Consuming Nirvana. The Social Construction of Surfing Tourist Space

However, an alternative reading of Dharamsala/'dharmashala/ dharamshala provides a different story, one that affords a theoretically sophisticated conceptualization of Tibetanness and therefore challenges the dominant story. Such a reading not only looks at identity as always already in process but also affirms the diaspora experience as something more than a temporary aberration. The two different narratives of diasporic Tibetan identity I posit are not strictly contradictory since they can be retheorized together productively, through postcolonial IR theory, by combining a "decon-structive attitude" with an "agential politics of identity," which, as Radhakrishnan points out, "makes it possible for movements to commit themselves simultaneously to the task of affirming concrete projects of identity on behalf of the dominated and subjugated knowledges and to the utopian or long-term project of interrogating identity-as-such" (1996, xxiii). My alternative reading highlights several things within discourses of Tibetanness at once-the politics of place and the place of politics; the social construction of space and the spatialized social relations; and the rhetoric of essentialism and the practice of strategic essentialism ...»