lhakarism

There's something in this account of the Tibetan cultural revival movement that doesn't seem to quite fit:

That includes the lhakar movement, which emphasizes individual acts of protest through personal actions such as wearing traditional clothes, eating Tibetan food, listening to Tibetan music and teaching the native language to their children.

Tamding Tsetan, a well-known artist who writes and performs folk songs, is one of the leading exponents of Tibetan heavy metal.

Well, authenticity is in the eye of the beholder I suppose. Anyway: the lhakar, a kind of Tibetan Gaeltacht thing:

Developed inside Tibet after the uprising of 2008 and more recently exported to the Tibetan Diaspora, Tseten says it challenges Chinese rule while simultaneously allowing Tibetans to assert their culture and identity within the letter of Chinese law.
 
“So, Tibetans have started buying vegetables from Tibetan [grocers], going to Tibetan restaurants, not Chinese," Tseten says. "We are speaking as much Tibetan as possible, not Chinese. But Lakhar is not just about eating Tibetan food and wearing Tibetan dress, it is about getting back your identity. 

Pressures towards Sinicization certainly exist, but I'm pretty sure the Politburo are quite cool with people buying stuff from Tibetan grocers: there's probably a quota for Tibetan grocer creation as part of Provincial economic development metrics. Overall, China's aim is more to co-opt 'Tibetanness' as an inferior part of a Greater Chinese identity than to supress it absolutely.

This actually reads more like a way of disengaging with direct confrontation than anything else: a retreat into culture. If the alternative is serial self-immolation maybe that's not too surprising. 

Comments

[Phil]

From demanding rights for Tibetans to demanding the right to be Tibetans - very much a rearguard action, and a fairly unpolitical one at that. (Rule of thumb: choice of restaurant is very rarely a radical act. OK, lunch counters in Mississippi, but that's not quite the same kind of choice.)

[dsquared]

Heavy metal, nationalist politics and traditionalism seem to go together like pie, chips and gravy.

[ajay]

Rule of thumb: choice of restaurant is very rarely a radical act.

Clothing choice, on the other hand, definitely is.

[ajay]

Heavy metal, nationalist politics and traditionalism seem to go together like pie, chips and gravy.

True dat. Look at Iron Maiden. (Recently saw a video of them performing live in Argentina. You don't see ninety thousand Argentinians cheering a British bloke in a British army uniform waving an enormous Union Flag that often.)

[Chris Williams]

Laibach might be a closer, if not better, fit.

[dsquared]

Sepultura are the most interesting example in my mind because they're clearly in the traditional/nationalist heavy metal current, but in the Brazilian context that doesn't put them politically on the right - they're quite unusual in Brazilian pop culture in being explicit about the fact that their country isn't all bikinis and football.

[chris y]

This actually reads more like a way of disengaging with direct confrontation than anything else: a retreat into culture.

They probably said the same thing about Pádraig Pearse at one stage. If the balance of forces demands retreat, using the time to consolidate your cultural milieu isn't a bad idea, because when you can go forward again you have more water to swim in.

[Phil]

True - and Plaid Cymru was a club of ageing language geeks at one time.

The dynamics of 'keeping the flame alive' interest me - in particular, whether it actually matters. The post hoc ergo propter hoc temptation is huge. If you take Plaid, I think the party's current status (and the normalisation of the language more widely) dates back to the 1970s period of cottage-burning and road sign vandalism, and more specifically to the dawning realisation among all concerned that (a) there were quite a lot of people doing it and (b) there were an awful lot of people looking the other way. Something, in other words, was going on here. But would none of it have happened without the people who took the cultural turn years & decades earlier? No Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, no S4C? I'm not sure.

I'm very much in favour of keeping flames alive as a general thing, I'm just not convinced that the world at large gives a monkey's.

[dick gregory]

Fairies wear boots

[Barry Freed]

Surely whether it matters and whether the world at large gives a monkey's are two different things? (At least with regard to 'keeping the flame alive,' and retreating into culture whereas with serial self-immolation campaigns one very much depends on the other).

[Cian]

Rule of thumb: choice of restaurant is very rarely a radical act.

You should come to the US south some time. There's quite a few local restaurants who are explicit about their confederate, or anti-immigrant, politics. Of course one of the most anti-immigrant places serves Mexican food, so there's that.