Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 460-461
Author(s):  
Carole Mcgranahan
Keyword(s):  
Refugee Community ◽  
Tibetan Refugee

scholarly journals Spirit-possession in theory and practice: séances with Tibetan spirit-mediums in Nepal

1982 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Per-Arne Berglie
Keyword(s):  
Spirit Possession ◽  
Field Work ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Satisfactory Solution ◽  
Refugee Community ◽  
Actual Change ◽  
Tibetan Refugee

This paper describes a short study of the séances and trance-performances of three Tibetan spirit-mediums (dpa' bo) from a refugee-community in Nepal. The field-work on which this study is based was carried out in a Tibetan refugee-village in Nepal during 1970 and 1971. For each dpa' bo:  dBang phyug, Sri gcod, and Nyi ma don grub, a summary of personal thoughts and beliefs concerning possession is provided, followed by an example of how a séance was structured. A common feature is that when all the gods summoned have arrived, possession took place by the god most suited to carry out the task of the evening. The actual change of the ritual status of the spirit-medium is marked by the putting on of the headdress. From now on, until it falls off at the end of the séance, it is the god who speaks and acts through the medium, who afterwards claims that he has no recollection whatsoever of what then passes. A necessary condition for the activity of a spirit-medium is, of course, the conviction that their possession is genuine. Theoretically, when a dpa' bo has passed the period of calling and has been tested and has received the necessary training, this genuineness is proved. Of an established dpa' bo no further proofs are therefore required in addition to the satisfactory solution of the problems put to him at the séances. If, after all, someone has doubts about a dpa' bo, he can call a lama.

Echos from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community (review)

Notes ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 184-185
Author(s):  
Ricardo Canzio
Keyword(s):  
Refugee Community ◽  
Tibetan Refugee

The Problem with ‘Rich Refugees’ Sponsorship, Capital, and the Informal Economy of Tibetan Refugees

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
AUDREY PROST
Keyword(s):  
Informal Economy ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Economic Capital ◽  
Refugee Community ◽  
Methodological Challenges ◽  
Economic Exchanges ◽  
Tibetan Refugee ◽  
Tibetan Refugees

This article examines issues pertaining to the growth of ‘informal’ economic exchanges and relationships of patronage in the Tibetan refugee community of Dharamsala (H-P), India. I firstly review the theoretical and methodological challenges posed by investigations of Tibetan refugee modernity, then focus on one particular form of exchange in the informal economy of exiles: rogs ram, or the sponsorship of Tibetans by foreigners. The article argues that symbolic capital comes to play a particularly important role in communities where economic capital is scarce, acting in fact as a proviso to economic capital. The highly unstable character of symbolic capital means that, for Tibetan refugees as for other communities, its conversion into economic capital is arduous and engenders a tense field of negotiations between sponsors and beneficiaries.

scholarly journals Seeking Dhasa; Finding Lhasa: Liminality and Narrative in the Tibetan Refugee Capital of Dharamsala

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-73
Author(s):  
Harmony Siganporia
Keyword(s):  
Central Concept ◽  
Religious Capital ◽  
The Past ◽  
Refugee Community ◽  
Social Events ◽  
Trace Residue ◽  
Tibetan Refugee ◽  
Identity Markers ◽  
Tibetan Exile

This article explores the role of narrative and narrativity in stabilising identity in an exile setting, read here as a way to avert what Bjørn Thomassen calls the ‘danger’ inherent to liminality. It does this by analysing the shape and visualscape of the little Himalayan town of Dharamsala, which serves as the secular and religious ‘capital’ of Tibetan exile. It attempts to decode the narratives which allow ‘Dhasa’, as Dharamsala is colloquially known, to cohere and correspond to its metonymically aspirational other – Lhasa, the capital of old Tibet. There can be read in this act of assonant naming the beginnings of a narrative geared towards generating nostalgia for a lost homeland, alluding to the possibility of its reclamation and restitution in exile. This article explores how this narrative is evidence of the fact that it is in indeterminacy; in liminality in other words, that the ‘structuration’ that Thomassen proposes, becomes possible at all. Even as it alludes to the impossibility of transplanting cultures whole, the article also examines closely the Foucauldian notion of ‘trace residue’ inherent to ruptures in prior epistemes, treating this idea as central to creating new-‘old’ orientations for this refugee community in exile. Following Thomassen and Szakolczai, liminality is here treated as a concept applicable to time as well as place; individuals as well as communities, and social ‘events’ or changes of immense magnitude. It is this notion of liminality that the article proposes has to be a central concept in any exploration of exile groups which have to live in the spaces between the shorn identity markers of the past – rooted as these must be in a lost homeland – and the present, where they must be iterated or man-ufactured anew.

Institutional development in practice: A case-study from the Tibetan refugee community

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 217-227
Author(s):  
Thomas Fisher ◽  
Vijay Mahajan ◽  
Tsering Topgyal
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Development ◽  
Refugee Community ◽  
Tibetan Refugee
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