In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Introduction Theory at Home and in the Field But what of the ethnographic ear? James Clifford This book is concerned with the performance and reception of popular music and song by Tibetan refugees living in north India. It strives to convey how Tibetans hear the complex array of sounds that make up the musical life of their community-in-exile and explores the relationship they have with these sounds. The musical “soundscape”1 (Schafer 1977) most Tibetan refugees live in includes traditional or revitalized Tibetan folk music, Tibetan songs and music perceived to be “Chinese” or “sinicized,” Hindi film songs, Western rock, reggae and blues, modern Tibetan music made in exile, and Nepali folk and pop songs.2 The ways in which different musics resonate with and against one another for Tibetan refugees—the ways these various song traditions are loved, debated, rejected, tolerated, or ignored—are themselves embodiments or performances of the challenges of building and maintaining an ethnically based community in diaspora. More specifically, the complexity of Tibetan refugees’ relationships with various song traditions indicates the diversity and unevenness of their relationships with the places and people associated with those songs. These cultural changes and exchanges continually evolve, despite this exiled group’s politically informed investment in, and often adamant rhetorical delineation of, cultural boundaries that discourage such ambiguity. To explore the ways in which cultural boundaries are understood, negotiated , and enacted by Tibetan refugees, this book largely focuses on nontraditional musics that have found a receptive audience in this diasporic community . I emphasize popular foreign genres, such as Hindi film music and Western rock and roll as well as the “modern”3 Tibetan song genre that has emerged in exile. Modern Tibetan songs, which have not been documented elsewhere, are given special consideration because they bring together in a particularly salient way the foreign and the familiar, the modern and the tra- ditional; further, they effectively challenge the usefulness of those categories . Most Tibetan refugees genuinely enjoy this new locally produced, Western-influenced Tibetan music, but a close look reveals that tolerance of these modern songs is, in fact, quite qualified. While the formidable social and financial constraints on any Tibetan aspiring to be a musician today are readily apparent,the conservative artistic constraints on the actual music and lyrics of modern Tibetan songs (and on opportunities for and styles of performing them) only become evident when this new genre is considered or “placed” in conversation with all the other musics heard in the Tibetan diaspora in South Asia. Until recently, each of these local sounds—Tibetan, Indian , Nepali, Western, Chinese—have been compartmentalized into specific aural and social contexts, muting the ways in which they in fact constantly echo off one another and inform local notions of the appropriate content and use of each genre. With the advent of live rock concerts and dance parties in Dharamsala and elsewhere in the Tibetan diaspora, events where young Tibetan musicians juxtapose diverse musics in a single place and time, assumed musical and cultural boundaries are being challenged. One sociologist has likened rock concerts to anthropologist Victor Turner’s liminal ritual stage, in the sense that they are “crucibles for social experimentation” that generate both communitas and antistructure (Martin 1979: 98).4 As social events, rock concerts do provide an unprecedented forum for Tibetan refugees to enact their relationships to one another as punda-tso (kin) and to the several cultures that inform their daily lives as refugees, often generating moments of deeply felt solidarity. However, these events have also revealed that maintaining the oppositional stance to “otherness” institutionalized by the dominant Tibetan refugee paradigm of cultural preservation and residential isolation in exile now can involve opposing one another, as various “foreign” practices and ideas—such as delight in Hindi film songs and American rap music—have inevitably become incorporated into the lives of many refugees. With these issues in mind, ingroup criticism of Tibetan refugee pop-rock musicians and concerts may be understood to be less about an intolerance for “modern” music itself than it is about discomfort with the creation of a venue where Tibetan refugees can and do publicly enact positive aspects of their relationships with other cultures (understood, by some, as their failure to stay Tibetan in exile). conversations this book is joining Despite the particular idiosyncracies of the Tibetan refugee case—such as having had a stable leader and relatively stable communities for more than 2 / Introduction [3.144...

Share