Exile meets homeland: politics, performance, and authenticity in the Tibetan diaspora

Tibetans are often imagined as authentic, pure, and geographically undifferentiated, but Tibetan identity formation is, in fact, varied and deeply inflected by national location and transnational trajectories. In this paper I examine the frictions of encounter between three groups of Tibetans who arrived in the USA around the same time, but who differ in their relationships to the homeland. The numerically dominant group consists of refugees who left Tibet in 1959 and of exiles born in South Asia; second are Tibetans who left Tibet after the 1980s for India and Nepal; and third are those whose routes have taken them from Tibet directly to the United States. Whereas the cultural authority claimed by long-term exiles derives from the notion of preserving tradition outside of Tibet, that of Tibetans from Tibet is based on their embodied knowledge of the actual place of the homeland. Their struggles over authenticity, which play out in everyday practices such as language use and embodied reactions to staged performances of `traditional culture', call for an understanding of diaspora without guarantees. In this paper I use habitus as an analytic for exploring the ways in which identity is inscribed on and read off of bodies, and the political stakes of everyday practices that produce fractures and fault lines. DOI:10.1068/d2805 (1) `rGya-dmar Jagtshogs' (lyrics in Tibetan, my translation) Courage (snying-stobs) 2002, track 9, mp3.com, San Diego, CA. have already been made to suffer for his actions; one brother was jailed for six years. When I met his elderly mother in Tibet, she pleaded, ``please, tell him not to come back for another couple of years at least'' even though she longed to see her son after a separation of more than a decade. The family's experience is both tragic and exemplary of the type of political repression to which the transnational Tibet Movement has called attention. The fact that he is a political refugee, together with his dedication to improving conditions in Tibet, suggest that Tenzin should be a poster child for the Tibet Movement, held out by the community as a model for others. Why, then, has he instead been suspected and accused (more than once) of being a spy for China? Significantly, Tenzin is one of the very few Tibetans in the area to have spent a good part of his life in Tibet, rather than in India or Nepal. To at least a few Tibetans from India, the fact that he is from Tibet, is very active in the local organization, and has at times refused to have his photograph posted on community websites is `proof ' enough that he is a spy. More generally, his strong ties to the homeland, and the way the homeland is inscribed on his body, make him the object of derision and suspicion. Migrants' stories have theoretical power beyond their own uniqueness (Lawson, 2000). Tenzin's story alerts us to some of the political and cultural contradictions of the Tibetan diaspora which emerge around the issues of migrants' roots and routes. Like other groups of transnational immigrants, Tibetans in the USA `̀ forge and sustain multistranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement'' (Basch et al, 1994, page 6). Yet the structure of Tibetan immigration to the USA is such that the `society of origin' to which the vast majority of Tibetans have immediate ties is in South Asia, not in Tibet. Tibetan immigrants in the USA can be divided into three groups vis-a© -vis their embodied experience of Tibet and their immediate society of origin. First, the largest group is comprised of those who either left Tibet in 1959 or were born in South Asian refugee communities: for convenience, I refer to them here as èxile Tibetans'. Second, a smaller number, who I refer to as `new arrivals', were born and raised in Tibet, but left for India or Nepal in the 1980s and 1990s. Third, the smallest group are those whose routes have taken them directly from Tibet to the United States; I call them `Tibetans from Tibet'.(2) In this paper I examine struggles over the authenticity of everyday embodied practices as well as of staged performances of `Tibetan culture', which fracture the imagined unity of a seamless diasporic community. Marked as `Tibetan' in distinct ways by the varied national locations through which they have traveled, Tibetans also draw on different strategies for establishing their authority to speak as Tibetan. Tibetans from Tibet draw on the embodied knowledge and experience of homeland, whereas èxile Tibetans' seek to recenter authentic Tibet-ness away from the physical territory of the homeland and toward other geographical spacesöparticularly Dharamsala. Exile Tibetans are numerically dominant in the USA, and it is their views that set the discursive terrain. However, their authority is challenged by the Tibetans from Tibet whom they encounter. The project of recentering the locus of authenticity is thus unstable, and requires an enormous amount of everyday cultural work. (2) This categorization of Tibetans vis-a© -vis their route of migration to the USA is not meant to be absolute. For example, neither exiles from India who have spent years in Taiwan, nor Tibetans who have returned from India to Tibet (both of which are beyond the scope of this paper), fit neatly into these categories. However, the larger point about different sites of subject formation and the importance of routes still holds true in these cases as well. Politics, performance, and authenticity in the Tibetan diaspora 649