ABSTRACT
While Chinese Buddhists and their Tibetan Dharma masters actively utilize the internet and other modern media to facilitate Buddhist teachings and public discourses, urban Tibetans pull resources together to construct their version of virtual Tibet. Many of them, upon receiving a modern education in China, have become faculty members of universities and research institutions, administrators, writers, filmmakers, and Communist Party members. The presence of Tibetan Buddhism among this group of Tibetans appears to be instrumental in articulating Tibetan identity and expressing the emotions of their ethnic nationalism in the context of contemporary China. Urban Tibetans’ search for “Tibetanness” is an animated and emotional collective work. The most notable articulation of “Tibetanness” is the claim of a primordial Tibetan cultural identity based on Buddhism, made by several leading Tibetan intellectuals. Among Western scholars, the notions of culture and civilization are rapidly becoming de-essentialized and de-primordialized. However, parallel to this de-reifying process of culture and civilization, newly emerging national identities, on the ground level, are expressed in the language of essentialization and primordialization. Contemporary Tibetan intellectuals’ primordialization of Tibet is a telling example of modern ethnic nationalism.
