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Diaspora 6:3 1997 Shangri-La in Exile: Portraying Tibetan Diaspora Studies and Reconsidering Diaspora(s) Martin Haumann University of Hanover Constructing Tibetan Culture: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. Frank J. Korom. Québec: World Heritage Press, 1997. Tibetan Culture in the Diaspora: Papers Presented at a Panel ofthe 7th Seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, Graz, 1995. Ed. Frank J. Korom. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1997. The word "Tibet" awakens in many people images of a "land of snow," of simplicity, and of pre-modernity. The high altitude, the rarified air, and the seemingly unbounded distances are metaphorically transferred to Tibet's supposedly heroic people and their ostensibly unpolluted, original sources of spirituality. "Tibet," imagined as a romanticized "Shangri-La," is more often than not depicted as a repository of archaic wisdom and occult religion, an enchanted place where ancient traditions have been kept alive. It is assumed that this literally deep-frozen space preserves an access to transhuman and cosmic knowledge and experiences, lost to the West long ago. These well-known images and fantasies, analyzed and evaluated in various academic studies,1 have been emblematically summarized by the famous, gently smiling actor and Buddhist convert Richard Gere, in his address to the exhibition "Wisdom and Compassion," held in New York during the International Year of Tibet, 1991: Prior to the invasion of Tibet in 1950, the Tibetans were unusually peaceful and happy. Isolated for centuries from a chaotic world they deeply mistrusted, they developed a wondrous, unique civilization based wholly on the practice of Buddhism's highest ideals. Theirs has been a revolutionary social experiment based on spiritual, psychological, and philosophical insights that provide us with models for achieving intimate and creative relationships with the vast and profound secrets ofthe human soul. Tibet's importance for our own time, and for the survival of Earth itself, is more critical 377 378 Diaspora 6:3 1997 than ever. Being our most vibrant link to the ancient wisdom traditions, Tibet, and the sanity she represents, must not be allowed to disappear (Rhie and Thurman 8). Such a stereotyped representation not only glorifies Tibetan people and their culture against history (e.g., Lopez, "New Age"; Snellgrove and Richardson 194; Sperling), but continues to define the "Other" according to Western needs and Orientalist perception (Said). Whereas the "lost" or steadily "vanishing Tibet" as a culture, ethnos, and geographical region, located in Central Asia, has been the focus of many historical, philological, and, increasingly, anthropological studies, until now relatively few studies have been published on the scattered communities and settlements ofTibetan refugees in exile. Much research on these approximately 131,000 deterritorialized Tibetans (1995 statistics) has remained unpublished, in PhD theses submitted by anthropologists since the mid-1970s. As the books Constructing Tibetan Culture and Tibetan Culture in the Diaspora, both carefully edited by Frank J. Korom, illustrate, this previous "silence" on Tibetans in India and elsewhere no longer applies. Both general interest in the West and the exile elite's own voicing of their plight, as well as the propagation of their culture and religion, have contributed to an increased public awareness. Bringing together various ethnographic accounts and multifarious studies, the two volumes have been so framed theoretically that they are aligned with discourses on transnationalism, processes of representation, and matters of cultural production in exile. For all these issues, and many more, the term "diaspora" has become the catch- and code-word. It is often applied convincingly. Frequently, however, the term is also used in a rather uncontrolled, arbitrary fashion, and at the whim of the author's imagination. As Korom states in his introduction to Tibetan Culture in the Diaspora, the aim of the contributions is to make "research on exile currently being conducted in the field of Tibetology" relevant "to the broader sociological and anthropological issues that confront diaspora studies at large" (8). One aspect of the relevance of these studies of Tibetans living in exile is that they urgently need to be recognized by sociological and anthropological diaspora theorists, just as they must be acknowledged within Tibetology and Indology. In order to evaluate this effort to catch up with "diaspora studies at large," to...

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