Tibetans in Nepal: The Dynamics of International Assistance among a Community in Exile

by Ann Frechette

Overview

Based on eighteen months of field research conducted in exile carpet factories, settlement camps, monasteries, and schools in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal, as well as in Dharamsala, India and Lhasa, Tibet, this book offers an important contribution to the debate on the impact of international assistance on migrant communities. The author explores the ways in which Tibetan exiles in Nepal negotiate their norms and values as they interact with the many international organizations that assist them, and comes to the conclusion that, as beneficial as aid agency assistance often is, it also complicates the Tibetans' efforts to define themselves as a community.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571816863
Publisher:	Berghahn Books
Publication date:	10/01/2004
Series:	Forced Migration , #11
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	60.00(w) x 90.00(h) x 7.50(d)

About the Author

Ann Frechette is Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research in Cambridge Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
A Note on Tibetan Translations and Transliterations

Introduction: Entitlement Systems and Identity Politics

Chapter 1. Swiss Assistance and Self-Sufficiency
Chapter 2. Containing Communism: The U.S. and a Tibetan Democracy
Chapter 3. Friends of Tibet: Variations on a Theme of Liberal Humanism
Chapter 4. Weapons of Weak States
Chapter 5. Middlemen and Moral Authority
Chapter 6. Conflict and Consciousness

Conclusion

Appendix

Glossary
References
Index

What People are Saying About This

Sally Falk Moore

This is a detailed and unsentimental book. It examines and explains the remarkable financial success of the Tibetan refugees in Nepal, by exploring the effects of powerful foreign assistance and lively Tibetan cooperation. The agendas of the political patrons of the Tibetans and the motives of the Tibetans themselves are inspected in a global framework of engineered transformations and organized responses. This is mandatory reading for anyone interested in international affairs and the newest achievements in anthropological fieldwork.
—Harvard University

Stanley Tambiah

Ann Frechette's book Tibetans in Nepal (2002) is an incisive and systematic account that begins with how Tibetan exiles, who arrived in Nepal some forty years ago, poor and stateless, were able with the help of international assistance to develop and control Nepal's largest industry, the manufacture and export of handmade woolen carpets. The crux of Ann's impressive achievement - ethnographic, interpretive and theoretical - is to set aside the romantic narratives of Tibet-as-Shangri-La, and of Tibetans in exile as focused on preserving and protecting their traditional identity and religio-cultural heritage, and to engage in tracing the dynamics of the trajectory and effects of the interaction between international assistance and the Tibetan exiles. These dynamics include not only the successful formation of settlement camps, monasteries and schools, but also the imbibing of Western patrons' liberal democratic themes and values, such as the right to self determination, protection of the environment, support for multiculturalism, etc., as consistent with Tibetan traditions and concerns. Moreover, international assistance and its ideological baggage both assist and complicate the efforts of Tibetan exiles to define themselves as a national community and to seek recognition as such by international powers and agencies. This recognition, though subject to continuing construction and contestation, is crucial for the Dalai Lama's exile administration's efforts to seek recognition for the Tibetan community's membership in the international family of nations, to publicize the Tibetan political cause, and to claim a share of international resources.

Ann Frechette's multi-sited and multidimensional study, moving back and forth between the local and the global, should serve as a necessary resource for scholars studying other communities in exile or in diasporic circumstances.
—Harvard University

Levent Soysal

Frechette explicates the social and institutional conditions of Tibetan success in exile in a globalizing world ... A stimulating ethnographic excursion into the landscape of globalization.
—European College of Liberal Arts, Berlin

Editorial Reviews

“Ann Frechette’s multi-sited and multidimensional study, moving back and forth between the local and the global, should serve as a necessary resource for scholars studying other communities in exile or in diasporic circumstances.” • Stanley J. Tambiah, Esther and Sidney Rabb Research Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University

“This valuable book asks some very significant and urgent questions about the Tibetan refugee experience, particularly about the manner in which outside agents (NGO's, governmental aid organizations, and the like), in the course of carrying out important projects, can become part of an interaction that leads to both sides reinforcing a refugee state of mind and being; preserving some of the least beneficial aspects of the situation within a relationship of comfortable dependence.” • Elliot Sperling, Indiana University

“This is a detailed and unsentimental book. It examines and explains the remarkable financial success of the Tibetan refugees in Nepal, by exploring the effects of powerful foreign assistance and lively Tibetan cooperation. The agendas of the political patrons of the Tibetans and the motives of the Tibetans themselves are inspected in a global framework of engineered transformations and organized responses. This is mandatory reading for anyone interested in international affairs and the newest achievements in anthropological fieldwork.” • Sally Falk Moore, Harvard University

“Frechette explicates the social and institutional conditions of Tibetan success in exile in a globalizing world ... A stimulating ethnographic excursion into the landscape of globalization.” • Levent Soysal, European College of Liberal Arts, Berlin

From the Publisher