It is important for my analysis to underline a two-pronged approach I will be taking. First, I will explore the poetics of representation-how is Tibet as the Other represented, how is Tibet produced within representations about it. This entails examining how Tibet is imagined within Western culture by looking at literature (both fiction and nonfiction), films, travel accounts, and so on. Second, I will analyze the politics of representation-effects and consequences of representation on the identity of Tibet and Tibetans. The latter places expositions on Tibet in the context of power, imperialism, neocolonialism, (trans)nationalism, and Orientalism. Chapters 2 and 3 will discuss the poetics while chapters 4, 5, and 6 will deal with the politics of Western representations of Tibet.
2. Imagining the Other
Within the context of European imperialism, the issue of the representation of natives was often considered as belonging to the realm of scientific objective ethnography, journalistic commentaries, or fiction (Spurr 1993). A clear boundary was said to exist between fiction and nonfiction writing. It was presumed that, unlike fiction, nonfiction writing such as literary and popular journalism, exploration and travel writings, memoirs of colonial officials, and so on are unmediated by the consciously aesthetic requirements of imaginative literature. Emphasis was on the recording of observed facts. However, as argued by scholars from fields as diverse as postcolonial theory (Bhabha 1983; McClintock 1995; Said 1978; Shohat 1995; Spurr 1993), anthropology (Clifford 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Fabian 1990; Van Maanen 1995), and international relations (Campbell 1998b; Doty 1996b; Weldes et al. 1999), such views are no longer tenable. Starting with Said (1978) the enterprise of postcolonial theory has unpacked the notion of neutral academic expertise and highlighted how Western knowledge and representations of the non -Western world are neither innocent nor based on some preexisting "reality" but implicated in the West's will to power and its imperial adventures. The image of a scientific, apolitical, disinterested, knowledge-seeking "gentleman" braving all odds to study non-Western cultures has been revealed as hollow.
The mask of objectivity in the colonial discourse hid relations of inequality and domination. Fiction as well as nonfiction writings were permeated with various strategies of representation. These were not epiphenomenal but central to the ways in which the Other was sought to be known. What Kabbani points out about travel writing holds true for nonfictional writings in general: during imperialism, it ultimately produced "a communal image of the East," which "sustained a political structure and was sustained by it" (1986, 10).
Various forms of representing the non-West-visual (films, television, photographs, paintings, advertisements, and so on) as well as textual (such as fiction, travelogue, journalism, ethnography, and anthropology)-were closely linked to the production of imperial encounters. Asymmetry of productive power is a common trait shared by these encounters. The contemporary neocolonial world too "bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social within the modern world order" (Bhabha 1994, 171). It is not only the represented (here the colonized, the third world, the South) who are subjects of and subjected to the process; even the representer (the colonizer, the first world, the West) is constructed by representational practices. This in no way implies similar experiences for the colonizer and the colonized (the representer and the represented). It only indicates that though everyone is subjected to representational practices, the impact differs according to the existing power relations. To illustrate this point, while both the West and Tibetans are subjects of Exotica Tibet, and the latter are not mere victims but exercise their agency through creative negotiations, the West does not have to construct its identity according to the perception of Tibetans. Westerners exoticize Tibet, and in turn, Tibetans exoticize the West. But while Western exoticization has a defining productive impact on Tibetan identity discourse (as discussed in detail in chapters 5 and 6), the same cannot be said of Tibetan exoticization of the West. This reflects the asymmetry in their power relations.
A concentration on Western representations does not deny the fact that representational practices were prevalent in non-Western societies too. In fact, historically all cultures and civilizations have had their own particular representational practices for perceiving those they considered as Other. But-and this is a crucial qualification-it was only with modern European imperialism that the capacity to convert these representations into truth on a systematic and mass scale emerged. What makes such representational practices distinctly modern is their productive capacity. Production of knowledge about the Other through representations goes hand in hand with the construction, articulation, and affirmation of differences between the Self and Other, which in turn feed into the identity politics among the representer as well as the represented.
ESSENTIALIZING AND STEREOTYPING THE OTHER
The practices of essentializing and stereotyping the Other underlie different strategies of Western representations. Essentialism is the notion that some core meaning or identity is determinate and not subject to interpretation. Inden writes that essentialist ways of seeing tend to ignore the "intricacies of agency" pertinent to the flux and development of any social system (1990, 20). In the colonial context, we find essentialism in the reduction of the indigenous people to an "essential" idea of what it means to be "native"-say, Africans as singing-dancing-fighting, Chinese as duplicitous, Arabs as cruel and oppressors of women, Tibetans as religious, and so on. Imperialism drew its strength from representations of natives as quintessentially lazy, ignorant, deceitful, passive, incapable of self-governing, and the native rulers as corrupt and despotic. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the British officials involved during the 1903-4 invasion of Tibet saw it as something welcomed by "ordinary" Tibetans seeking deliverance from their Chinese and monastic overlords. Captain Cecil Rawling in a military report in 1905 wrote: "It seems to be the general wish of the inhabitants of that country (Tibet) that they should come under British administration" (in Lamb i960, 296). Curiously, Lamb's own assessment that "when dealing with the primitive peoples of Central Asia, the problem often was not how to expand one's power but how to prevent its indefinite expansion" (101; emphasis added) also puts the onus of responsibility for imperial expansion on the victims themselves. This is made possible by their essentialist representations as requiring paternal imperialism-an alternation of iron fist and velvet glove.
A stereotype is a one-sided description of a group/culture resulting from the collapsing of complex differences into a simple "cardboard cut-out," seeing people as a preset image and "more of a formula than a human being" (Gross 1966, 2). It reduces people to a few, simple characteristics, which are then represented as fixed by nature. "Stereotyping reduces, essentialises, naturalises and fixes 'difference'" (Hall 1997a, 257-58). Stereotypes function as a marker between norm and deviancy (see Gilman 1985), between "us" and "them." As Said argues, stereotypical images of the Orient's separateness-"its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine malleability"-have been part of Western discursive practices for a long time (1978, 4). Such images flourished to justify imperialism as a civilizing mission-the restless, honest, active, exploratory, masculine, enlightened, modern spirit of the "white man" stood in contrast to the laziness, deceit, passivity, fatalism, femininity, backwardness, and traditional spiritlessness of the natives. For example, Captain John Noel's films Climbing Mount Everest (1922) and The Epic of Everest (1924) developed the "contrast between the extroverted, aggressive, and manly British climbers with the introverted, passive, and squalid but mystical Tibetans" (Hansen 2001, 92-93).
Stereotyping is a simplification because it freezes what is otherwise a fluid, contested, complex always-in-motion identity. Let me illustrate this with an example from the story of the first two men to reach Mount Everest-Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary. Reaching the summit, Tenzing Norgay says he felt the warm presence of the mountain,
buried an offering to the gods, and said in prayer: "I am grateful, Chomolungma" (in Hansen 1998); Hillary took photographs to survey the area, urinated on the summit, and later told one of the other climbers, George Lowe: "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off" (Outside Online 1999). This difference in attitude may be due to cultural factors. But to interpret humility as passivity and fix the identity of Tenzing Norgay (read as representative of Sherpas and other natives) as essentially passive in contrast to adventurous, scientific Hillary (read as white man) leads to a reified and fixated form of representation (excluding those who do not "fit" in the image-women, for instance). Stereotyping is not about expressing cultural difference but fixing it in a pregiven sociocultural milieu with extreme power differentials.
Stereotyping served imperialism at both representational and psychic levels-supporting the idea of paternal domination and acting as a kind of perceptual blinder protecting the colonizers from the discomforting consciousness of either poverty or guilt (Lebow 1976, 22). It allowed the participants in the massacre of Tibetans at Guru (31 March 1904) that took place during the British invasion of Tibet to blame it on the "crass stupidity and childishness of the Tibetan general" (Mehra 1979, 223), malevolent "thorough-going obstructionist" (IOR: MSS EUR/F197/105 n.d., 6) monks, superstitious Tibetan soldiers-everyone except themselves. We must liberate the ordinary natives from their brutal leaders-this sentiment can be seen in Colonel Francis Younghusband's account of the 1903-4 expedition to Tibet where, after criticizing Tibetans for being crafty, immoral, overreligious, dirty, and lazy, he talks about the role of the British in providing enlightened guidance to ordinary Tibetans (Younghusband 1910, 321). Younghusband argued for a permanent settlement at the end of the invasion "which would prevent the Lhasa Lamas from ever again usurping monopoly of power to the detriment of British interests and to the ruin of their own country" (IOR: MSS EUR/F197/106 n.d., 2).
Though in everyday conversation we tend to use stereotypes only for negative images, stereotyping has within it dualism and ambivalence (Bhabha 1983; Chow 1993; Hall 1997a). As Hunt in his study of hierarchy of race and American foreign policy points out, the Americans created for "Orientals" two distinctly different images: "a positive one, appropriate for happy times when paternalism and benevolence were in season, and a negative one, suited to those tense periods when abuse or aggrandizement became the order of the day" (1987, 69). While sometimes a positive stereotype may be politically and socially helpful for a group, in the long run it reifies and imprisons the represented subjects in their own arrested image. This problem can be seen most clearly in the case of Tibetans, who seem to be prisoners of their stereotyped images. Alluding to the real effects of the language of stereotype about Tibet, Lopez points out that it "not only creates knowledge about Tibet, in many ways it creates Tibet, a Tibet that Tibetans in exile have come to appropriate and deploy in an effort to gain both standing in exile and independence for their country" (1998, 10). However, these stereotypes legitimize only certain goals and actions geared toward achieving them-the prevalent stereotypes paint Tibetans mainly as passive victims requiring outside help. And this outside support comes at a price.
STRATEGIES OF REPRESENTATION
In spite of commonalities and consistencies, it is complexity, opposi-tionality, and ambivalence that lie at the heart of Western colonial representations. Imaginative practices through which the imperial West came to represent the Other can be interrogated through the various strategies of representation involved. Though there was always a will to reify the represented, this was undermined by the nature of representation-it was not a singular act but one necessitating repetition. There always was a paradox in the Western representations of other cultures-an unresolvable tension between transparency and inscrutability, desire and disavowal, difference and familiarity. Therefore Exotica Tibet is not a distinct phenomenon devoid of contrariety; rather, it is defined by a "true complexio oppositorum, a rich complexity of contradictions and oppositions" (Bishop 1989, 63, emphasis in original). So near, yet so far! As Zizek puts it:
The very inconsistency of this image of Tibet, with its direct coincidence of opposites, seems to bear witness to its fantasmatic status. Tibetans are portrayed as people leading a simple life of spiritual satisfaction, fully accepting their fate, liberated from the excessive craving of the Western subject who is always searching for more, AND as a bunch of filthy, cheating, cruel, sexually promiscuous primitives… The social order is presented as a model of organic harmony, AND as the tyranny of the cruel corrupted theocracy keeping ordinary people ignorant. (2001, 64-66; emphasis in original).
The following section of the chapter analyzes the most common discursive strategies marshaled in the representation of the non-Western Other in the context of Western imperialism and uses Exotica Tibet as the main empirical site of investigation.
Gaze
Surveillance is a technique through which, under an overpowering gaze, the non-Western subject is rendered "a knowable, visible object of disciplinary power" (Doty 1996b, 11). The gaze is not mere innocent curiosity: "to gaze implies more than to look at-it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze" (Schroeder 1998, 208). Through observation, examination, and interpretation objects are differentiated, categorized, identified, and made ready to be acted upon. Objectification (fixing the essence) of the gazed goes hand in hand with its subjectification-gaze and surveillance are productive of the identity of the gazed.
Surveillance as a strategy for representing the Other and rendering it disciplined is characterized by the all-knowing gaze of a white
"man," the colonial master, the West. It enables both the visual possession of the body of the gazed and an interposition of technique that safely conceals the body of the gazer (Spurr 1993, 22). Observations then are presented as dispassionate, objective facts. The gaze is disembodied-statements are made as if there is no seer behind the observations.
This is not to say that non- Westerners are visually impaired, powerless to gaze back at the West. But the authority of imperialism for a large part of the modern period ensured that mastery and control remained a possession of Western "man." The "monarch of all I survey" rhetorical gesture remained peculiar to the West (Pratt 1992, 201). Establishment of mastery through surveillance, gaze, and observation was accompanied by consolidation of shades of political dominance over the object of the gaze. Appropriation was done in the name of scientific curiosity, ethnographic material gathering, protection of simple masses from their own despotic rulers, or the spread of progress.
British colonial and military officials who went inside Tibet often wrote their accounts as scientific exploration or as exciting adventure (see Bailey 1957; Forman 1936) or as "everyday" observation (Gordon 1876, v). Behind their innocent-sounding descriptions of travel-for example, "[a] narrative of a plant hunter's adventures and discoveries" (Ward 1934)-lay the violence of imperialism. Though their gaze might be considered by Europeans as that of the adventurer or romantic, its effect on the natives was the same as that of some steely-eyed militarist's gaze-the establishment and in-stitutionalization of control through political rule and knowledge formation. To know is a prelude to possessing, especially if there is a huge asymmetry of power. Such asymmetry led to situations where it was perfectly acceptable for a participant in the Tibet mission of 1903-4 to say, "In fact the visible riches and treasures of Lhasa fairly made our mouths water. The Tibetans however would not sell, and to our honour be it said; although Lhasa was a fair object to loot, and lay in our power, not a farthings worth was forcibly [author adds this word in pen in a typed text] taken from it" (IOR: MSS EUR/C270/FL2/E/1/144, 6; emphasis added; see Carrington 2003 for an analysis of the predatory nature of the mission). Securing priceless artifacts through coercion and displaying them in the private and public collections in the West was an essential feature of Western imperialism.
Paradoxically, the project of rendering the Other knowable
and the image of it as primitive and simple went hand in hand with the recognition that there are elements of inscrutability and mystery that eluded complete understanding of the Other. While discussing his own failure to fathom the unease of Phuntsog, a Tibetan who is no longer considered an "authentic" native as he has learned the language of the imperialist, Candler, an early example of embedded reporter (a Daily Mail reporter accompanying the British invasion of Tibet in 1903-4), calls him a "strange hybrid product of restless western energies, stirring and muddying the shallows of the Eastern mind. Or are they depths? Who knows? I know nothing, only that these men are inscrutable, and one cannot see into their hearts" (1905, 206).
Frustrated with the inaccessibility, invisibility, and inscrutability of "the Orientals," Western desire subjects them to a relentless investigation. Veil becomes a metaphor for all that invites, titillates, and yet resists Western knowing. It is "one of those tropes through which Western fantasies of penetration into the mysteries of the Orient and access to the interiority of the other are fantasmatically achieved" (Yegenoglu 1998, 39).
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