Authenticity, Impermanence, and the Tibetan Origin Story: Rooted & Routed Tibetans in the Diaspora
More scholars in Tibetan Studies have recently begun turning their attention to questions I engaged in my 2020 chapter in the book Tibetan Subjectivities on the Global Stage: Negotiating Dispossession — questions of Tibetan suffering, displacement, and dispossession; reflections on the Tibetan origin story of Srinmo and Indigeneity; and embodied Tibetan understandings and enactments of impermanence. I am resharing the concluding section, “Theorizing Purity: Hybridity,” from my chapter “Who is a Pure Tibetan? Identity, Intergenerational History, and Trauma in Exile,” as a timely entry point into these conversations.
In it, I read texts alongside oral stories shared with me by my elders, thinking through Tibetan ways of being in the world — and offering them as frameworks for understanding Tibetan life in the present: a life not severed from the land, but one that recalls it daily through story, history, and family.
It is also worth noting that the questions now gaining scholarly attention — Tibetan suffering and dispossession, the Srinmo origin story, embodied practices of impermanence — have long been alive in Tibetan homes, in the stories of our elders, and in the scholarship of those of us who grew up inside these conversations. This piece is offered in that spirit: as a reminder that these are not new discoveries, but inherited understandings that Tibetans have been thinking, living, speaking, and writing about all along — and should be acknowledged as such.
With this in mind, I reshare my concluding section:
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Theorizing Purity: Hybridity
Although it is essential to approach Tibetan concepts of purity historically, as cases from different decades demonstrate, purity politics narrow, rather than broaden, the politics of belonging for Tibetans of diverse backgrounds. Purity politics positions Tibetans who mix and/or are mixed in a polarizing framework that views them as becoming something else, something not Tibetan. But what does a pure Tibetan look or sound like? According to purity advocates, a pure Tibetan is neither genetically mixed nor mixes Tibetan with any other languages.
As previously mentioned, the Tibetan vernacular has always been mixed, even the Tibetan alphabet is acknowledged by Tibetan history as having been adopted from the Indian alphabet following Tibet’s adoption of Buddhism from India [in the 7th century]. The Tibetan language is also diverse, with dialectal differences based on regions and villages that have changed over time. According to Tibetan religious history from prior centuries, Mongolians were not only prominent in our history, but they were also recorded as having settled in different parts of Tibet and intermarried with Tibetans.
Neither genetically pure Tibetan, nor a pure version of any spoken Tibetan dialect exists. Rather, Tibetans have always had a heterogeneous culture that acknowledges hybridity—a notion acknowledged in the Tibetan origin story that suggests Tibetans were the result of the copulation between a compassionate monkey and a lustful rock ogress (Gyatso 1989). Hybridity also makes room for recognizing Tibetan histories as diverse, continuous, and moving. Prominent scholars of modernity such as Bruno Latour have argued against the notion of purity as nothing but fictitious constructs of modernity.[22]However, Tibetans do not need to turn to other philosophical traditions to know this fact. The logic of impermanence in Buddhism argues against the existence of purity in the physical world. Instead, purity is conceptualized as a goal that can be achieved outside the physical world through spiritual enlightenment.
As previously mentioned, current conversations of purity in the Tibetan community have resulted from lived traumas of the older generation. Such traumas have led to collective efforts towards culture preservation, taking on a homogenous version of Tibetan culture with an aim to secure the future of Tibetans. Yet, the logic of purity demands that the project of culture preservation be enacted in a manner that keeps aspects of Tibetan culture pure. Under such circumstances, aspects of Tibetan traditions are forced to remain static and one-dimensional. This promotes the false notion that Tibetan cultural traditions were never diverse or subject to change. The purity politics in the current moment frames Tibetan cultural traditions prior to the Chinese invasion as pure and monolithic. Thus, culture preservation projects undertaken by Tibetans, following Tibet’s invasion, called for authentic recreation of traditions in exile as a preventative method against foreign culture contamination. Those who enact Tibetan subjectivities different from the prescribed notions are thus accused of mixing and of being inauthentic and impure.
Tibetans have not been alone in gamut of debate on cultural purity. The genre of salvage anthropology, for example, has long been critiqued for promoting notions of authentic culture through its conceptualization of the term as an unmoving static category. Much of the scholarship generated by anthropologists on Tibetan culture between 1960 and 1980, for instance, followed the salvage anthropology model. For such anthropologists, the project of preserving classic kinship structures of Tibetan society or recording traditional nomadic way of life in the refugee camps of India and Nepal became important projects for preserving the authenticity of Tibetan cultural knowledge before it would become non-existent. They viewed the dilution of such authenticity as inevitable due to Chinese colonization inside Tibet and Tibetan adoption of foreign sensibilities in exile. This view promoted a notion of authentic Tibetan culture that existed only inside Tibet before it became colonized by China. As a result, some scholars of classic Tibetan culture interpreted cultural hybridity taking shape for Tibetans in exile or in colonized Tibet as inauthentic, and in the process, promoted the existence of cultural purity.
However, such views have not gone unchallenged. For instance, such a view of purity, argues Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith, promotes “a belief that indigenous cultures cannot change, cannot recreate themselves and still claim to be indigenous. Nor can they be complicated, internally diverse or contradictory”.[23]Change is interpreted as contamination. That is why, decade after decade, Tibetan adoption of any foreign sensibilities are interpreted as impurities threatening Tibetan purity. On the one hand, purity advocates promote the false notion that authentic Tibetanness exists only in the past. According to this logic, Tibetans of the present who fail to re-enact Tibetanness from the past fail to enact authentic versions of their cultural identity. On the other, those who call themselves mixed or T+, which Lhadon Tethong translates as Tibetans of mixed heritage on her Facebook page, as a new identity marker publicly in response to Tibetans who call them not-full-blooded, also inadvertently ignore ongoing histories of Tibetan hybridity and end up promoting the existence of purity. Instead they too, like purity advocates, need to acknowledge the ongoing histories of Tibetan hybridity, an acknowledgement that proves the fallacy of the pure/impure dichotomy.
Rather than a view of Tibetan culture that is static, I propose a view from the Hawaiian scholar Stephanie Nohelani Teves, who writes “I think of tradition like indigeneity, rooted and routed, moving, evolving, and gesturing toward its past and its horizon”.[24]Such a view recognizes Tibetans and their cultural traditions and histories as fluid and moving. This depiction allows Tibetans of all backgrounds to be seen as subjects continuing to interact with changes, resulting from the Chinese invasion without being assumed to have compromised their Tibetanness. This way of conceptualizing Tibetanness moves away from centering the Chinese invasion as the beginning of the end. Instead, it centers Tibetanness as rooted and routed. It recognizes Tibetanness as always having been continuous, both before and after the Chinese invasion. This way, different enactments or performances of Tibetanness no longer have to cater to purity or impurity binaries. “All performances,” argues Teves, “contain both residual and emergent elements… if we see Native identity or indigeneity as containing both residual and emergent elements of ‘the Native,’ Nativeness is immediately made into something this is connected to the past as well as the future… [and is] no longer obsessed with being pure, authentic, or traditional”.[25]Under such circumstances, Tibetans enjoying The Beatles, rock and roll, Chinese pop, or American hip-hop, do not have to be thought of as having compromised their Tibetanness. Rather, for Tibetans singing in the style of rock and roll or hip-hop about their current circumstances can be thought of as enacting their Tibetanness—a performance that is both residual and emergent. This framing allows the focus of Tibetanness to shift away from mixing and towards the recognition of the diversity and dynamics of Tibetan cultures, histories, and identities. This way, contemporary performances of Tibetanness—through enactments as diverse as hip-hop or narrating shopping at Tibetan shops in New York in English—can be thought of as adding to the dynamic aspects of Tibetanness that continue to thrive and flourish. Rather than define Tibetan identity with narrowed terms dictated by the politics of purity, this approach embraces historical and contemporary multiplicities of Tibetan identities.
The solution lies in aiming for authenticity, without opposing hybridity. Hybridity and authenticity are not mutually exclusive, as some purists mistakenly think. A hybrid approach allows Tibetanness to be in conversation with change or what is new. Doing so allows Tibetan culture and identity to be seen as multiple and continuous, and in the process, discourages static notions. Such an approach also ensures the futurity of Tibetan identities because it allows room for changes that will continue to shape different subjectivities of Tibetans living in different lands and under different conditions as displaced or colonized people without assuming they have compromised their Tibetanness.