INTERPRETING THE TIBETAN DIASPORA: CULTURAL PRESERVATION AND THE PRAGMATICS OF IDENTITY
INTERPRETING THE TIBETAN DIASPORA: CULTURAL PRESERVATION AND THE PRAGMATICS OF IDENTITY

Summary/Abstract: Nearly all accounts of Tibetans in exile acknowledge the remarkable extent to which they have been able to maintain their culture against all odds. They were premised on the idea that exile and identity was only worth studying insofar as it contained traces of “how things were in the past”, and proof of how well that past has been preserved. The result of this approach to refugee studies has been the tendency to neglect the variety of strategies displayed by Tibetans with regard to “place-making”. Without making any definitive claims about the prevalence of a distinctly “Darjeeling Tibetan exile culture”, this ethnographic study of Tibetan refugees in Darjeeling town, India shows how the experience of movement to and from a “place” – Darjeeling town reconstitutes the idea that Tibetan refugees have of their relation to a specific “place” in the diaspora; of how this sense of “place” in the diaspora gives meaning and purpose to refugee lives.

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