July 1939 / Departs Amdo for three-month journey to Lhasaġ939 / Public Declaration of the Official Recognition of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama near town of BumchenĨ October 1939 / Enters Lhasa after three-month journey from Amdo (Earth-Hare Year, 8th month, 25th day)Ģ2 February 1940 / Enthronement Ceremony (Iron-Dragon Year, 1st month, 14th day)ġ940 / Begins monastic education at the age of fiveġ942 / Receives Vows of Novice Monk from Taktra Rinpoche (1st month, 10th day)ġ7 November 1950 / Assumes full temporal (political) power after China's invasion of Tibet in 1949 (Iron-Tiger Year, 10th month, 11th day)ġ6 December 1950 / Departs Lhasa for Dromo because of Chinese threat This essay uses the theoretical insights of Giorgio Agamben, Banu Bargu, and Michael Biggs to think through self-immolation protests within a mystical-political framework that constructs these acts as martyrdoms.17 December 1933 / Thirteenth Dalai Lama Passes Away in Lhasa at the age of 57 (Water-Bird Year, 10th month, 30th day)Ħ July 1935 / Born in Taktser, Amdo, Tibet (Wood-Pig Year, 5th month, 5th day) heroes, martyrs) themselves as sites of conflict – conflict over their “message,” who is ultimately responsible, and what can or should be done. As then, the current cycle of Tibetan self-immolations inaugurated some debate about the nature of these acts, and how they are to be interpreted as agentive manifestations of “communicative suffering” – whether these are suicides, patriotic sacrifices, religious offerings, or something altogether different. As a modern protest tactic, autocremation originated with the Saigon immolation of the Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức in 1963. The Tibetan self-immolations have been chronically underreported in the international media, but have elicited charged internal conversations within the Tibetan and allied communities. This paper will investigate the contemporary phenomenon of Tibetan autocremations, considering them as responses to Chinese colonization, in the larger contexts of self-mortification and political protest. Due to the state of available source material, the study focuses on the imaginations of Tibet within the contents of the newspaper and thus combines Benedict Anderson’s theses of “imagined communities” with a transcultural approach. On the other hand, it investigates, how, in the process, the global product newspaper was adapted for a Tibetan-speaking audience, analyzing transformation processes of the genre newspaper. On one hand, the study thus investigates transformation processes of the participating community, Tibet. These are: religion (Christianity), knowledge production (discourses on the shape of the earth), world politics (coverage of the Second World War), economics (advertisements), and time (the newspaper as prophecy). Five case studies based on the general content of the newspaper further highlight the strategies for making foreign concepts understood whilst in the process changing the newspaper. The same data allows insights into how Tibet as a nation state was imagined within the Melong, at the same time appropriating contents in language and style to specific communicative protocols established amongst Tibetan-language speakers. A detailed content analysis of editorial comments published in the newspaper underlines this trend. His partly commercial outlook gave way to a new agency of a mass audience, in theory levelling people as equal potential customers, disregarding traditional socio-cultural hierarchies. Here, Tharchin, with his workshop, is identified as one of the first commercial print-publishers for the Tibetan language. After giving a concise history of mediated communication on the Tibetan plateau with a focus on print media, the production environment of the Melong’s print shop “Tibet Mirror Press” in Kalimpong is examined. The Melong’s main editor Tharchin attributed value to the newspaper itself: as a medium of an active public of a nation state. Different from its precursors, the Melong was not only envisioned as a medium to propagate religious contents (such as Christian missionaries had done) or political propaganda (such as the Republicans in China had done). It developed into one of most influential early newspapers in Tibetan-language. The Melong was produced between 19 from the Indo-Tibetan border town of Kalimpong, by the Christian convert Babu Tharchin. the “Mirror of News from Various Regions ” (in short: Melong), in a socio-historical context. The study examines the beginnings of a Tibetan-language newspaper history by analyzing the Yul phyogs so so’i gsar ‘gyur me long, i.e.
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