Anthropology Commons^™

The Transformation Of Tibetan Identity, Mang Jia

Senior Theses

After the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1951, Tibetan identity began to secularize, shifting from a more traditional religious to a more explicitly political identity. The few studies that focus on the secularization of Tibetan identity, even if only secondarily, claim that it is either a compulsory product imposed by the reinforcement of modernization by the Chinese authority or a voluntary product through younger generations of Tibetans’ internalization, primarily through schooling, of the Chinese colonization ideology. Either way, those scholars of Tibetan studies treat the secularization of Tibetan identity as a form of cultural assimilation or deterioration of Tibetan identity. …