Tibet is often talked about as a monolith, but there’s great regional variation in the historical Tibetan regions of Amdo, Kham and U Tsang, now divided into the Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan and Xizang. Each has a different dialect and cultural heritage, and one of those traditional practices that really digs into such matters of identity and politics is zurza — a form of Tibetan satire, often in spoken repartee similar to Chinese xiangsheng, particular popular in the Amdo region.

Our guest on the podcast this month is Timothy Thurston, Associate Professor in China Studies at the University of Leeds and author of Satirical Tibet: The Politics of Humor in Contemporary Amdo (University of Washington Press, April 2025), a study of zurza satire. From radio scripts of the 1980s, through to TV recordings in the 2000s, and Tibetan hip hop today, the genre has shown how Tibetan humorists walk the line between social comedy and political critique, keeping Tibetan language and tradition alive in an environment that is often hostile to both. We’re delighted that Thurston could join us over the line to talk us through the context, history and implications of Tibetan satire:

Guest

Zurza is a way of being able to say things that are unsayable. It’s this tool that Tibetans have in their arsenal to say things that are difficult to say.

Transcript

Alec Ash: Timothy, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Timothy Thurston: Thank you for having me.

So before we get into Tibetan satire in your book, let’s lay a little geographical groundwork with what we mean when we say Tibet. It has a long and contested history from the 9th century Tibetan kingdom being variously an independent state and variously part of China. Arguably, it was a vassal state of the Qing, then an independent state until the Chinese invasion of 1951, and then the borders of Tibet province, today Xizang, contracted in, was it 1965 when parts of historical Tibet were subsumed into the neighboring provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and, and Qinghai, where your book is set? Can you walk us briefly through this modern history and explain what and where is Tibet today?

So that’s a great question. Thank you. As a folklorist, which is how I start far too many sentences, we often talk about disclaimers of performance, and I’m going to have to sort of begin with one now to say that my research and my personal interests are very much more in the contemporary period. So I may take some liberties or, be a little bit…I will glide over some of the details in what is about to come. But, basically, the way we think about sort of what I would call cultural Tibet today is large portions of Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu provinces, as well as Xizang, previously known as the Tibet Autonomous Region, or sometimes contestedly known as the Tibet Autonomous Region today.

Um, and so you have Tibetan communities that live in all of these different jurisdictions and these communities, many of them have long historical, connections with the Tibetan Empire. So you have stories about how the Tibetan Empire or the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo or other Tibetan kings around the Tang Dynasty, had soldiers who came out and had garrisons in this area. Then from that time there were Tibetans living in this area. So, we could say, regardless of whether or not it was directly controlled by Chinese emperors or by the government in Lhasa, which sometimes changed a little bit and there was a lot of negotiation in which sometimes you would have local leaders who would sometimes go get recognition from Lhasa and then go to Beijing and get recognition from Beijing or from a representative from Beijing. There were contested poles of power at that time, but all of them are sort of – this is Tibetan inhabited space. And we say Tibetan inhabited space in a cultural sense, in the sense that these are places where languages that are Tibetan are spoken or where there are people who are in the contemporary sense recognized as Tibetans live, which is a slightly more complicated question, is who is recognized as a Tibetan?

But Tibetic languages, and often in many cases, similar to Chinese, unified by a single script. So, the Tibetan writing system that is used for Buddhism and also for Tibetan political purposes. And in contemporary terms for literature for the comedies that I’ve been researching, this has unified people who speak mutually unintelligible forms of language that linguists would call Tibetic languages.

Tell us more about that language. Sometimes I hear the phrase Sino Tibetan language group, but Tibetan looks so radically different to the Chinese script, more like Hindu or Vedic. Is it related to Indian languages? And there’s one script you’re saying like Chinese, as opposed to different, variations of the spoken languages depending on region.

Correct. So the popular story that Tibetans tell is that the king Songtsen Gampo – the king who married, Princess Wencheng and is sort of memorialized in all the state discourse around that –lso, sent some ministers and some monks to India to develop a writing system for the Tibetan language. And again, I’m being a little bit simplistic, but one of them brought back this writing system that he created based on Indic languages. So you’re right. I mean, it does look radically different. It’s not a character-based system. It is a syllabary. So. You have 30 consonants. There are ways of joining the consonants to make syllables. And then your vowels are written as diacritics –

Which means that squiggles above or below…

Above and below, yes.

You use the phrase crooked letters, or they use the phrase crooked letters, in your book to describe it. Geographically, of course, the Tibetan Plateau is the thing which – am I correct in thinking – unified the historical idea of Tibet and now it’s broken up between the different Chinese provinces, but originally there were three Tibetan regions. I think I’ll let you pronounce them, instead of attempting it myself.

Well, pronunciations will be funny anyways, no matter who says them, in part because they differ based on the dialect you’re speaking. So, I’m, with apologies perhaps to people who are more familiar with Central Tibetan, which is sort of the dialect that gets taught most frequently in exile and in university courses. I will be trying to pronounce things closer to how I understand the Amdo dialect. So, one region is Amdo. This is sort of Northeastern Tibet. This is most of the Tibetan communities in Qinghai province, as well as the communities in southern Gansu, so is primarily Amdo. And then there are, in northern Sichuan around sort of Aba area. Aba Prefecture, is largely Amdowa – the wa being sort of just a “person of Amdo.” The second region is Kham, which is sort of Yushu Tibetan autonomous prefecture in sort of the western part of Sichuan province, the eastern part of the Tibet Autonomous Region. And the Tibetan communities in Yunnan frequently considered Khampas or Kham. And then the third region is U-Tsang. That would be the Amdo pronunciation. This is sort of Lhasa and Shigatse, sort of the majority of the area that people often recognize as the Tibet autonomous region.

And so these are three regions. They speak forms that are for the most part mutually unintelligible. People do learn to speak multiple dialects, but for the most part, if you’re speaking Kham dialect and you haven’t had a lot of exposure to Amdo dialect, you will not understand somebody who’s speaking it. But as I suggested earlier, and to return to a question you asked, these are joined by a single script. And so you’ll find there is a fair amount of overlap in individual words. but they will be pronounced very differently. So it’ll be the same word. You can write it the same way, but the pronunciation will differ. But depending on the area you are in or from.

So you have these three different Tibetan regions which map onto the contemporary Chinese provinces. Uh, my first trip to China in the summer of 2007, I was teaching in Amdo in Qinghai Province, a village called Song Kong Xi, near to Rebkong, a few hours drive south of Xining, the capital of Qinghai. And Rebkong is one of the art capitals of Tibet. I also first went into the Tibetan Autonomous Region that summer too, on a trip with a Chinese tour guide, which was the only way I could get in on the then quite newly built train, and visited Tibetan areas of western Sichuan. It was really striking to me how different each region felt culturally. On top of a language that you’re talking about, in Kham they wore these cowboy hats and carried knives. Amdo felt more agrarian than nomadic at times with singing and horse riding festivals. Are there other big cultural differences between the regions as well as linguistic?

Absolutely. And this gets codified in the way that Tibetans themselves will define these three regions. So these are sort of the three major regions that Tibetans will talk about, and there’s a famous distinction they make in the Chol-kha-gsum, the three regions, and these are the three regions. That’s Amdo, U-Tsang, Kham. They have some vernacular ways of describing that they’re culturally different. So Lhasa is the land of religion as, most popularly remembered, Kham is sort of the place of people. So your observation, Alec, that there were people wearing cowboy hats and wearing these knives – well, this wearing of the knife and the reputation of being maybe, quick to anger, quick to fight, fighting over any number of things and maybe multi-generational feuds and things like this. This is something for which Kham is particularly well known. And then, Amdo was traditionally called the land of horses. Uh, in part because, outside of the Rebkong area, which is much more farming, much more agrarian, southern Amdo, with Golok are known for really, really tremendous verdant grasslands, that are potentially very good for raising horses. More recently they’ve also taken on different characters. Again, Amdo is more known for being one of the intellectual hubs of cultural Tibet. And Lhasa and Kham maintain their previous reputations for being religious centers and warlike, respectively.

So let’s get into the topic of your book, which is not something people might associate with Tibet. Everyone’s familiar with Tibetan resistance in terms of protest or even self-immolation, but you researched a form of Tibetan satire called zurza, which uses crosstalk or a kind of comic repartee for social and political critique. Can you introduce zurza to us and correct my pronunciation of it? What is its form, its history, and how is it being used?

Sure. Thank you. So, I first came to zurza this concept that I sort of loosely translate as the Tibetan arts of satire and sarcasm –dictionaries will just say sarcasm or satire. But I think it goes beyond that. It’s the art of creating these forms. And I first came across it, in the course of already, I was already doing research on the topic of these comedies that would form the basis of my PhD dissertation and that is the basis of this book. And I was doing interviews, it was probably five or six interviews in when all of a sudden I noticed somebody using this word. Maybe somebody was saying it before, but you know, sometimes your language catches up to your thought process or somehow the synapses fire and all of a sudden you think, wait a second. That’s a new term. I need to understand what’s going on here. So that’s sort of the genesis of my approach to this is sort of just starting to pull that thread on what, what is this thing? And how is it operating? And so eventually I’ve come to this realization that zurza is this traditional concept. It’s not something that is just limited to contemporary comedy or literature or things like that. It’s actually something that Tibetans have been doing for much a longer period of time. I didn’t necessarily go far enough to discover, you know, some first usage date, but this is something that Tibetans have been doing for quite some time.

And the term itself kind of gives us some indications on what it becomes. “Zur” means like angles or sides, and then “za” is like to eat. So it’s sort of “eating the sides.” In many cases, it refers to the sense of trying to be indirect to land a critique, to make a statement, to criticize or comment on somebody or something with indirection and humor. And in this way it’s something that a lot of communities do around the world, but this is the uniquely Tibetan approach to doing it.

If you are going to attack or make fun of somebody, there’s a good chance that they might take offense. And in some cases, if somebody takes offense in the wrong way or too seriously, it can lead to bloodshed, or it can lead to, I mean, if you’re trying to speak a critique to power, it can lead to quite serious consequences for oneself and potentially for one’s family. And so zurza is this way of being able to say things that are unsayable or tell things that are untellable in context where it’s going to be difficult. You know, we can immediately think about how that is useful in the context of contemporary China. But this is something that also is useful and necessary in historical times when the average person may have their wits and their mouth, but they may not have a lot of power to back up, or to stand somebody down in the context of being maybe a farmer in an area controlled by a local lord, or to speak something that is difficult to say to a local religious figure in a community that puts a lot of emphasis on religion. So it’s this tool that Tibetans have in their arsenal to say things that are difficult to say.

What are the kind of things that they satirize through this form? How much of it is cultural, local, politics, religion, and how much can they say about Chinese control and oppression? How direct can the satire get?

In a traditional sense, some of it actually to a Western eye or ear, would feel reasonably direct in the traditional sense. There is a strain of traditional satire that is very much just about making fun of how an individual looks or acts in a particular situation. The book is sort of structured chronologically. And so in the one of the earlier chapters, it’s more about traditions. And in this traditional period we’re looking at these comedies that, or, or not comedies, but these satirical poems. Basically you see somebody do something funny or inappropriate or silly and then you on the spot extemporaneously compose a poem that makes fun of them and is really direct. Some of it is really harsh, you would think in a Western context, you would think, how can you get away with that? But it works in the Tibetan sense. In that sense, very cultural.

When we get into the contemporary period, the forms of comedy that I’m looking at are overwhelmingly performed on stages or airwaves. So one has to be really careful about that. And it goes through several layers of vetting to reach state sponsored stages in airwaves, right? The critiques are often much less personal, much more oblique. They can critique general behaviors or they can hold up a mirror to local society and local behaviors, but there very little direct critique of central government, of policy, of things like that. So a lot of it, I think as outsiders with a particular background and a particular media diet, shall we say, we often look for maybe more sensational, more direct, more antagonistic forms of satire and resistance. We look for resistance and often when we look for it, we can find it. Which is why, as you said at the outset, there are these spectacular forms of protests that get a lot of attention. Like self-immolation. And what zurza and the arts of Tibetan satire allow people to do is to engage in much more quotidian, much more understated forms of resistance. And a lot of it is focused back on Tibetan communities rather than on the state, and if it looks at the state, it’s at representatives who are coming out of Tibetan communities in many cases.

So I thought that we could, give an example actually by reading out one of these dialogues from the book together, in your translation. We picked a section where two Tibetans are talking about the local party secretary, Secretary Wang Cheng, who is Tibetan. Maybe you could introduce the section and the characters that we will be reading.

Yeah. So this is from the earliest comic dialogue in my corpus, so this is a script that I found in the collected writings of an author named Dondrup Gyal, who’s sort of credited as the father of modern Tibetan literature. For people who haven’t yet had a chance to look at this book, this is basically a Tibetan version of xiangsheng, like of Chinese crosstalk. So people who might be more familiar with, crosstalk in Beijing or Tianjin might recognize that there are some similar things that go on. You have sort of opening sections of repartee where two people are having a chat, and then it gets into some broader discussion about life these days, or society or things like this. And this is what’s happening here is that they’ve opened with, two characters. neither of whom are sort of historically identifiable figures, but they’re having a chat you can imagine sort of two people meeting on the street, old friends catching up. You know, they start by little displays of wit in which they perform little proverbs. And then it turns into the fact that one of them is concerned about the state of Tibetan language. This script’s name actually means studying Tibetan.

And so he’s concerned about the Tibetan language because there are people who feel like studying Tibetan is not useful in modern society. And you can imagine that this is probably a conversation that’s happening in Amdo in 1980. So this is from 1980, right after Reform and Opening Up, you can imagine that people are sitting there thinking, is it useful for us to worry about learning Tibetan language anymore? They’re talking about how Tibetan is used in modern times, and this is where this particular comedy starts to pick up, or this section that we’re talking about is gonna pick up, is they’re postulating on the behavior of a local party secretary and his language use and how that shapes perceptions on the importance of Tibetan language in contemporary times.

Wonderful. So I’ll begin, playing the straight man of the two in this comic repartee who begins, “What did you say? Secretary Wang Cheng doesn’t know Tibetan?”

“Where are there Tibetans who don’t speak Tibetan? He speaks Tibetan better than I do.”

“If he knows Tibetan, then why do you have to translate?”

“The reason cannot be expressed in one or two words, right? Don’t tell anyone, but Secretary Wang Cheng is really interesting. When he’s with Tibetans, he speaks nothing but Chinese. When he’s in Chinese places, he speaks nothing but Tibetan.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s really hilarious if you think about it. Last year we went to the pastoral areas to do propaganda for the party’s economic policies.”

“That’s good. If a pastoral and farming masses, know the Party’s policies, then all the agricultural and pastoral work will develop. Moreover, the lives of a pastoral and agricultural masses can get rich.”

“That’s right, except the masses were unable to clearly understand the Party’s policies.”

“Why not?”

“The document was in Chinese. Party Secretary Wang Cheng proclaimed in Chinese and there are very few among the masses who understand Chinese.”

“You couldn’t interpret?”

“Who would have a Tibetan interpret for a Tibetan? Also, I myself am not very capable. And afterwards, Secretary Wang Chen there was an error or that was wrong.”

“Then there’s nothing you can do. Well then can’t Secretary Wang Cheng speak in Tibetan?”

“How could Party Secretary Wang Cheng speak Tibetan, you old fool?”

“Why is that?”

“If he spoke Tibetan, then it would dull the shine of being a Party Secretary.”

“Stop being silly.”

“I’m telling it like it is. If a Tibetan speaks Tibetan, then he can’t signal that he’s a Party Secretary.”

“I’ve never seen or heard anything like it. It’s really difficult if you have a Party Secretary like that.”

“Actually, Secretary Wang Cheng speaks broken Chinese. Unless you’re accustomed to listening to it, it’s very difficult to understand.”

So yes, I can see how it’s flirting with the red line a little bit. Uh, it’s not directly critical, but it’s getting to the heart of the matter, of language and politics and curing favor and the sort of influence of the Communist Party in Tibet and posturing that is necessary to survive in Tibetan politics. So is this representative of how the form walks the line?

Yeah. I mean, what you also immediately get out of that is that there’s no critique of central Party policy. Right? It’s sort of praising the general policy. It’s saying if people understand the policies, then everything’s gonna get better. And I mean, maybe you could, you could read that as having a double meaning as just sort of being cynical, but at the same time, this particular author is no longer with us. We can only go based on the words he said. What we do see is that it’s very directly shining a light on the behavior of Tibetans in this period, right? And Secretary Wang Cheng. Literally, that name means “very powerful.” So it’s sort of a useful little name that he’s chosen to deploy here. It’s the idea that this person is not somebody you can stand up to. And as far as we know, he’s not a historical figure. What he is is a foil, he’s just sort of standing in for however many other party secretaries have used their power like this or tried to index their power in this fashion. The way I think about it though is, I mean there, there is this component where it’s part-funhouse mirror, part-prism for understanding changes in Tibetan communities at that time. And I say that because it’s comedy, so you can’t take it as a faithful representation because it’s intentionally exaggerating certain behaviors to make it funny or to make a point.

 It is sort of a reflection in a way, and I say a prism because it sort of refracts out these different issues and lets them be, seen both by audiences for sort of public meditation on what is going on. I mean, so the audience, the ideal audience is Tibetan. There are very few people who read these. Chinese readers generally wouldn’t be able to come across these or listeners and…Westerners generally don’t read these or look at these. So it’s very much for a Tibetan audience and it’s sort of saying what are the issues, what is the story about us today? And it’s refracting out and it’s showing us these different issues. It’s showing the issue of the behavior of these party secretaries.

It’s allowing him to use that to come back to an issue that Tibetans are very concerned about in the 1980s and honestly, in Amdo, basically pretty continuously since then, which is the concern over what is going to happen to Tibetan language and Tibetan language knowledge. What is happening with our culture? I mean, these sort of concerns are allowed to be put on display for audiences to sort of think about in the 20th century.

You quote a Tibetan proverb, “There’s no way to talk without joking.” Which reminds me of a line from the Roman Satirist Juvenal, who wrote, “It is difficult not to write satire,” meaning that there was so much corruption and so on in Nero’s Rome, that he couldn’t not satirize it. Do you think it’s a bit of the same meaning in Tibet?

I love that. Maybe. The term in that proverb is a more innocuous joke. So it’s not necessarily making that pointed a statement. But at the same time, what we see in, particularly in the post-Mao period, there’s a tremendous amount of writing that is satirical in nature, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. And in the forms of new forms of literature in these comedies. And to that degree, it seems like a lot of people felt that it was very difficult to write without writing satire and taking it a step beyond Juvenal. I think there’s both an element where there’s so much fodder to satirize, but there’s also that satire is perhaps one of the only ways to write meaningful work and have it reach audiences. Because in the contemporary Tibetan and Chinese…say mediascape, the media world or the world of cultural production, it’s very difficult to get ISBN numbers. It’s very difficult to get official permission to publish a movie. It’s particularly so now, but even in the 1980s and 1990s, it was very difficult to get on stage to get heard or seen. And to do that, you had to toe the line. If you wanted to make it more than just fairly bland material, satire is your tool, is your friend for that, I think.

And has there been any state blowback, censorship suppression of zurza?

Not as such. Or not explicitly, let’s say. I would say that there’s a fair amount of attention to anything that might undermine the unity of the zhonghua minzu, the Chinese nation. And so, any of these texts prior to publication or prior to performance and recording, et cetera, goes through a number of checks and edits. It has to get permission. So generally they’re, I think considered mostly safe. Individuals have gotten in trouble for things that they’ve written and performed. And we’ve seen it about musicians, and singers have gotten more in trouble because their song lyrics are often more direct. And what you see with these comedians and with these satirists is that one of the sources of their sustained success over a long period of time is that they are able to embed their critiques in a way that inoculates them to a degree from the state.

And I mean, there have been news items saying that so and so got arrested. Even without news items, I know one of the main comedians in this book was arrested for a short period of time, but I don’t think it was a significant thing. He didn’t really want to talk about it, but there are some times where somebody gets in trouble with a local official for maybe making a critique that hits too close to home. Then they get in trouble with sort of the official, the sort of the United Front or the PSV, things like that.

Got it. And how has the form evolved with modern technology? You start earlier, but then in the two thousands you have TV sketches, later, the rise of Tibetan hip hop and social media and smart firms. Walk us through these new forms and technologies for Tibetan satire.

One of the things I try to do in this book is I try to, with each chapter map sort of a technology, a time period, and a genre onto sort of local trends. And so in the early sections, I’m looking at oral tradition and literary tradition, and I’m looking about how direct or indirect, I sort of identify two strands of zurza. There’s one strand that is much more direct, much more personal. It’s targeting an individual and then you have another strand that is more about types of people, it’s not targeting individual people and their behaviors so much as targeting sort of broader behaviors that people do.

With this book, I try to generally structure each chapter to be focused on sort of one medium, one time period, one genre. So it goes oral tradition in sort of. Broader across multiple time periods. Then we have the 1980s and a written comic script. But I try to also attach that to satirical literature that was coming out at that time in the 1990s. There’s some very popular audio recordings of these comic dialogues of these Tibetan xiangsheng. Into the two thousands. in Western China, there’s the great Open the West campaign, and in this period you start seeing a lot of investment into Western China, greater wealth moving into, the communities and, and also the resettlement of a lot of more mobile communities into sort of stationary homes.

And what that does is that leads to increased television ownership. And you have this new form of performance which is kind of like the Chinese xiaopian or like, for viewers who are familiar with neither we could say, uh, Saturday Night Live sketches, they’re about 15 minutes long. They have people on stage – as few as two, as many as maybe four or five – basically they’re acting out their hijinks. And then starting in the late aughties, sort of post-2008 with the spread of the internet and also most importantly, smart digital technologies and Web 2.0 technologies, you start having people share things online. So this is sort of the general flow or chronological development that I’m trying to narrate with this book. And then in the contemporary period, I look at, there are all sorts of different things that you see online in the Tibetan sphere, but the one that I specifically look at in this period, it’s sort of a period of aggregation. So all of the things continue to exist. The scripts from the 1980s, the oral tradition to a degree. The 1990s audio-only comic dialogues. They’re also available for consumption online. These early two thousands videoed sketch comedies, they’re also available online. But then you have the emergence of Tibetan hip hop and other forms as well.

And across these the satire continues, but it also changes in certain ways such that maybe in the 1980s and 1990s it’s much, it’s this sort of oblique satirizing character types. In the early two thousands sort of similarly, you have these types of people, these types of behaviors that could put on display for public consumption and public meditation. Like how do we behave? Who are we in the 20th century? Who are we in the 21st century? Amidst all these changes to our lives in the 21st century, it gets a little bit more. Or with hip hop it gets a little bit complicated because there’s both more direct satire, where sometimes named individuals are referenced. So it’s not necessarily their names, but maybe their famous works are, are referenced, and then you also have sort of more general critiques about young people in the cities and things like that.

As a final question, springboarding off that, how healthy is Tibetan culture as a whole today? Not just zurza, but in wider literature, music, art, religion, both inside political Tibet and outside of it. Inside Tibet you have writers like Tsering Dondrup, whose novel The Red Wind Howls was translated into English this year, which we are reviewing. But there’s also the diaspora outside, not least, the Dalai Lama, whose new memoir we also covered. So, is Tibetan culture most alive inside China or more so outside of it?

It’s a great question. Beginning with the caveat that I am not an expert in the exile diaspora Tibetan communities and their experiences, and that I have a lot to learn in that area, let’s start with Tibetan communities who live in areas that are governed by the People’s Republic of China. I would say it’s a hodgepodge and it’s hard to make broad statements. We’re in a particular moment of constraint on ethnic minority cultural production in general. And there are a lot of regulations and limits that are placed on the visibility of minority language and culture at this moment. There are some areas that are very well supported. The Chinese government’s emphasis on intangible cultural heritage safeguarding means that certain traditions that are officially supported or officially recognized as heritage receive tremendous support.

So the Rebkong Thangka arts you had mentioned being in Rebkong earlier and this sort of largely farming community. But now increasingly there’s people not living in farms or they’re living in high rises. If you go back, I was back last summer, if you go back, it’s unrecognizable. The fields are largely gone. The city has expanded exponentially with high rises and art is everywhere. Um, there are these tremendously well-financed art academies that train apprentices up to continue this tradition. And in that sense, you have certain traditions that are incredibly vital and flourishing. At the same time there are constraints being placed on Tibetan language education in schools, on the public display, on Tibetan dress, in dance in some cases, and certainly on minority language publication. So one of the things I’ve been hearing a lot recently is about how difficult it’s to publish or to get a film approved, things like this. I would say, as with so many things with China, Tibet is sort of a Rorschach test. And if you wanna find it, you can. If you wanna see something, you will see it because it’s, everything is there in some ways.

Mm-hmm.

With the exile community, I can only speak through the experience of trying to raise a part-Tibetan daughter. And I don’t have much beyond that other than to say, one of the things I’ve come to realize is that community is vital. And without community it’s very difficult to maintain a sense of culture and to transmit language and culture. There are areas where there are large enough communities that forms of tradition and forms of culture are continuing to exist with a degree of vitality. At the same time, a lot of the exile communities work is focused on. central Tibetan traditions. And so what you don’t have as much is a flourishing of traditions like the Tibetan, the Amdo traditions that I’m most familiar with. So it’s complicated. Tibetan traditions and Tibetan traditional knowledge and Tibetan culture continues to exist. It is diffuse and this diffuseness in some ways can lead to marginalization, but it makes it very difficult to make this culture die out completely, as long as there are people who are dedicated to keeping it alive. And for now there are.

Well, let’s hope that the language, the culture, and the satirical spirit remain very much alive and healthy, both inside and outside of Tibet. Thank you so much, Tim Thurston for coming on the podcast today.

Thank you. Thank you, Alec, so much for having me. It’s been a real pleasure. ∎