Tibetan Transitions

Download or read book Tibetan Transitions written by Geoff Childs and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-07-25 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tibetan Transitions uses the dual lenses of anthropology and demography to analyze population regulating mechanisms in traditional Tibetan societies, and to link recent fertility transitions with family systems, economic strategies, gender equity, and family planning ideologies.

Download or read book Tourism and Tibetan Culture in Transition written by Ashild Kolas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-09-12 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the relationship between tourism, culture and ethnic identity in Tibet in , focusing in particular on Shangrila, a Tibetan region in Southwest China, to show how local ‘Tibetan culture’ is reconstructed as a marketable commodity for tourists. It analyses the socio-economic effects of Shangrila tourism in Tibet, investigating who benefits economically, whilest also considering its political implications and the ways in which tourism might be linked to the negotiation and reassertion of ethnic identity. It goes on to examine the spatial re-imagining provoked by the development of tourism, and asks whether a tourist destination inevitably becomes a ‘pseudo-community’ for the visited. Can a fictitious name, invented for the sake of tourists, still provide the ‘natives’ of a place with a sense of identity? This book argues that conceptions of place are closely linked to notions of social identity, and in the case of Shangrila particularly to ethnic identity. Viewing the spatial as socially constructed, and place-making as vital to social organisation, this is a study of how place is constructed and contested. It describes how local villagers and monastic elites have negotiated the area’s religious geography, how agents of the Communist state have redefined it as a minority area, and how tourism developers are now marketing the region as Shangrila for tourist consumption. It outlines the different ‘place-making’ strategies utilised by the various social actors, including local villagers to create the communities in which they live, monastic elites to invent a Buddhist Tibetan realm of ‘religious geography’, agents of the People’s Republic of China to define the area as part of the communist state, and tourism developers to market the region as ‘Shangrila’ for tourist consumption. Overall, this book is an insightful account of the complex links between tourism, culture and Tibetanethnic identity in Tibet, and will be of interest to a wide range of disciplines including social anthropology, sociology, human geography, tourism and development studies.

Download or read book Tawang, Monpas and Tibetan Buddhism in Transition written by M. Mayilvaganan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents various facets of border life in the strategic eastern sector of the India-China frontier, i.e. the Monpas of Tawang. It addresses the history of the Monpas’ transnational cultural and religious interaction. The respective chapters cover diverse topics such as culture, religion, the environment, border management, and social activism. The book offers a compelling analysis of Mon identity, their lifestyles in transition, and the reach of development politics in the Tawang borderland. It maximizes the reader's insights into development works in borderlands. This book is an essential guide for students, scholars, activists, policy makers, and anyone interested in learning about this unique geographical borderland of Monpa.

Download or read book Amdo Tibetans in Transition written by International Association for Tibetan Studies. Seminar and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates Tibetan recovery from the devastation of High Socialism and a new engagement with attempts to modernize the region in the era of 'reform and opening' in post-Mao China. A unique introduction to contemporary life and attitudes in north-eastern Tibet, invaluable for understanding modern Tibetan life in China today, how it developed, and what it is rapidly becoming.

Download or read book The Disempowered Development of Tibet in China written by Andrew Martin Fischer and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-12-20 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Series: Studies in Modern Tibetan Culture, Lexington Books Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University Since the central government of China started major campaigns for western development in the mid-1990s, the economies of the Tibetan areas in Western China have grown rapidly and living standards have improved. However, grievances and protests have also intensified, as dramatically evidenced by the protests that spread across most Tibetan areas in spring 2008 and by the more recent wave of self-immolation protests that started in 2011. This book offers a detailed and careful exploration of this synergy between development and conflict in Tibet from the mid-1990s onwards, when rapid economic growth has occurred in tandem with a particularly assimilationist approach of integrating Tibet into China. Fischer argues that the intensified economic integration of Tibet into regional and national development strategies on these assimilationist terms, within a context of continued political disempowerment, and through the massive channeling of subsidies through Han Chinese dominated entities based outside the Tibetan areas, has accentuated various dynamics of subordination and marginalization faced by Tibetans of all social strata. Whether or not these dynamics are intended to be discriminatory, they effectively accentuate the discriminatory, assimilationist and disempowering characteristics of development, even while producing considerable improvements in the material consumption of local Tibetans. In particular, strong cultural, linguistic and political biases intensify ethnically-exclusionary dynamics among middle and upper strata of the Tibetan labor force, which is problematic considering the rapid shift of Tibetans out of agriculture and towards the highly subsidy-dependent sectors of the economy, especially in urban areas. The combination of these disempowering dynamics with the sheer speed of dislocating and disembedding social change provides important insights into recent tensions given that it has accentuated insecurity while restricting the ability of Tibetan communities to adapt in autonomous and self-determined ways. The study represents one of the only macro-level and systemic analyses of its kind in the scholarship on Tibet, based on accessible economic analysis and extensive interdisciplinary fieldwork. It also carries much interest for those interested in China and in the interactions between development, inequality, exclusion and conflict more generally.

Download or read book Morality and Monastic Revival in Post-Mao Tibet written by Jane E. Caple and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-03-31 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The speed and extent of the Tibetan Buddhist monastic revival make it one of the most extraordinary stories of religious resurgence in post-Mao China. At the end of the 1970s, there were no working monasteries; within a decade, thousands had been reconstructed and repopulated. Most studies have focused on the political challenges facing Tibetan monasteries, emphasizing their relationship to the Chinese state. Yet, in their efforts to revive and develop their institutions, monks have also had to negotiate a rapidly changing society, playing a delicate balancing act fraught with moral dilemma as well as political danger. Drawing on the recent “moral turn” in anthropology, this volume, the first full-length ethnographic study of the subject, explores the social and moral dimensions of monastic revival and reform across a range of Geluk monasteries in northeast Tibet (Amdo/Qinghai Province) from the 1980s on. Author Jane Caple’s analysis shows that ideas and debates about how best to maintain the mundane bases of monastic Buddhism—economy and population—are intermeshed with those concerning the proper role and conduct of monks and the ethics of monastic-lay relations. Facing a shrinking monastic population, monks are grappling with the impacts of secular education, demographic transition, rising living standards, urbanization, and marketization, all of which have driven debates within Buddhism elsewhere and fueled perceptions of monastic decline. Some Tibetans—including monks—are even questioning the “good” of the mass form of monasticism that has been a distinctive feature of Tibetan society for hundreds of years. Given monastic Buddhism’s integral position in Tibetan community life and association with Tibetan identity, Caple argues that its precarity in relation to Tibetan society raises questions about its future that go well beyond the issue of religious freedom.

Download or read book Tibetan Subjectivities on the Global Stage written by Shelly Bhoil and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-11-08 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tibetan Subjectivities on the Global Stage: Negotiating Dispossession explores the many ways Tibetans are reimagining their cultural identity since the communist takeover of Tibet in the 1950s. Focusing on developments taking place in Tibet and the diaspora, this collection of essays addresses a wide range of issues at the heart of Tibetan modernity. From the political dynamics of the exiled community in India to the production of contemporary Tibetan literature in the PRC, the collection delves into various aspects of current significance for the Tibetan community worldwide such as the construction of Bon identity in exile, the strategic use of the discourse of development or the issue of cultural and linguistic purity in an increasingly hybrid and globalized world. Moving away from the preservationist paradigm that regards Tibetan culture as an endangered and precious object, the essays in this book portray Tibetan identities in motion, as lived subjectivities that travel, change and creatively reimagine themselves on various global stages. Even if recent Tibetan history is marked by imposed transitions and a sense of dispossession, this collection highlights the ways Tibetans have not only managed traumatic historical events but also become agents of change and reinventors of their own traditions.