ABSTRACT
Since 1950, when China began its takeover of Tibet, the socio-political contexts of Tibetan material and visual culture have been radically dislocated. All pre-existing activities of a religious, social or cultural nature have had to be reinvented either by Tibetan refugees in the alien conditions of host nations or by those who remained ‘at home’ in a country that has been renamed the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Whether as exiles or members of a minzu (national minority) of a colonising communist state, Tibetans have been engaged in processes of cultural retrieval and reconfiguration in which the photograph has been an active coparticipant. This chapter explores the ways in which Tibetans use, adapt and create photographs, with an emphasis on their presence in the physical world. A cross-cultural perspective allows us to investigate the specificities of shifting relationships between Tibetan bodily practice in the domain of photographs, while also suggesting ways in which a global technology like photography (and the theories attached to it) can be adapted for a contemporary Asian setting. As a physically tangible thing with an indexical link to persons deceased or places vacated, the Tibetan photograph is more than just a ‘certificate of presence’ (Barthes 1984:87), it is a socially salient object that literally embodies and enacts relationships with the past, present and even the future. This is possible due to the specifically local Tibetan concept of reincarnation, in which the human body is seen as a receptacle, fleetingly occupied by a person or deity, but when apprehended in sensory and haptic registers, these values are literally incarnated in photographs. Following from this, when consumed by refugees as part of an ‘artefactual diaspora’, photographs become the temporary physical location for the transmigration of ideas about identity and belonging in both local and global contexts.
