“The truth of what’s happening” How Tibetan exile media develop and maintain journalistic authority

Tibet is one of the most restrictive places in the world for press freedom, with information online and offline tightly controlled and censored by the Chinese government. Foreign correspondents are restricted from travelling to and reporting in Tibetan areas, while Tibetans who act as sources are often persecuted. Despite this level of repression, Tibetans still find ways to tell the rest of the world what is happening in Tibet. This paper explores how it is possible to authoritatively report on events in one of the world’s most restrictive places for press freedom. Instead of relying on a single individual or news organisation, we find that reporting is conducted through journalistic networks consisting of sources in Tibet, Tibetan exile journalists, and source intermediaries called ‘communicators’. Based on fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with Tibetan journalists and communicators we explore how they develop and maintain journalistic authority, while being in exile and having to deal with severe constraints to press freedom.

“NOT IMPORTANT” : an analysis of the Tibet photo service medium format negatives at the Tibet Museum

This thesis approaches a body of 1,428 6x6 cm gelatin silver acetate negatives in the Tibet Museum’s photographic archives in Dharamsala, India. This material, labelled “not important” by an archivist at their collecting institution, contains images of the Tibetan community in exile, made by the Tibet Photo Service (TPS) studio between 1962 and 1987. The practical component of this project involves arranging and rehousing the negatives for accessibility and preservation purposes. The theoretical component of this project provides a contextual framework for the TPS medium format negatives, unpacking the reasons behind their exclusion from care and display. Additionally, it engages the negatives as sites of “articulation and aspiration” of the Tibetan exile community. The objects and their images are recontextualized from material that is “not important” to social and political documents that serve as a subjective historical record of the foundational years of the Tibetan community in India.

“NOT IMPORTANT” : an analysis of the Tibet photo service medium format negatives at the Tibet Museum

This thesis approaches a body of 1,428 6x6 cm gelatin silver acetate negatives in the Tibet Museum’s photographic archives in Dharamsala, India. This material, labelled “not important” by an archivist at their collecting institution, contains images of the Tibetan community in exile, made by the Tibet Photo Service (TPS) studio between 1962 and 1987. The practical component of this project involves arranging and rehousing the negatives for accessibility and preservation purposes. The theoretical component of this project provides a contextual framework for the TPS medium format negatives, unpacking the reasons behind their exclusion from care and display. Additionally, it engages the negatives as sites of “articulation and aspiration” of the Tibetan exile community. The objects and their images are recontextualized from material that is “not important” to social and political documents that serve as a subjective historical record of the foundational years of the Tibetan community in India.

Thinking through complex webs of potency

The epidemic of COVID-19 caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been in the headlines since December 2019. This Think Piece presents ethnographic vignettes from a recent (February 2020) field visit to Dharamsala, where the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and a Tibetan exile community reside in the northwestern Indian Himalayas. At that time there were no COVID-19 cases in India except in Kerala, South India, which had three confirmed cases. There were no cases in Tibetan communities in India, but they were considered vulnerable because of the influx of Buddhist pilgrims from China. My ethnographic focus is on traditional Tibetan medical responses of prevention and conceptions of contagion prior to any outbreak. I explore what counts as prevention, protection, and contagion in a Tibetan medical public outreach context during pre-epidemic days, and how politics and fear of ‘the other’ merge with the preventive aspects of traditional medicinal products and public health announcements in Dharamsala. Taken together, these ethnographic vignettes illustrate how local epidemic imaginaries draw on complex webs of potency. These combine, for example, substances and their smells with mantras, protective oils, and facemasks in varied ways, all in an effort to reduce anxiety and prevent contagion.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the author’s fieldwork and the focus of the book: using narrative approaches to understand and represent exile. The chapter reviews the progress narrative work has made in the discipline of psychology and how it provides a useful approach to the study of exile for reasons that are theoretical, methodological, and rhetorical. The author sketches the history of the Tibetan exile and explains how it provides a useful site to investigate the issues that are at the heart of the book, including the transmission of stories, and traumas, over time. Finally, the author introduces the informants who feature significantly in the book.

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

This ethnographic study of trauma and resilience among Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala, India explores how Buddhist practices like lojong (mind-training) bolster resilience, and why foreign practices of psychotherapy have largely been rejected.

Seeking Dhasa; Finding Lhasa: Liminality and Narrative in the Tibetan Refugee Capital of Dharamsala

This article explores the role of narrative and narrativity in stabilising identity in an exile setting, read here as a way to avert what Bjørn Thomassen calls the ‘danger’ inherent to liminality. It does this by analysing the shape and visualscape of the little Himalayan town of Dharamsala, which serves as the secular and religious ‘capital’ of Tibetan exile. It attempts to decode the narratives which allow ‘Dhasa’, as Dharamsala is colloquially known, to cohere and correspond to its metonymically aspirational other – Lhasa, the capital of old Tibet. There can be read in this act of assonant naming the beginnings of a narrative geared towards generating nostalgia for a lost homeland, alluding to the possibility of its reclamation and restitution in exile. This article explores how this narrative is evidence of the fact that it is in indeterminacy; in liminality in other words, that the ‘structuration’ that Thomassen proposes, becomes possible at all. Even as it alludes to the impossibility of transplanting cultures whole, the article also examines closely the Foucauldian notion of ‘trace residue’ inherent to ruptures in prior epistemes, treating this idea as central to creating new-‘old’ orientations for this refugee community in exile. Following Thomassen and Szakolczai, liminality is here treated as a concept applicable to time as well as place; individuals as well as communities, and social ‘events’ or changes of immense magnitude. It is this notion of liminality that the article proposes has to be a central concept in any exploration of exile groups which have to live in the spaces between the shorn identity markers of the past – rooted as these must be in a lost homeland – and the present, where they must be iterated or man-ufactured anew.