Dan Smyer Yu

Pema Tseden's Transnational Cinema: Screening a Buddhist Landscape of Tibet

The emergence of independent Tibetan filmmakers in China only began in the twenty-first century; however, their productions are already being premiered and are winning awards at international film festivals. In their productions the cinematic images of Tibetan cultural landscapes are markedly different from their Western and Chinese counterparts. Both the verisimilitude and believability of their scenes and characters point to the inextricability of Tibetan Buddhism from Tibetan cultural identity. Using a case study of the films of Pema Tseden, the leading Tibetan indie filmmaker in China, this article illustrates the transnational nature of his filmmaking. At the same time it discusses how he cinematically depicts Tibetan Buddhist values being destabilized by the forces of globalization and modernization in the context of contemporary China.The emergence of independent Tibetan filmmakers in China only began in the twenty-first century; however, their productions are already being premiered and are winning awards at international film festivals. In their productions the cinematic images of Tibetan cultural landscapes are markedly different from their Western and Chinese counterparts. Both the verisimilitude and believability of their scenes and characters point to the inextricability of Tibetan Buddhism from Tibetan cultural identity. Using a case study of the films of Pema Tseden, the leading Tibetan indie filmmaker in China, this article illustrates the transnational nature of his filmmaking. At the same time it discusses how he cinematically depicts Tibetan Buddhist values being destabilized by the forces of globalization and modernization in the context of contemporary China.

Subaltern placiality in modern Tibet: Critical discourses in the works of Shogdong

I attempt to write this article as a pathology of modernity in connection with how place, memory, and subalternity are expressed by urban Tibetans in China. The literary works of Shogdong, a contemporary Tibetan writer and cultural critic, are the focus of my interpretation of the sociopolitical, religious, and psychological meanings of an anti-traditional discourse among urban Tibetans. My pathologizing this intra-Tibetan discourse is meant to discern how modern subjectivity or its mindscape in the case of urban Tibetans is inherently conditioned by place as both geographic landscape and locus of memory. I then argue that the negation of anti-traditional Tibetans of their native traditional cultural and religious values and practices is a remembering process which is inversed as a process of seemingly intentional subversion, rejection, and forgetting; and I further argue that the anti-traditionalist imagining of a modern Tibet, though it uses nomenclature identical to that of China’s socialism, is not a ...I attempt to write this article as a pathology of modernity in connection with how place, memory, and subalternity are expressed by urban Tibetans in China. The literary works of Shogdong, a contemporary Tibetan writer and cultural critic, are the focus of my interpretation of the sociopolitical, religious, and psychological meanings of an anti-traditional discourse among urban Tibetans. My pathologizing this intra-Tibetan discourse is meant to discern how modern subjectivity or its mindscape in the case of urban Tibetans is inherently conditioned by place as both geographic landscape and locus of memory. I then argue that the negation of anti-traditional Tibetans of their native traditional cultural and religious values and practices is a remembering process which is inversed as a process of seemingly intentional subversion, rejection, and forgetting; and I further argue that the anti-traditionalist imagining of a modern Tibet, though it uses nomenclature identical to that of China’s socialism, is not a replica of China’s modernity, but an exercise of a power discourse in a subaltern sense.

A Review of Carolyn Chen's Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience

Becoming religious among immigrants to the U.S. is undoubtedly a complex transformation. It takes place with both external sociocultural conditions and internal spiritual and psychological volitions. While marveling at Carolyn Chen’s fine scholarship on Taiwanese immigrants’ conversion experience, this review offers a critical reading of Chen’s equation: becoming American = becoming religious or vice versa with the reviewer’s own experience as both an Asian immigrant and a cultural anthropologist. It also discusses Chen’s assessment of the gendered identity of both Asian-American men and women, be it religious, cultural, or political.

Becoming Conversant by Learning to Listen: A Reading of T. M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God

This review considers T. M. Luhrmann’s ethnographic findings on contemporary evangelical Christian practices and her aim to bridge the “rift between believers and non-believers.” Luhrmann’s portrayal of these practices stems from current research within evolutionary psychology, sociology, and the neurosciences on consciousness and religiosity. Depth Psychology and aspects of non-affiliated, lived religions that cultivate such “experiences of mind” are also considered.