Abstract

Based on eighteen months of field research conducted in exile carpet factories, settlement camps, monasteries, and schools in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal, as well as in Dharamsala, India and Lhasa, Tibet, this book offers an important contribution to the debate on the impact of international assistance on migrant communities. The author explores the ways in which Tibetan exiles in Nepal negotiate their norms and values as they interact with the many international organizations that assist them, and comes to the conclusion that, as beneficial as aid agency assistance often is, it also complicates the Tibetans' efforts to define themselves as a community.

Ann Frechette is Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research in Cambridge Massachusetts.

“Ann Frechette’s multi-sited and multidimensional study, moving back and forth between the local and the global, should serve as a necessary resource for scholars studying other communities in exile or in diasporic circumstances.” • Stanley J. Tambiah, Esther and Sidney Rabb Research Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University

“This valuable book asks some very significant and urgent questions about the Tibetan refugee experience, particularly about the manner in which outside agents (NGO's, governmental aid organizations, and the like), in the course of carrying out important projects, can become part of an interaction that leads to both sides reinforcing a refugee state of mind and being; preserving some of the least beneficial aspects of the situation within a relationship of comfortable dependence.” • Elliot Sperling, Indiana University

“This is a detailed and unsentimental book. It examines and explains the remarkable financial success of the Tibetan refugees in Nepal, by exploring the effects of powerful foreign assistance and lively Tibetan cooperation. The agendas of the political patrons of the Tibetans and the motives of the Tibetans themselves are inspected in a global framework of engineered transformations and organized responses. This is mandatory reading for anyone interested in international affairs and the newest achievements in anthropological fieldwork.” • Sally Falk Moore, Harvard University

“Frechette explicates the social and institutional conditions of Tibetan success in exile in a globalizing world ... A stimulating ethnographic excursion into the landscape of globalization.” • Levent Soysal, European College of Liberal Arts, Berlin