“Drifting” in Lhasa: Cultural Encounter, Contested Modernity, and the Negotiation of Tibetanness

Hong Zhu and Junxi Qian

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2015, vol. 105, issue 1, 144-161

Abstract: During the past decade, thousands of Han Chinese have migrated to Lhasa, the capital city of the Tibet Autonomous Region, to pursue a slow-paced and leisurely lifestyle in a land in which they have invested both fantasies and emotional attachment. These lifestyle migrants constitute a culturally unique group dubbed, by themselves and in folk discourse alike, “drifters in Tibet.” This group puts into question the positions and identities of the socially and economically advantaged Han, by hybridizing with and adopting what they assume to be authentic Tibetan values and worldviews. This article takes Han Chinese's “drifting in Lhasa” as a point of entry to inquiry of the ongoing negotiation of Tibetanness. Drifters mobilize Tibetanness as a repository of representational, discursive, and experiential resources to critically reflect on recent modernization and economic development in the interior of China. Yet, in embracing Tibetanness to problematize the privileged position of the Han in Tibet, the drifters have not distanced themselves from an essentialized conception of Tibetanness. They uncritically celebrate the state's economic subsidies as a means for preserving what they think of as “authentic” Tibetan lifestyles. Tibetans, on the other hand, contest the rigid binary opposition between Han developmentalism and the perceived economic inertia of Tibetans, a regime of identity regulation implicated in uneven power. In particular, Tibetans respond to the drifters’ representations by configuring alternative, but nonetheless “modernized,” conceptions of ethnicity and indigenous identity.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00045608.2014.962975 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:105:y:2015:i:1:p:144-161

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/raag21

DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2014.962975

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of the American Association of Geographers is currently edited by Jennifer Cassidento

More articles in Annals of the American Association of Geographers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().