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ABSTRACT This article introduces a representative claims approach as a novel analytical framework to the field of diaspora politics. Supplemented with a network perspective, this approach offers a more nuanced understanding of the practices underpinning diasporic claims‐making. Applying it to the empirical case of the Tibetan diaspora, which is confronted with an authoritarian China, the study draws on the internet as a pivotal tool for diasporas to foster connections, mobilize and articulate their claims. By exploring the online network on the basis of a hyperlink and web‐content analysis, the article reveals the intertwined structure of the Tibetan diaspora online. A plethora of actors claim to speak on behalf of the voiceless people at home, advocating for the preservation of the unique Tibetan culture while also embracing global values to garner external support. This article contributes to the scholarly discussion on transnational engagement and representation in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that belonging can be characterized by absence. It explores this as experienced in two different geographical and historical contexts by two groups of actors: members of the early Tibetan diaspora in India (1959–1979) and former members of a religious group (Aum Shinrikyō) in Japan. The absence we conceptualize is double: it is not solely a spatial absence, but also a temporal absence in terms of the irreversibility of time. It is felt and articulated through emotions that play decisive roles in the constitution and sustaining of these communities. These communities as feeling communities are characterized by absence, but absence is simultaneously what makes them a community. This simultaneity allows our actors to create complex temporal frameworks by relating to reimagined pasts, different presents, and potential futures. Therefore, the article contributes to discussions of belonging by retheorizing the relationship between absence, emotions, and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of the contact zone, as formulated by Marie Louise Pratt, describes social spaces where different cultures meet and engage, generally in very uneven relations of power. However, she suggests that contact zones can also be de-colonialising spaces where new possibilities are formulated for a different, better future. Within such spaces some kind of hope is essential. In recent years the notion of hope has been the focus of considerable attention by scholars from a wide range of disciplines, yet the role of hope in a contact zone has received little, if any, attention. This paper explores contact zones where diverse, multiple hopes, from western and non-western cultures, encounter each other. In particular it draws on the struggle for reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, plus attempts at dialogue between western cultures and the Tibetan Diaspora as it seeks reconciliation with China. While a sense of hope can be shared across differing cultures, it can also be highly specific to them. Different goals for hope can circulate through a contact zone, and also differing visions and modalities of hope as western and non-western cultures struggle to attain some kind of mutual imaginary. Such situations suggest challenges for post-Enlightenment systems of knowledge and imagination, which have often dominated contact with other traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Tibetans in the diaspora in India are shown to be engaged in emotional processes that connect very different themes of their lives. Their attachment to both Tibetan moral notions and Indian popular cultural representations is theorised with reference to emotional attachment as appropriation into the sense of what belongs with oneself. Both normative Tibetan moral notions and aspirational Indian popular-cultural representations are appropriated by Tibetans born and raised in India. On the one hand, Tibetan moral notions of harmonious relationships present generally salient norms for Tibetans, and are connected to polyandry and idealised representations of Tibet in older people's discourse. On the other hand, Indian popular film and television are ubiquitous in Tibetan everyday life. The ethnography presented demonstrates that Indian popular culture has helped to shape Tibetan diasporic aesthetics and historicity and provides an idiom for ideas and practices of love, romance and marriage for younger Tibetans in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

First, demographic aspects and the focus of research of studies on the Tibetan Diaspora are presented in relation to other, general studies of diasporas. Then, the notion of "Tibetanness" is analyzed and. against this background, traditional Tibetan attitudes, the relation of adaptation and integration, and also the idea of "limited integration" in the Tibetan case. Then, the discourse on the Tibet question (by, and about Tibetans) and the present situation of information are briefly portrayed. This includes the influence of the western, or, "Orientalist" discourse. Following this research methods regarding the Tibetan Diaspora are described (as in Capper, Kohut) as well as major complexes of Tibetan identity in the Diaspora are described: health, partnership, marriage and sexuality, the body, and generally coping strategies and the notion of "religio-political" identity. Finally, changed identities in the Diaspora are dealt with. and future research is addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]