ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes how the Tibetan diaspora uses media to portray self-immolators as heroes by focusing on the exchange of iconic images and videos on Facebook. The photograph posted to Facebook clearly shows Tibetans taking photographs of the funeral procession with their mobile phones. The chapter looks at how the process and aesthetics of the apotheosis of martyrs in Tibetan culture is subject to re-mediation through new media formats. Self-immolation is a break from the past that indicates the quality of life in Tibet has suddenly declined, which has precipitated a more radical, perhaps desperate, protest regime. In the case of self-immolation, the sacrifice and the sacrificer are one. Following Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss' lassic typology of sacrifice, Ohnuma argues that some cases of self-immolation are both sacrifices of desacralization as well as sacrifices of sacralization. According to Daoxuan, self-immolation could be deployed as a Buddhist response to government restraints on the practice of religion.
