In Echoes from Dharamsala, Keila Diehl uses music to understand the experiences of Tibetans living in Dharamsala, a town in the Indian Himalayas that for more than forty years has been home to Tibet's government-in-exile. The Dalai Lama's presence lends Dharamsala's Tibetans a feeling of being "in place," but at the same time they have physically and psychologically constructed Dharamsala as "not Tibet," as a temporary resting place to which many are unable or unwilling to become attached. Not surprisingly, this community struggles with notions of home, displacement, ethnic identity, and assimilation. Diehl's ethnography explores the contradictory realities of cultural homogenization, hybridity, and concern about ethnic purity as they are negotiated in the everyday lives of individuals. In this way, she complicates explanations of culture change provided by the popular idea of "global flow." Diehl's accessible, absorbing narrative argues that the exiles' focus on cultural preservation, while crucial, has contributed to the development of essentialist ideas of what is truly "Tibetan." As a result, "foreign" or "modern" practices that have gained deep relevance for Tibetan refugees have been devalued. Diehl scrutinizes this tension in her discussion of the refugees' enthusiasm for songs from blockbuster Hindi films, the popularity of Western rock and roll among Tibetan youth, and the emergence of a new genre of modern Tibetan music. Diehl's insight into the soundscape of Dharamsala is enriched by her own experiences as the keyboard player for a Tibetan refugee rock group called the Yak Band. Her groundbreaking study reveals the importance of music as a site where official and personal, old and new representations of Tibetan culture meet and where different notions of "Tibetan-ness" are being imagined, performed, and debated.

"Echoes of Dharamsala takes us deep into exile as a performance space, a refugee home on the diasporic range. The metaphor of reverberation comes very much to life as Keila Diehl bears witness to the emergent politics and poetics of Tibetan rock and roll. Compassionate and modest, yet incisive and unromantic, her writing brings us close to amazingly complicated musical lives being forged in a distinct global conjuncture of modernity, desire, and longing."—Steven Feld, Prof. of Music and Anthropology, Columbia University "Echoes from Dharamsala is a charmingly written, ethnographically rich, theoretically ambitious book about a Tibetan community in exile. Keila Diehl joined a Tibetan rock band as its keyboard player, and from that perspective gives us a fresh and honest look at the Tibetan refugee experience through its soundscapes. She has presented us with a model of ethnography, which while not shying away from representing the conflicts and contradictions of the community she studied, nevertheless displays a deep political solidarity with the Tibetan cause."—Akhil Gupta, author of Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India "Giving new meaning to "participant-observation," Keila Diehl explores the politics and poetics of Tibetan cultural production in exile, in a study that is at once engaging and insightful."—Donald S. Lopez, author of Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West

Contextualising the seemingly esoteric and exotic aspects of Tibetan Buddhist culture within the everyday, embodied and sensual sphere of religious praxis, this book centres on the social and religious lives of deceased Tibetan Buddhist lamas. It explores how posterior forms – corpses, relics, reincarnations and hagiographical representations – extend a lama’s trajectory of lives and manipulate biological imperatives of birth and death. The book looks closely at previously unexamined figures whose history is relevant to a better understanding of how Tibetan culture navigates its own understanding of reincarnation, the veneration of relics and different social roles of different types of practitioners. It analyses both the minutiae of everyday interrelations between lamas and their devotees, specifically noted in ritual performances and the enactment of lived tradition, and the sacred hagiographical conventions that underpin local knowledge. A phenomenology of Tibetan Buddhist life, the book provides an ethnography of the everyday embodiment of Tibetan Buddhism. This unusual approach offers a valuable and a genuine new perspective on Tibetan Buddhist culture and is of interest to researchers in the fields of social/cultural anthropology and religious, Buddhist and Tibetan studies.

This edited collection addresses the relationship between diaspora, religion and the politics of identity in the modern world. It illuminates religious understandings of citizenship, association and civil society, and situates them historically within diverse cultures of memory and state traditions.

Music and arts initiatives are often praised for their capacity to aid in the rehabilitation of refugees. However, it is crucial to recognize that this celebratory view can also mask the unequal power dynamics involved in regulating forced migration. In Composing Aid, Oliver Shao turns a critical ear towards the United Nations-run Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, one of the largest and oldest encampments in the world. This politically engaged ethnography delves into various cultural practices, including hip hop shows, traditional dances, religious ceremonies, and NGO events, in an urbanized borderland area beset with precarity and inequality. How do songs intersect with the politics of belonging in a space controlled by state and humanitarian forces? Why do camp authorities support certain musical activities over others? What can performing artists teach us about the inequities of the international refugee regime? Offering a provocative contribution to ethnomusicological methods through its focus on activist research, Composing Aid elucidates the powerful role of music and the arts in reproducing, contesting, and reimagining the existing migratory order.

The ten papers presented in this eight volume of the Proceedings of the Ninth Seminar of the IATS, 2000, provide examples of the colourful and lively range of Tibetan self-expressions that exist within the modern homeland and in exile. The scholars here represent the fields of anthropology, sociology, literary studies, history, and political science. Four papers are based in studies in the modern Tibet Autonomous Region, five are grounded in the Tibetan diaspora, and one deals with both classical Tibetan history and current affairs. The mass representation of Tibetan self, delivered through various literary vehicles, by linguistic competence, body decoration, landscape, or individual deportment, constitutes the basic theme of this collection. The volume is useful for any student of Tibet and those interested in the process of identity formation and presentation.

Ethnomusicology deals with the study of the music of the world. The field is interdisciplinary, and ethnomusicologists draw on theory and method from folklore, cultural anthropology, historical musicology, literature, cultural studies and media studies, among other disciplines. So when ethnomusicologists met at Makerere University's symposium on ethnomusicology in October 2011, the issues dealt with spanned a wide spectrum of concerns which can be grouped under three major categories: Institutions, culture and identity. African Musics in Context discusses the place of performing arts in Ugandan society, archiving music and music sources, performing archival music, performing health and religious issues in music, music and identity in East Africa as well music in motion, which tackles how identity shifts when people move from one place to another. All these are key aspects of our day-to-day lives, and they are the themes that colour the music we listen to. This book follows up on and extends work in an earlier volume (Nannyonga- Tamusuza and Solomon 2012) which included papers from the first symposium in the series. While this book focuses primarily on music and music research in Uganda, the chapters by the contributors from Tanzania, South Africa and Norway demonstrate the importance of scholarly and professional networks that connect the different countries of the African continent with each other and with the larger international scholarly community. If the published proceedings from the first symposium mentioned above represented a first in the history of ethnomusicological publishing in Uganda, this second book in the series shows that professionalised ethnomusicology in Uganda continues to gain ground and make contributions to music research in Uganda, Africa, and the global ethnomusicological community. The chapters collected here show that ethnomusicology in Uganda has a healthy institutional basis and promises to continue to make contributions that are relevant locally, regionally, and internationally.

Echoes of Enlightenment explores the issues of gender and sainthood raised by the recently discovered "liberation story" of the fourteenth-century Tibetan female Buddhist practitioner Sönam Peldren. Born in 1328, Sönam Peldren spent most of her adult life as a nomad in eastern Tibet until her death in 1372. She is believed to have been illiterate, lacking religious education, and unconnected to established religious institutions. For that reason, and because as a woman her claims of religious authority would have been constantly questioned, Sönam Peldren's success in legitimizing her claims of divine identity appear all the more remarkable. Today the site of her death is recognized as sacred by local residents. Suzanne Bessenger draws on the new-found biography of the saint to understand how the written record of the saint's life is shaped both by the hagiographical agendas of its multiple authors and by the dictates of the genres of Tibetan religious literature, including biography and poetry. She considers Sönam Peldren's enduring historical legacy as a fascinating piece of Tibetan history that reveals much about the social and textual machinations of saint production. Finally, she identifies Sönam Peldren as one of the earliest recorded instances of a historical Tibetan woman successfully using the uniquely Tibetan hermeneutic of deity emanation to achieve religious authority.

Jamyang Norbu has taken the stories of 'forgotten' Tibetansresistance fighters, secret agents, soldiers, peasants, merchants, even street beggarsand skillfully worked their myriad accounts into a single glorious 'memory history' of the Tibetan struggle. He uses recollections from his own childhood to ease the reader into an immersive understanding of the complexity of Tibet's modern history: the Chinese invasion, the uprisings in Kham and Amdo, the formation of the Four Rivers Six Ranges Resistance Force, the March '59 Lhasa Uprising, the CIA supported Air Operations, the Nyemo peasant Uprising of 68/69 and the Mustang Guerilla Force in northern Nepal, where Norbu later served. He writes of leaving home to drive tractors at refugee settlements, educate refugee children, produce plays at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, and collect intelligence for the Tibetan Office of Research and Analysis (TORA) and for France's External Intelligence Agency (SDECE). He uses these anecdotes not so much as autobiography but as a framing device to recount the lives, deeds and, too often, tragedies of the many Tibetans he encountered and befriended throughout his lifenearly all of whom played vital roles in shaping the recent history of their country but whose contributions are still unsung and forgotten. Jamyang Norbu's lifelong commitment to collecting and orchestrating the 'echoes' of these many forgotten voices from the past has resulted in a lyrical, learned and compassionate book that could well be described as the prose epic of the Tibetan freedom struggle.

With its analytic focus on the cultural production by Tibetans-in-exile, this volume examines contemporary Tibetan fiction, poetry, music, art, cinema, pamphlets, testimony, and memoir. The twelve case studies highlight the themes of Tibetans’ self-representation, politicized national consciousness, religious and cultural heritages, and resistance to the forces of colonization. This book demonstrates how Tibetan cultural narratives adjust to intercultural influences and ongoing social and political struggles in exile.