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That Elsewhere Tibetanness: The quest for the ‘Authentic’ Tibetan in China

Date
Tue November 12th 2024, 4:30 - 6:00pm
Event Sponsor
Center for East Asian Studies
Location
Lathrop Library
518 Memorial Way, Stanford, CA 94305
224

What does it mean to live a life perceived as ethnically ‘inauthentic’? I explore this question through my ethnographic work with Tibetan subgroups, who are often considered as not ‘Tibetan enough’ by neighboring non-Tibetan communities and their mainstream Tibetan fellows in China. By tracing how ‘authentic’ Tibetanness is understood, experienced, and contested among the Choné people on the Sino-Tibetan borderland, I argue that the quest for Tibetan authenticity is not only relational and hierarchical, but also always locates a Tibetan sense of being as existing elsewhere either in the past or in the future — never fully here in the present. This debilitates Tibetan existence and deprives Tibetans of recognizing and embracing their rich experiences of being Tibetan in their own ways.

This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP here. 

About the speaker:

Bendi Tso is a sociocultural anthropologist working on borderlands, nationalism, ethnicity, and oral traditions in China. Her scholarship draws on ethnographic approaches to study China’s ethnic minorities beyond the dominant lens of ethnicity. She is currently working on a book project that examines the negotiation of essentialized Tibetanness among disparate Tibetan subgroups on the Sino-Tibetan borderland characterized by ambiguity and diversity.