Tibetan Dance

Tibetan Dance: An Identity for a People without a Home

By Debora Colby

http://kennedy.byu.edu/events/inquiry/video/2011/index.html

McLoed Ganj, India is in the state of Himachal Pradesh and the Dalai Lama lives there in the Tibetan community in exile.  The three major regions of Tibet are Amdo, U-Tsang, and Kham.  Lhasa is the biggest city and the place where the Dalai Lama used to reside.  Tibetans circumstances and lifestyles have changed as a result of their exile to India.  The communities from the regions were being preserved in India.  They preserve it through culture, dance, etc. and they even have a leader over each community.  The Dalai Lama created the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts to preserve the performing arts.  Students there spend 10 years studying dance, culture, costuming, etc.  Learning and Idea for Tibet (LIT) is a community organization that aims to remember Tibet and to prepare Tibetans to live in the evolving world.  It was a community teaching people to dance, cook, etc. Music has been modernized; they don’t use traditional instruments as much because they synthesize it.  It’s hard to find instruments.

Dance helps preserve Tibetans’ sense of identity.  Dance also helps show the respect between elders and the people they teach.  They have a deep respect for authority.  Tibetan dances have distinguishing features, which is an obvious way to show the differences between Tibetans, Indians, Chinese, etc.

Ethnography. Ethnography was defined in this presentation in depth, which was very helpful to my current situation.  When first brainstorming my project with my professor, we both studied ethnography as a possible way to approach the study.  In the end, I think we decided it was too broad, and it wasn’t as appropriate as other methods for my particular study.  Colby defined ethnography as the study of the people’s “ethos”: the tone, character and quality of life, its moral aesthetic style and mood and their worldview.  Ethos also includes their picture of the world vs. how things actually are.  My study will be more focused on specific ideas, and it will likely involve more case studies.  I’m still not sure if ethnographies are more narrow, or strictly the study of perceptions of a group of people.