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Modernity, Mobility, and Dilemma: The Making of Tibetan Cultural Citizenship through an English Training Program

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Abstract

Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in an English training program tailored for rural young Tibetans in West China, this study looks into the complexities, dilemma, and possibilities of particularly the cultural aspects of citizenship in a context where minority people are encountering urban, majority, and global forces as a result of their geographic and cultural mobility. In doing so, the theme of flexible citizenship (Ong 1999) emerges, which deconstructs the conventional conception of citizenship. This deconstruction is achieved through unveiling the complexity and complication of citizenship that is in particular evidence in the everyday practices of these Tibetan subjects. The findings capture a re-consideration of citizenship that is open to multiplicity and grows out of practices.

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Notes

  1. The information in this section is primarily based on Stuart & Wang [31].

  2. See “The Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library” [32] for detailed and up-to-date information of community projects carried out by ETP students.

  3. Although I did not carry out a longitudinal study which would otherwise enable me to compare how these students formerly acted, the passivity of the Tibetan (and other) students I interviewed in 2003 in local regular schools was apparently observable [36].

  4. This is not to say that the participants’ support for community development projects mentioned above should be interpreted simply as support for “neoliberal entrepreneurialism”. While I do not deny that an entrepreneurial mentality was cultivated along with other economy-related activities among these students, its rationale is survival in the first place.

  5. Modood [20] distinguishes between radical public “religionism” and modest public “religionism”, as well as radical secularism and modest secularism by looking at whether or to what extent a standpoint separates religion from the state.

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  1. School of Public Affairs, Xiamen University, 422 Si Ming Nan Road, Xiamen, Fujian, China, 361005

    Lin Yi

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Yi, L. Modernity, Mobility, and Dilemma: The Making of Tibetan Cultural Citizenship through an English Training Program. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 19, 387–403 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-014-9304-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-014-9304-4

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