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Description:
This dissertation examines the construction of Tibetan identity within the context of global politics, taking a look particularly at globally circulating ideas such as democracy, human rights, women's issues, and environmentalism. The author argues that modern Tibetan identity is inseparable from this global context, that it is a product of what Jonathan Friedman calls global process. Despite their marginalization from mainstream global politics, Tibetans, numbering an estimated 121,000 worldwide, present a viable and relatively cohesive political force in the international arena, building, within the past seven years, a support network at both the political and grass roots levels. The author starts with the question of why the Tibetan cause has gained such popular recognition. She discusses ideological compatibilities between Tibetan philosophical and religious traditions and the Western discourses of democracy that make a tenable global Tibetan identity. But she also looks at the disjunctures with Tibetan political and historical traditions, as evidenced in some of the ethnographic data she collected while in India, pointing to the ideological constitution of this identity. Through examining the case of the creation of a global Tibetan identity, she also takes a critical look at the concept of identity. The author problematizes the idea of Tibetan identity, particularly as it is typically associated with being national (political) and Buddhist in nature in popular, essentializing Western constructs of Tibetan identity. She suggests that we can better understand the global Tibetan identity if it is viewed, as Friedman suggests, as practice, and simultaneously as ideology, in Geertz's sense. In addition to its contribution to Tibetan refugee studies and studies of identity, the dissertation contributes to scholarship on refugee and immigrant political movements, transnational relationships, and globalization and global process. (author's abstract)
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