The Value of Refugees: The Impact of Inter-Asian Tibetan Buddhist Patronage Networks

This project examines transnational patronage of the Tibetan diaspora and tracks its overlapping geopolitical and sociocultural impact at local, national, and international scales.

In this project, I will first map transnational patronage, increasingly from Buddhist organizations sweeping across East and Southeast Asia, and second investigate its impact on the material, spiritual, and psychosocial landscape of the Tibetan diaspora in India.

By combining anthropology, religious studies, and international relations, the project will generate new data on how the intersection of geopolitics and global Tibetan Buddhism shapes diasporic Tibetan identity and ethnic belonging in Indian settlements.

In short, the project analyzes the recursive loop between transnational patronage and Tibetan identity formation within the Indian milieu it most directly impacts and against the backdrop of Chinese geopolitics it most clearly reflects. As such, it will be the first quadratic analysis of diasporic Tibetans grounded in ethnographic fieldwork.

The imbrication of global Tibetan Buddhism, patronage networks, and refugee politics necessitates scholarship which analyzes value creation and attendant forms of soft power.

Such research is a corrective to an anti-materialist “Othering” within Tibetan Studies which, paired with lay New Age Orientalism, distorts the ethnographic picture of contemporary Tibetans.