<Boring academic title about politicization>

May 6, 2008 in books, india, links, rants, thought

I’ve been slowly coming to a realization over the last few days, brought about by lots of time to sit around and think and read blogs and some books and think some more. What I’m realizing is how exhausted I am by how politicized everything in Dharamsala is. Everything either relates or is made to relate somehow to the Tibet Question, in a political sense. I suppose I might have realized earlier that this is an issue for me, since every single one of my papers for culture class has focused pretty heavily on these issues of politicization, whether it’s of identity or art or what.

In a sense, the converse of this frustration is that I miss good, dispassionate scholarship on things that are happily and firmly held at arm’s length in time or space or discourse. But, then again, this isn’t the point of what I and we are doing here, and in large part the reason I wanted to do this and come here is to step out of my comfort zone, the zone of reading about things in books and thinking from my cozy academic armchair nestled safely away in Williamstown.

This place is far from safe. Not only in the physical sense or even the cultural sense, but in the academic, intellectual sense as well. There is a very very fine line—or rather, a very complicated relationship—between propaganda and posturing and real, useful information here. So much of what is said and, more generally, performed here is for something: the preservation of Tibet’s “unique cultural heritage” or the vilification of the Chinese government or the presentation of Tibetans as essentially peaceful, Buddhist people who intrinsically care for women’s rights and the environment.

None of this, of course, can be taken at face value, and it’s frankly quite tiring to always have to worry about who’s saying what for what reasons while simultaneously dealing with the force of their deeply emotional convictions. That makes me uncomfortable; I’ve always been the kid that goes to his room and shuts the door whenever there’s any sort of tension in the house. I hope that it’s understandable if I then find refreshing the sort of dispassionate scholasticism of organizations like Amnye Machen or books like Geoffrey Samuel’s Civilized Shamans. I grabbed this book from the library on a whim, remembering that we read part of it in Dreyfus’s class, and it was partly my surprise at discovering just how this semester of Tibetan studies has been from that one that caused all these thoughts to crystallize.

The last thing that I’ll mention here is another thing that helped prompt these thoughts. Slate today had a piece that discusses “the deep contradictions of Christian popular culture” that strongly reminded me of some of the problems faced by exile Tibetans (especially in Dharamsala) in creating meaningful popular Tibetan culture.

The Christian rockers Radosh interviews are always torn between the pressure not to lead their young audience astray and the drive to make good music. Mark Allan Powell, a professor who teaches a class on contemporary Christian music at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, describes the predicament for Radosh: Imagine the Good Rubber Tire Co. came out with an awesome rock song that just happened to be about tires. Musicians wouldn’t want to play it because they’d think, “We’re being used,” Powell explains. Creative Christian types find themselves in a similar bind: They want to make good, authentic music. But they are also enlisted in a specific mission which confines their art.

There are obvious differences between exiled Tibetans and American evangelical Christians, but both groups face the challenge of retaining a distinct cultural identity while living in an inescapable, hegemonic culture. And what happens to the identity, and to the performance or enactment of that identity, is in important ways the same: it becomes heavily, explicitly politicized, to the extent that the agency of individuals is severely constrained.

Now, whether or not that agency is necessary or even good or beneficial is another question, one that I haven’t really thought about too much…