Postcards from Shangri-La: Tourism, Tibetan refugees, and the politics of cultural production.
Item
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Title
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Postcards from Shangri-La: Tourism, Tibetan refugees, and the politics of cultural production.
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Identifier
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AAI9732948
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identifier
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9732948
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Creator
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McGuckin, Eric Allen.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Jane Schneider
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Anthropology, Cultural
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Abstract
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This dissertation analyzes the social, cultural, and political impacts of tourism and the reconstruction of Tibetan refugee culture in Dharamsala, India. Dharamsala, in the foothills of the Himalayas, is host to the Dalai Lama, the Central Tibetan Administration, and a Tibetan refugee community of some 5,000. It attracts growing numbers of Western seekers, volunteers, social scientists, and tourists. Tibetan refugee cultural production is analyzed as an interactive process, shaped not only by exile and indigenous history and values, but by new touristic, religious, charitable, and academic consumers who themselves become producers of a commoditized "Tibetan" culture. Consumption is thus considered a form of production.;This thesis integrates a detailed account of the "host" population--the ethnic Other who is the usual focus of anthropological monographs--with an equally detailed and differentiated account of the "guests," the travelers who are too often stereotyped in both popular and academic literature. This dissertation will also describe artistic change as well as the lives and practices of Tibetan and Indian artisans and merchants. These groups have been relatively neglected in prior research on Tibetan refugees, which has tended to emphasize the transmission of identity or Buddist philosophy and practice.;While this dissertation focuses most closely on the production, exchange, and consumption of Tibetan crafts and commoditized ritual objects, it links this description to a broader analysis of tourism, cultural politics, and class, ethnic, and gender relations. Unfortunately, the increasingly popular Cultural Studies approach has tended to dematerialize this dimension, just as international tourism is expanding and integrating indigenous and refugee communities further into an asymmetric transnational market of goods and meanings.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
