic refusal 9/30/2016). As Patrick Wolf notes, colonization was and remains structural (1999). Therefore, modes of decolonization must too be structural. If we truly want to decolonize, we must reimagine legacies of episodic conceptualization as structural—moving away from the resisting colonial encounters by ethical outsiders, toward the refusal of colonial structures by obligated stake holders, for whom non-obligatory ethics loses all meaning.

For guidance, I turn to my attention to Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, a groundbreaking book by Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith—another Indigenous scholar doing work with her own community and a leading theorist on decolonizing methods (1999). Smith problematizes Euro-Western approaches to research that she argues has historically served to essentialize communities and assist those in power in their project to further colonization—a system she terms “colonizing knowledges” (59). In order to avoid this, she proposes research that is decolonial in method. For research to be considered truly decolonial, it must, argues Smith, prioritize Indigenous voices, histories, epistemologies, and their struggles against settler colonialism (129)—in other words, research that orients itself around Indigenous peoples and their thoughts and struggles first and foremost. Such an approach that Smith stresses must be collaborative, and can lead, argues Smith, to “healing of the researched and a wider scope of representation for the voices of the dispossessed, disenfranchised colonized Other in the research process” (255). “The goal,” writes Smith, “is to make them visible and integrate them in the academic discourse and the global knowledge economy” (307). Thus, for me to produce responsible scholarship on the community from whom I’m from, my obligation requires me to produce decolonized work that centers them and their struggles and concerns. It requires Indigenous scholars such as myself, argues Smith, to be ethical, critical, respectful, reflexive, and most of all, humble so that they may hear members of their community when they are speaking (1999:139).

In 2012, the number of Tibetans who chose to self-immolation in Tibet began to increase at an alarming rate. Although the first Tibetan to set himself afire to protest in Tibet took place in 2009, following the largest uprising ever recorded across the three provinces of Tibet, the number of Tibetans self-immolating jumped at an alarming rate from one in 2009, to fourteen in 2011, to eighty-six in 2012. There were one or two self-immolations taking place almost every week during the winter of 2012. If one understands self-immolation as episodic, it takes away its deeper relationship with settler colonialism—which is not episodic. Tibetans across the world had been reacting emotionally in unison to this act because this is the physical manifestation of their every day life and history. Tibetans organized at all levels to amplify the voices of the self-immolators so that their protests were seen and heard inside and outside Tibet. During this time, scholars of Tibet and Himalayas stepped forward to take scholarly responsibility to address the misrepresentation of self-immolations of Tibetans in the media. On April 9, 2012 Carole McGranahan and Ralph Litzinger edited a series of essays on the self-immolations titled Self-Immolation as Protest in Tibet on Cultural Anthropology (McGranahan and Litzinger, 2012). Months later, Katia Buffetrille and Francoise Robin edited Tibet is Burning on Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines on December 14, 2012 (Buffetrille and Robin, 2012). I consider these works to be decolonial because they tried to strengthen the voices of the self-immolators by giving their actions socio-economic, religious-political, and historical context—trying to, in Smiths words, “make them visible and integrate them in the academic discourse and the global knowledge economy.” Rather than take an objective stance, scholars came together to use learned knowledges from their subjects to engage larger conversations that contextualized individual self-immolators and their protest as the act took place. This was scholarship that drew on knowledges of the Indigenous pasts to make sense of their individual presents, especially during moments in which the baseline daily structural violence manifested in ways that was read internationally as episodic human tragedy. But where does my work as a Native scholar fit into all this?

In Cheryl Suzack and Shari M. Huhndorf’s Indigenous Feminism: Theorizing the Issue, authors make the argument that for any work to be considered decolonized, such works need to first center settler colonialism (2010:16). As the number of self-immolation in Tibet began to slowly rise in 2011, I began addressing individual self-immolators by intentionally placing them within the discourse of Chinese settler colonial state on Lhakar Diaries, a blog I run with other Tibetans to serve as a platform for Tibetan thought by us for us (Lokyitsang, 2011). However, the alarming rise in numbers in 2012 put me in a constant state of anxiety—especially when I felt so far away from friend and family who were engaged in practices of commemoration and solidarity. I made every effort to bring up self-immolations as they took place in every space I was engaged in. On April 11, 2012, I was invited by a friend to give a special talk on the self-immolations, as these acts were virtually unknown to my university. I felt obligated in the positive generative sense to amplify their calls to action. Following the talk, I wrote another post on Lhakar Diaries giving an outline of the talk I had given for others interested in doing similar talks for public awareness (Lokyitsang, 2012).

In all these posts and talks, I situated individual self-immolators against the backdrop of the Chinese settler colonial state. In Indigenous Feminism: The Project, Hilden and Lee argue that to decolonize, one needs to “reclaim, reread, and rearticulate” Indigenous peoples from the past and the present, whose voices, they argue, are always being misrepresented and/or erased (2010:74). I published the essay Their Burning Bodies Told Histories Never Forgotten (which I recently discovered was heavily plagiarized by someone doing a dissertation on the subject at the University of Sussex) on on December 18, 2013 (Lokyitsang, 2013). The essay was my attempt to write against colonizing narratives on the self-immolations by the Chinese state, as well as to speak with rather than for the self-immolators. Aside from few scholars, which include McGranahan, most reports on the self-immolation in scholarship and media up until then had mostly concerned itself with just the act, and very little attention had been paid to whom the self-immolators were speaking, and the structures that they were speaking about. That article was my attempt to write about the self-immolators and the audiences they were speaking to. It was my attempt to “reclaim, rewrite, and rearticulate” self-immolators and their multiple audiences. In this way, I was able to begin the process of “healing of the researched,” myself included.

The reason I go through this timeline is to demonstrate how my role as a Native scholar requires me to always address present circumstances of the Tibetan community at all times. The position of colonized, refuged, or exiled Tibetan suggests a positioning of crisis that isn’t episodic, but an everyday structural affair. I consider the historical approach I have adopted over the course of my progression as a scholar to be a method to decolonize. It is a method that has helped me center the voices and subjectivities of Tibetans in the present using their memories of the past—a method many Indigenous scholars stress. It also allows me to engage Tibetan pasts in order to make sense of Tibetan presents, so that we may collectively engage in imagining Tibetan futures—an engagement that Grace Dillon (2012) argue preoccupies itself with the project of healing. For my work to be truly decolonizing, it must engage the concerns of my community at all times because it engages the futures of not just myself, but my family and thus, my community. Decolonized works suggests pathways towards individual and communal healing. This is how I view my obligation as a Native scholar doing work with my own community.

In considering yesterday’s discussion of critiques against the dehumanizing Ontological turn; I invite researchers to consider a structurally decolonizing praxis. This would not only involve theories and methods generated by community members with whom you work, it would also employ the genealogy of works produced by Indigenous scholars over the last forty years. The contributions made by such scholars often remain inaccessible in our disciplines, yet they offer ways of approaching questions regarding ethics and responsibility that anthropology often considers important. Having spent the weekend engaging refusal, we might ask a larger disciplinary question beyond the level of the individual; what happens when anthropological ethics become disciplinary obligations embedded into the ethnographic process itself, to refuse the everyday structures of ever-present colonization?

Works Cited:

Bista, Dor Bahadur. 1987. Nepal school of sociology/anthropology.

Buffetrille, Katia and Robin, Francoise. 2012. Tibet is Burning. Self-immolation: Ritual or Political Protest? Special issue of Review d’etudes Tibétaines, 25, 1-212.

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Cambridge City Hall

The three tiers of my integration into the ‘America’ of Cambridge, MA. The three black women (among many) in my life who became influential in my development as a person.

Joy,
When I think of Joy, I think of her smile. She was warm. I don’t remember exactly how we met. But I remember it was in 5th grade. I had been introduced by the homeroom teacher as the new student who had just moved to Cambridge with her family from India. Days, weeks, or who knows maybe months had passed, but in between those days, Joy and I had several classroom exchanges. And each time we interacted, she was gentle and warm, perhaps sensing my new-kid awkwardness anxieties. From what I remember, she was well-liked by most of my classmates particularly cause of her warmth. But she was also spunky and cute. Her not-to-be-taken-for-granted attitude won her many fans, I was one of them. I had a friend crush on Joy from afar. But it wasn’t till Erin moved from King Open to Peabody that Joy and I became closer.

Erin,
I don’t remember how it started, but I remember Erin being introduced to the rest of us in class as the new transfer student from King Open. Instantly, she was a hit. She was open, talkative, and kind. Within days, her and Joy were inseparable. Somehow, one day, Erin suddenly began talking to me and she never stopped. I don’t know how, but all of a sudden it was Erin, Joy and me. Hanging out everyday. The three of us were doing homework either at Joys’ or Erins’ while BET and MTV blasted from the television in the back. This was when mid-90s hip hop scene was blowing up. In these jam sessions, Joy and Erin introduced me to rap, hip-hop, r&b and dancehall. But it was through dancing that we connected the most. All three of us were obsessed with dancing. Joy belonged to the dance group Jamnastics, and they would perform at different venues around Cambridge. She was always teaching us new dance moves because we were fast learners. It was actually through Joy I discovered the world of hip hop dancing (I joined Jamnastics later). Dancing has brought me joy since the beginning of time, and it was Joy who first introduced me to the dance scene in Cambridge. Now I am forever a fan of hip hop and dancehall thanks to Joy and Erin.

Tatiana,
It was a friendship that began at a summer tennis camp at thirteen at MIT (from which I was kicked out for calling a Chinese counselor a bitch). We became thick as thieves and sneaked out to basement parties in Boston during High School. Tatiana was there when I got into my first fist fight at Rindge (Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School). She threw down when I was attacked by two racist white chicks who had fought me the previous day on the basis of my race. Joy heard about it later and went after the same girls. Although Erin wasn’t at the same High School, somehow she had also heard. She called me up to find out if I was ok, and was satisfied with Joy’s retaliation. I had not told either about the incident, but there they were, all three, making sure they had my back. I remember thinking how lucky I was to have such friendships.

Tatiana was nurturing, accepting, and patient, even when I was being a narcissistic teenager. She accepted me for all that I was and encouraged me to be more. But what we connected on most was our sense of humor. We loved finding humor in everything and our favorite thing to do together was laughing. In Tatiana, I found my twin. She and I could read each others mind like no other. We always knew we were on the same page. No explanations needed. Just love.

Joy, Erin, and Tatiana
These three girls, now women, were influential in the ways in which I related to the world that was Cambridge. A microscopic spec of what the United States hoped it was (a fading image now in Trump America where the increasing wealth gap shapes the contours of a neighborhood). The Cambridge of mid-90s to early 2000s was multi-cultural, multi-racial, and multi-lingual, but it was also highly racial. To my 10-yr-old Dharamsala sensibilities, I hadn’t a clue. But these three were there, each step of the way. Teaching me and helping me navigate a highly racialized world. I realize now that they had subtly been teaching me about race, racism, class, gender, and ways of belonging all along. In return, I taught them about Tibet. Anytime anyone mistook me for Chinese in front of them, they’d correct the other that I am Tibetan not Chinese. My understanding, knowledge, and praxis surrounding race, class, and gender in America has highly been influenced by each of them. These early introductions would encourage a life-time of learning from and understanding Black history and the history of movements in the United States. And I’ve learned over time, how crucial these lessons have been in shaping my understanding of racialized developments for Tibetans in China-Colonized Tibet, and the trials and tribulations of revolutionary movements more broadly when imagining sovereign Tibetan futures.

My childhood social landscape was filled with black and white children, with a handful of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese students. As a Tibetan, I couldn’t figure out where I belonged. But for Joy, Erin, and Tatiana, it was easy. I belonged with them. And through their nurturing friendships a multi-racial Cambridge steeped in black history and culture became home.

I’m forgetful with dates and don’t remember anyone’s birth dates, but I remember Joy’s thanks to her family-filled cook-out birthday invites. Her birthday is on the 4th of July, the date that marks the “birth” of (the settler state) America. I’m still trying to figure out whether that’s just a coincidence. Whenever and where-ever “Independence” day is marked on the 4th of July, I think about and celebrate Joy.