Tibetan Refugee Community Research Articles

Identity, memory, and homeland: in conversation with Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, a Tibetan author and poet in exile

AbstractThe annexation of Tibet into the People's Republic of China in the 1950s led to an exodus of nearly 80,000 Tibetans along with the fourteenth Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso. Since then, thousands of Tibetans have taken refuge in the neighboring countries. Many live as refugees in different parts of the world today. Although the Tibetan refugee community has emerged as a successful model for other displaced communities, the individual struggles of these refugees in foreign lands cannot be underestimated. Dhompa's book A Home in Tibet shines a light on this other side of their exilic existence by raising questions about identity, home, country, and memory. It outlines the hardships, confusion, and contestations that Tibetans face on a daily basis. After a short introduction to provide context, this article reports a conversation with Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, which grippingly addresses these issues.

Continuity and changes in food consumption pattern among Tibetan refugee community in India

Background: Food consumption pattern of refugee communities was carried by many scholars but little is known about the food continuity of refugees in host country and its implications on health. Aim: The present study highlights the issue of food continuity among Tibetan refugees in Bylakuppe settlement, India. Methods: 200 household data were collected in order to understand food consumption pattern by employing household structured questionnaire. Simultaneously, 23 individual data were collected consisting first migrants (15) and second generation (8) for qualitative study. Results: Households derive energy mainly from carbohydrates and animal fats and there is a high prevalence of food insecurity among Tibetan community. Conclusions: It is proven fact that food insecurity will have serious health consequences in terms of emotional and mental well-being and suggest that further study of food insecurity is warranted among Tibetan refugees across world.

Re-Examining Death: Doors to Resilience and Wellbeing in Tibetan Buddhist Practice

This paper explores how conceptions of death and the ways in which such conceptions shape responses to death determine ways of living as well as valued approaches to dying. The paper posits the question: can a fundamental understanding of death contribute to the development of adaptive social traits that lead to more sustainable phenomenological experiences of happiness and flourishing? Employing an anthropological lens, this work starts from the initial inquiry of “what is death?” by looking at cross-cultural historical and theoretical accounts of death and comparing the modern (medicalized) death to the Tibetan Buddhist notion of death. It examines how the practice of a “medicalized death” has shaped the understanding of contemporary death and the ways in which dying is approached. It employs the hermeneutic of a biopsychosociospiritual death to gain a holistic understanding of human mortality. This analysis, based on an 18-month ethnographic study among a Tibetan refugee community in southern India, explores the conception of death for this community using biological and cultural lenses. Moreover, it presents conceptions of death in Tibetan Buddhist culture, paying particular attention to how death is employed as an adaptive cultural tool in pursuance of positive behavioral changes and happiness at both individual and societal levels. In doing so, the paper presents both the theoretical conception of death and dying as well as its role in animating Buddhist cultural values and beliefs. Importantly, it presents a general landscape of Tibetan Buddhist cultural models that facilitate multiple ways of dying that are specifically dependent on an individual’s familiarity with practices related to death and dying and his or her own level of engaging such spiritual practices.

Viewing embeddedness and ethnic-solidarity in economics of exchange: reflections from economic and cultural practices of tibetan community in India

ABSTRACT Karl Polanyi argues that the discipline of economics has emerged from the observations of human beings and their practices existing in a society. Since humans are perceived primarily as social beings rather than economic ones, embeddedness is a necessary and basic condition of the economy. This paper is an attempt to observe study and understand the inter-sectional application of these concepts of embeddedness and ethnic solidarity, in the socio-economic context of the Tibetan refugee community residing in India. Our study’s fieldwork was focused on observing the functioning of the local Tibetan economy in Mcleodganj (Dharamshala), where two Tibetan knowledge systems: the Thangka art and the Tibetan healing system were closely studied, reflecting Tibetan culture, and the community’s effort to preserve and promote these knowledge systems in different economic forms.

Same Language, Different Histories: Developing a “Critical” English Teacher Identity

ABSTRACTOur paper contends that growing awareness of the historicity of English lies at the heart of the process by which English language teachers develop “critical” identities. We compare novice teachers in three different contexts of English teaching: urban Guatemala, rural Nicaragua, and a Tibetan refugee community in India. Collectively, these ethnographic case studies illustrate the complexity of English teacher identity formation in contemporary global society, as our participants developed new understandings of their positions in history, their relationships with English learners, and the local meanings around English as symbolic capital.

Trauma and the Making of Flexible Minds in the Tibetan Exile Community

AbstractMental health in the Tibetan refugee community has been studied extensively, but like most research on political violence, these studies focus almost exclusively on trauma. Studies suggest this exile community seems to be unusually resilient; but from where does this capacity to thrive stem? On the basis of ethnographic research in Dharamsala, India, conducted over 14 months, this article demonstrates how Tibetans conceive of resilience as a learned and active process of making the mind more “spacious” and “flexible.” Drawing on extended participant observation and in‐depth interviews with 80 Tibetan refugees, this work explores why negative emotions associated with trauma exposure are considered toxic and how many Tibetans exposed to political violence engage in a Buddhist practice known as “mind training” (lojong in Tibetan) to abate its harmful effects. Attending to culturally sanctioned responses to political violence and displacement, this study challenges the notion that trauma is a universal experience.

Arrested histories: Tibet, the CIA and memories of a forgotten war

In the 1950s, thousands of ordinary Tibetans rose up to defend their country and religion against Chinese troops. Their citizen army fought through 1974 with covert support from the Tibetan exile government and the governments of India, Nepal, and the United States. Decades later, the story of this resistance is only beginning to be told and has not yet entered the annals of Tibetan national history. In Arrested Histories , the anthropologist and historian Carole McGranahan shows how and why histories of this resistance army are “arrested” and explains the ensuing repercussions for the Tibetan refugee community. Drawing on rich ethnographic and historical research, McGranahan tells the story of the Tibetan resistance and the social processes through which this history is made and unmade, and lived and forgotten in the present. Fulfillment of veterans’ desire for recognition hinges on the Dalai Lama and “historical arrest,” a practice in which the telling of certain pasts is suspended until an undetermined time in the future. In this analysis, struggles over history emerge as a profound pain of belonging. Tibetan cultural politics, regional identities, and religious commitments cannot be disentangled from imperial histories, contemporary geopolitics, and romanticized representations of Tibet. Moving deftly from armed struggle to nonviolent hunger strikes, and from diplomatic offices to refugee camps, Arrested Histories provides powerful insights into the stakes of political engagement and the cultural contradictions of everyday life.

Using clinical audit to improve the quality of obstetric care at the Tibetan Delek Hospital in North India: a longitudinal study.

BackgroundThe Tibetan Delek Hospital is a small general hospital providing primary and secondary care for the Tibetan refugee community and the local Indian population in Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, North India. In a baseline clinical audit of intrapartum care at the Tibetan Delek Hospital in 1996, high levels of postpartum haemorrhage associated with poor medical management of the third stage of labour, plus inappropriate transfer of women in labour were observed. These audit findings prompted the implementation of changes in the delivery of intrapartum care and follow-up audit cycles to monitor the ongoing effect of these changes.MethodsThe delivery of intrapartum care was modified in two ways. Firstly, nurses, midwives, and doctors were re-trained in the active management of the third stage of labour, which involved the administration of intramuscular syntocinon plus ergometrine with delivery of the anterior shoulder. Secondly partograms were introduced to help rationalise the management of labour, and in particular decisions about when to transfer women in labour. Follow up audits were conducted in 1997, 1998, and 2003 to quantify the effects of these changes. The key measures for improvement included the documented incidence of postpartum haemorrhage and the number of women transferred inappropriately for failure to progress in labour.ResultsA sustained reduction of approximately 50% in the incidence of postpartum haemorrhage was observed after the introduction of active management of the third stage of labour. The introduction of the routine use of partograms was associated with a more rational decision-making process regarding transfer during labour.ConclusionIntroducing and maintaining a clinical audit cycle can lead to improvements in the quality of obstetric care in a refugee population.

Tibetan Folk Opera: Lhamo in Contemporary Cultural Politics

Lhamo, the popular folk opera of Tibet is a genre in which the contested politics of the Tibetan diaspora and the People's Republic of China are displayed. This essay notes the practice of the art by the Tibetan refugee community in India and beyond, where it evokes nostalgia for a lost existence and the struggle for a return to the Tibetan Buddhist homeland. Meanwhile the art has been redeveloped in the People's Republic of China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution and used to support Chinese claims to Tibet. Lhamo presents a case study of a particular art and how it can be articulated to different political and economic ends.

The Problem with ‘Rich Refugees’ Sponsorship, Capital, and the Informal Economy of Tibetan Refugees

This article examines issues pertaining to the growth of ‘informal’ economic exchanges and relationships of patronage in the Tibetan refugee community of Dharamsala (H-P), India. I firstly review the theoretical and methodological challenges posed by investigations of Tibetan refugee modernity, then focus on one particular form of exchange in the informal economy of exiles: rogs ram, or the sponsorship of Tibetans by foreigners. The article argues that symbolic capital comes to play a particularly important role in communities where economic capital is scarce, acting in fact as a proviso to economic capital. The highly unstable character of symbolic capital means that, for Tibetan refugees as for other communities, its conversion into economic capital is arduous and engenders a tense field of negotiations between sponsors and beneficiaries.

Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community, by Keila Diehl.

Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community, by Keila Diehl.

Review: Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community

Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community Keila Diehl xxv + 312 University of California Press Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London 2002 £13.95 0‐520‐23044‐2

Echos from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community (review)

Echos from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community (review)

Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community

Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of. Tibetan Refugee Community. Keila Diehl. University of California Press, 2002. ix. 312 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.

Echoes from Dharamsala: music in the life of a Tibetan refugee community

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Preface Note to the Reader Introduction: Theory at Home and in the Field 1. Dharamsala: A Resting Place to Pass Through 2. There Is a Tension in Our Hearts: Constructing the Rich Cultural Heritage of Tibet 3. Taking Refuge in (and from) India: Film Songs, Angry Mobs, and Other Exilic Pleasures and Fears 4. West as Surrogate Shangri-La: Rock and Roll and Rangzen as Style and Ideology 5. The Nail That Sticks Up Gets Hammered Down: Making Modern Tibetan Music 6. Little Jolmo Bird in the Willow Grove: Crafting Tibetan Song Lyrics 7. A Peek Through Ragged Tent Flaps and Heaven's Door: Concerts that Rupture and Bond Conclusion: Cycles, Echoes, and Their Implications Notes Glossary Bibliography Index

Institutional development in practice: A case-study from the Tibetan refugee community

There is growing interest in organisational and institutional development, or capacity-building, but little understanding of what these involve in practice. This article provides a case-study of a successful long-term programme of institutional development, which built the capacities of the Tibetan refugee community in development planning. The primary focus is on key features for adaptation by development practitioners. The authors also clarify some of the confusions in the debate on organisational and institutional development.