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234 7 A Peek Through Ragged Tent Flaps and Heaven’s Door Concerts That Rupture and Bond Having toured the different sounds that contribute to the musical environment of Dharamsala, and the Tibetan refugee community more widely, this final chapter focuses on the public concerts that uniquely bring many of these sounds together in a single place and time. These events—generally referred to as “rock concerts” because of their amplified technology and inclusion of Western music, although they always include modern Tibetan , Indian, and Nepali music as well—are considered here as profoundly revealing cultural performances in which many of the social dynamics and community-wide challenges raised throughout this book are enacted. Loud evening concerts offer a new way for this refugee community to come together , adding to the list of familiar public gatherings that includes religious teachings, political demonstrations, folk operas, school performances, New Year rituals, and annual holidays such as the Dalai Lama’s birthday. Each of these kinds of gatherings foregrounds different aspects of the community ’s life, and rock concerts have added a new form of self-representation , and self-critique, to the mix. As mentioned earlier, Bernice Martin has likened rock concerts to Victor Turner’s liminal ritual stage, in the sense that they are “crucibles for social experimentation” (1979: 98). Like rock music itself, she argues, concerts both create communitas and expose or stimulate antagonism among participants . Indeed, as social events, Tibetan rock concerts provide an unprecedented forum for these refugees to enact their relationships to one another as kin or tightly bonded compatriots, resulting in deeply felt moments of solidarity. The concerts also, however, invite participants to reveal through their pleasure the inevitable (but carefully managed) fact that many practices and ideas borrowed from the foreign cultures that inform their daily lives as refugees have become deeply, even fondly, incorporated into their lives.Their pleasure risks revealing that the oppositional stance to otherness institutionalized by the dominant paradigm of cultural preservation and residential isolation in exile now raises for Tibetans the awkward question of when and how it is appropriate or necessary to oppose one another. By juxtaposing the many ways of being Tibetan in exile, concerts provide a new and controversial venue where refugees can express their appreciation for Tibetan and non-Tibetan musics, revealing a level of comfort with cultural ambiguity and a passion for foreign culture that is worrisome to some in the community, including, ironically, many of the musicians themselves. As messengers or mirrors of fearful aspects of contemporary refugee culture, it is the musicians themselves who are often blamed for the trends displayed at their concerts. Because they create a venue for expressing controversial behaviors, many assume that they are the cause or catalyst of those behaviors, and they are thereby made into scapegoats for the community’s “failings.” While my observations regarding the cultural and social dynamics of Tibetan rock concerts are informed by all the concerts I attended and participated in during my year in India, this chapter primarily presents ethnographic material from a fifteen-night series of concerts staged by the Yak Band in January 1995. Although this event took place two thousand miles away from Dharamsala, in a large tent erected at the Mundgod refugee settlement in South India, it played an important and lasting role in the community ’s cumulative impression of what rock and roll, rock concerts, and rock musicians are and the place they should or should not have in Tibetan cultural life. Albeit intensified over the course of several weeks, the dynamics at the Kalachakra concerts were very similar to those seen at concerts in Dharamsala —in fact, a significant number of Dharamsala Tibetans attended—so it is useful to include this event in an analysis of Dharamsala’s musical life and the investments Tibetan refugees have in cultural boundary making.1 This concert series also provided a unique opportunity for me, as anthropologist and keyboard player, to study a musical event again and again in the same context and from an onstage perspective. Further, the extended time frame enabled me to note and experience the truly dialogic nature of performance, since the content and performer-audience relations of each concert reflected the previous nights’ experiences and anticipated the remaining concerts yet to come. Each day the band members had time to react to the last concert, reflect on the successes and failures of the tour as it unfolded, and rethink their plans...

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