Memories of Tibet: Transnationalism, Transculturation and the Production of Cultural Identity in Northern Pakistan

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Steven Vertovec, “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 22, No. 2 (March 1999), pp. 447–62; Alejandro Portes, Luis E. Guarnizo, and Patricia Landolt, “The Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field,” Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 22, No. 2 (March 1999), pp. 217–37. 2. In this paper, I use transnationalism differently than some, who invariably imply the substance of human migration in their conceptualization. I believe this to be a limited use of the term. Certainly migration is one way through which transnationalism takes shape, but it is simply one component of a much wider range of transnational interactions, by which I mean direct and virtual relations of contact between individuals beyond nationalist ideologies of space and culture. See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Culture Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 3. Transculturation is an alternative to reductive notions of acculturation and deculturation, describing the multi-lateral processes by which cultural groups select, appropriate and invent from materials available to them in what we might call a “contact zone”—the real and virtual spaces in which disparate cultural groups interact. A contact perspective “emphasises how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other … in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power.” See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 4. The State of Jammu and Kashmir, created following the Treaty of Amritsar (1846), was originally a “princely state” under the terms of the British colonial doctrine of paramountcy. Over time, the British Indian administration exercised greater executive control over the State Council through a Permanent Resident Officer, but used the state as a buffer between British India and Central Asia. Following partition, the Hindu Maharajah of the Muslim majority state hesitated to join either India or Pakistan. A struggle between Pakistani irregulars and Indian troops ensued and ended with the establishment of a ceasefire line, later called the Line of Control, which divided Kashmir between India and Pakistan. A UN brokered resolution in 1948 called for a plebiscite to determine the permanent future of the state. This has never been held and both India and Pakistan continue to dispute rightful sovereignty over the state. 5. The region now known as Baltistan was colonized during the reign of Tibetan emperor Khri-mang-slon-rtsan (649–76 CE). Tibetan rule lasted until the Turks gained control of region c. 813. 6. The Northern Areas of Pakistan have received minimal attention from social scientists. Unlike Indian Kashmir, studies of the cultural politics of identity in FANA are virtually non-existent. Two notable exceptions include Shahzad Bashir, “Burdens of a Messanic History: Negotiating the Politics of Identity and Representation among the Nurbakshis of Baltistan,” Paper presented at the Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Washington DC, April 4–7, 2002; Martin Sökefeld, “Balawaristan and Other Imaginations: A Nationalist Discourse in the Northern Areas of Pakistan,” in Martijn van Beek, Kristoffer Bertelsen, and Poul Pedersen, eds., Ladakh: Culture, History, and Development Between Himalaya and Karakoram—Recent Research on Ladakh 8, Proceedings of the Eighth Colloquium of the International Association for Ladakh Studies (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1999). Comparative work in Indian Kashmir includes: Martijn van Beek, “The Importance of Being Tribal, or the Impossibility of Being Ladakhis,” in T. Dodin and H. Räther, eds., Recent Research on Ladakh 7, Proceedings of the Seventh Colloquium of the International Association for Ladakh Studies (Ulm: Universität Ulm, 1997), pp. 21–41; Nicola Grist, “Muslims in Western Ladakh,” The Tibet Journal Vol. 20, No. 3 (Autumn 1995), pp. 59–70; Reeta C. Tremblay, “Nation, Identity and the Intervening Role of the State: A Study of the Secessionist Movement in Kashmir,” Pacific Affairs Vol. 69, No. 4 (Winter 1996), pp. 471–97; Aparna Rao, “The Many Sources of Identity: An Example of Changing Affiliations in Rural Jammu and Kashmir,” Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 22, No. 1 (January 1999), pp. 56–91; Ravina Aggarwal, Beyond Lines of Control: Performance and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh, India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 7. The material in this paper is based on a long period of observation in Baltistan. I have been working in the region since 1989, with extended visits of two to four months, every two years on average. Over that time, I have witnessed ‘culture’ emerge as a specific component of regional (and national) political debate. In 2004, after the appearance of the shop signs mentioned in the article, I began a discrete project focused on investigating the transnational dimensions of this cultural identity “movement.” This has involved much more focused research on primary actors and organizations which has included participant observation within the relevant organizations, depth interviews, the compilation of life histories, and analysis of cultural products. 8. Known locally as yung drung, a symbol of permanence and indestructibility or security of place stemming from the Bon era. 9. Cf. T. Perreault, “Changing Places: Transnational Networks, Ethnic Politics and Community Development in the Ecuadorian Amazon,” Political Geography Vol. 22, No. 1 (January 2003), pp. 61–88; K. B. Warren, Indigenous Movements and their Critics: Pan-Mayan Activism in Guatemala (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 10. The AKCSP is an arm of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, a branch of the Aga Khan Development Network, that focuses on the physical, social, cultural, and economic revitalization of Muslim communities. 11. T. A. Khan, “Little Tibet: Renaissance and Resistance in Baltistan,” Himal Magazine Vol. 11, No. 5 (May 1998), pp. 14–20. 12. Notably, Ladakh continues to experience its own cultural struggle over questions of language and identity but relations with Baltistan rarely enter those discussions outside of the restricted region of Kargil. See Martijn van Beek, “Dissimulations: Representing Ladakhi Identity,” in T. Otto and H. Driesson, eds., Perplexities of Identification: Anthropological Studies in Cultural Differentiation and the Use of Resources (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2000), pp. 165–88. 13. Sydney Tarrow, Power in Movement—Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 14. Tarrow, Power in Movement, p. 85. 15. Tarrow, Power in Movement, p. 18. 16. YungDrung refers to the Bon swastika which has been experiencing a revival in Baltistan over the past five years. The BSF has adopted the Yungdrung for use as its emblem. 17. A. Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings (London: Lawrence linguists promote the Balti language as an important living Tibetan language and stress the value of preserving it; journalists and film makers focus on the Tibetan roots of the area to add a note of distinction to their projects. I am also “complicit” in feeding the circulation of discursive resources, having brought a reprinted copy of H. A. Jaschke’s 1881 Tibetan–English dictionary to Baltistan in the late 1990s as a gift for a development worker friend. This was subsequently used by others as the basis for learning the Tibetan script and preparing the shop signs mentioned in this paper. 22. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 35. 23. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 36. 24. Geoffrey Eley,“What Is Cultural History?,”New German Critique No. 65 (Spring—Summer 1995), pp. 19–36; p. 27. 25. Bon, with its animist and shamanist qualities, was prevalent in Baltistan and Tibet prior to the arrival of Buddhism in the seventh century. 26. Cf. Frederick Barth, “Boundaries and Connections,” in A. P. Cohen, ed., Signifying Identities: Anthropological Perspectives on Boundaries and Contested Values (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 17–36. 27. Chris Peet, “Tibet in Transformation,” in T. Dekker, J. Helsloot, and C. Wijers, eds., Roots and Rituals: The Construction of Ethnic Identities (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2000), pp. 303–15. 28. Emily Yeh, “Will the Real Tibetan Please Stand Up!: Identity Politics in the Tibetan Diaspora,” in P. C. Klieger, ed., Tibet, Self, and the Tibetan Diaspora (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 229–54. 29. Peter Bishop, The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Peter Bishop, “Caught in the Cross-fire: Tibet, Media and Promotional Culture,” Media, Culture and Society Vol. 22, No. 5 (September 2000), pp. 645–64. 30. F. Michael, “Survival of a Culture: Tibetan Refugees in India,” Asian Survey Vol. 25, No. 7 (November 1985), pp.737–44. 31. For a discussion of the emergence of the concept of culture areas, and their ideological and material effects, see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1979); F. Coronil, “Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories,” Cultural Anthropology Vol. 11, No. 1 (February 1996), pp. 51–87; R. Lederman, “Globalization and the Future of Culture Areas,” Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 27 (1998), pp. 427–49; Michael Watts, “Collective Wish Images: Geographical Imaginaries and the Crisis of National Development,” in Doreen Massey, J. Allen, and P. Sarre, eds., Human Geography Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), pp. 85–107; A. Paasi, “Bounded Spaces in the Mobile World: Deconstructing Regional Identity,” Tijdschrift Voon Economische En Sociale Geografie Vol. 93, No. 2 (May 2002), pp. 137–48; A. Paasi, “Region and Place: Regional Identity in Question,” Progress in Human Geography Vol. 27, No. 4 (August 2003), pp. 475–85. 32. By this I mean that discursive formations implicated in cultural identity movements never remain purely indigenous or exogenous; they are a product of transculturation—a multi-dimensional process in which cultural groups select, appropriate and invent from materials transmitted to them through relations in the global ecumene. See Pratt, Imperial Eyes; Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Vincanne Adams, Tigers of the Snow and other Virtual Sherpas: An Ethnography of Himalayan Encounters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 33. A. H. Francke, A History of Western Tibet: One of the Unknown Empires (London: Partridge, 1907). 34. Jane Duncan, A Summer Ride Through Western Tibet (London: Smith, Elder p. 220. 36. Phuntsog Wangyal, “Baltistan: The Land of Balti People,” Tibet Foundation Newsletter No. 32 (May 2001), pp. 9–12; p. 12 37. Wangyal, “Baltistan,” p. 10. 38. Wangyal, “Baltistan,” p. 10. 39. Wangyal, “Baltistan,” p. 10. 40. A number of individuals active in the promotion of cultural identity also own or are associated with adventure tourism agencies in Baltistan, and sit on the board of the Baltistan Cultural Foundation, an offshoot of AKCSP, the agency responsible for producing the brochure. 41. For a general discussion of mimesis and mimicry, see M. Taussig, Memory and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London: Routledge, 1993), and H. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 42. Frank J. Korom, “Introduction: Place, Space and Identity: The Cultural, Economic, and Aesthetic Politics of Tibetan Diaspora,” in F. J. Korom, ed., Tibetan Culture in the Diaspora (Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1997), pp. 1–12; Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-la: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 43. See, e.g., Bishop, The Myth of Shangri-La; Bishop, “Caught in the Cross-fire”; Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La; P. C. Klieger, “Shangri-La and Hyperreality: A Collision in Tibetan Refugee Expression,” in Korom, ed., Tibetan Culture in the Diaspora, pp. 59–68; Peet, “Tibet in Transformation”; Jan Magnusson, “A Myth of Tibet: Reverse Orientalism and Soft Power,” in Klieger, ed., Tibet, Self, and the Tibetan Diaspora, pp. 195–212; Yeh, “Will the Real Tibetan Please Stand Up.” 44. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this quirk to my attention. 45. I brought the copy of Jaschke’s dictionary used by this man to Baltistan in 1990 as a gift for another young development worker who had told me about his interest in the history of the Balti language. It has subsequently passed through a number of hands as the basis for learning Tibetan script. 46. Magnusson, “A Myth of Tibet,” p. 203. 47. It is significant in creating the boundaries between cultural self and other that many Baltis do not self-identify as Pakistani, but neither do they self-identify as Tibetan, and certainly not as part of a Tibetan diaspora. 48. George E. Marcus, Ethnography Through Thick and Thin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 49. For an insightful discussion of the significance of language issues in the cultural politics of identity, see: Laura Ahearn, “Language and Agency,” Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 30 (2001), pp. 109–37; Michael Silverstein, “Contemporary Transformations of Local Linguistic Communities,” Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 27 (1998), pp. 401–26. 50. For a description of these networks, see Dibyesh Anand, “(Re)imagining Nationalism: Identity and Representation in the Tibetan Diaspora of South Asia,” Contemporary South Asia Vol. 9, No. 3 (November 2000), pp. 271–87; Maria S. Calkowski, “The Tibetan Diaspora and the Politics of Performance,” in Korom, ed., Tibetan Culture in the Diaspora, pp. 51–7; Margaret McLagan, “Mystical Visions in Manhattan: Deploying Culture in the Year of Tibet,” in Korom, ed., Tibetan Culture in the Diaspora, pp. 69–89; Steven Venturino, “Reading Negotiations in the Tibetan Diaspora,” in Frank J. Korom, ed., Constructing Tibetan Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Quebec: World Heritage Press, 1997), pp. 98–121. 51. J. Gold and G. Revill, eds., Landscapes of Defence (London: Prentice Hall, 2000); Don Mitchell, “Cultural Landscapes: The Dialectical Landscape—Recent Landscape Research in Human Geography,” Progress in Human Geography Vol. 26, No. 3 (June 2002), pp. 381–9.