Freeing Tibet: Affective Multimodalities and Musical Imaginaries in Exile
By Eda Elif Tibet (University of Bern)
“A community is imagined because the member of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in mind each lives the image of their communion”.
Benedict Anderson, “Imagined Communities”
“The way we look at others imprisons them in their narrowest allegiances. And that same look can also set them free!”
Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong
Loten Namling is a renowned Tibetan musician, opera singer, storyteller and spiritual activist. He is known for blending Tibetan classics with Sufi ballads, jazz, blues, heavy metal, and rock music. Namling has travelled all around the world with his lute, singing the songs of the Dalai Lama. Born in India, he represents the first generation of Tibetans living in exile. Although he has never seen Tibet, he says he "lives Tibet" in his imagination.
This paper discusses the process of creating the first episode of a documentary TV series called Antropolojik, in Turkey. The episodes dealing with contemporary anthropology worldwide are produced for Habitat TV, a channel that reaches 30 million people nationwide. The first episode, titled Tibet Inside of Me, is a conversation between the author Eda Elif Tibet and Loten Namling. They discuss their collaboration on filming several music videos together with the accompanying filmmaker and cinematographer, Cihan Elci. These videos included Tibetan Nomads, Tibetan Warriors, The Top of the World (La Topo) and Beautiful Mountains. The creators collaborated as part of the KarmaMotion Collective, a Multimodal and Visual Anthropology Production house, the author is a founder off. Their conversation looks behind the scenes of their media collaborations and they reflect on Namling's lifelong struggle and worldview on the "issue of Tibet".
Loten is a spiritual activist who expresses his affection, activism and hope through various social media platforms. He creates his own narrative(s) and reflects on the stages and processes of making music videos and performance art. In his interpretation of the Tibetan Freedom Campaign "Free Tibet", formed in 1987, he mediates a dialogue with his own reflections.
Namling, a musician, believes that music is a powerful tool to fight back against colonialism, where he is free to create new possibilities. Namling proposes that there are undiscovered bridges in music that can reveal the narratives that are typically suppressed and invisibilized by Nation States. By using an affective lens to sense and de-center the occupation's Tibetan representations, which are often defined and portrayed as backward, feudal, and uncivilized, the paper shifts the focus to the multi-layered complexities of Tibetan representations. The filmmakers Tibet and Elci showcase marches, protests, traditional clothing, nomadic lifestyle enactments, religious and cultural practices, which reveal the Tibet within Namlings’ imagination.
In this essay, we think with Namling’s work to propose incorporating multimodal anthropologies, postcolonial thought, and the Jungian transcendent function into existing research on affect. Our goal is to use these lenses to co-create and bring dreams and aspirations to life. We use affective multimodalities as a methodology to challenge dominant and mainstream media narratives and showcase the personal and collective experiences, talents and responses of marginalised groups and individuals, such as mobile pastoralists, Indigenous Peoples, refugees, migrants and local communities worldwide (Tibet & Deeq, 2022). This approach helps to illuminate their political formations and reactions to social injustices. Through media practices, these individuals and collectives can participate as equal partners in the authorship of their stories, moving beyond academic or institutional hierarchies to realize their dreams and aspirations.
Affective Multimodalities and Musical Imaginaries
Namling often responds to the horrific spread of Tibetan self-immolations in his lyrics. The first known self-immolation took place in exile in Delhi, India on April 27th 1998. A Tibetan youth congress hunger strike was broken up by Indian police and a protester set himself on fire and later died. The first reported self-immolation inside Tibet occurred on 27th February 2009 in Aba, Sichuan Province of Southwest China. A 27-year-old Tibetan monk was shot dead by the police after setting himself on fire (See the news). Since then, 133 Tibetans (21 women and 112 men) have set themselves on fire in protest, which prompted outrage among Tibetan communities within Tibet and the scattered diaspora. The rise in self-immolations affected most media organizations and altered the general cultural climate.
During a discussion presented by Verstraete in 2019, Namling made the connection between the concepts of 'active vanishing' and performativity. When a group seeks representation, they become visible, which in turn makes them vulnerable to state oppression and coercion. As a result, many are cautious and hesitant to capitalise on their visibility and reclaim destituent power (Veerstraete, 2019). This is often the case for Tibetan activists, who are often disappointed by the world's media attention being indifferent, apolitical, and inactive towards their cause. For this reason, Loten Namling once dragged a coffin from Bern to Geneva to symbolise the dying nation and culture of Tibet. The entire journey was filmed by Swiss filmmaker Dodo Hunzicker, in his own words "to shake people up and to alarm them with a wakeup call." On May 13, 2013, Namling started a protest walk called "A Journey for Freedom - One Man, One Path". He walked 150 km from Bern to Geneva on foot. Later, he performed at the Geneva UN headquarters alongside the Swiss band, The Young Gods. Namling's activism for Tibetan freedom earned him the Free Spirit Award in McLeod Ganj, India. Their film, Tibetan Warrior, has been showcased in film festivals worldwide and is also available for streaming on Netflix (See the trailer of “Tibetan Warrior” ).
As another example, one of our collaborative music videos starring Namling is called "Tibetan Warriors". The video is an experimental montage of archived footage from the past and present faces of Tibet, playing with temporality to open affective resonances. The video features traditional clothing and transcendental dancing as a form of resistance against China's colonial occupation. It highlights a culture of resistance in response to the Tibetan uprisings and the shocking self-immolations that have been happening in Tibet.
The video clip begins with a train and a clock turning backwards, symbolising the past. Namling starts singing while we see footage of the Chinese parliament and Dalai Lama as a child: "In times of the great emperors of Tibet and China a treaty of peace was signed between the two nations..." The scene then switches to Namling standing in front of an occupied culture house in Bern called Reitschule. The colours of his dress are in harmony with the colours of the murals painted on the wall. The walls are adorned with phrases such as, "You buried us but didn't know we were seeds" and "Terror and chaos".
The montage phase features images of the turning, the burning, the march, and the tornado, while Namling’s music video highlights sites of collective identification as protest symbols continuously appear (Gerbaudo & Trere, 2015).
The music video for Tibetan Nomads showcases Namling, also known as the nomad, who gets lost in the luxurious streets of Zurich but eventually finds himself among the humble yak herders and shepherds of Andermatt. The video portrays his instant connection with the yaks and the Swiss Alps, which resemble the Himalayas, portrayed alongside Tibetan games such as Tsampa, making Momo’s (dumplings), and chanting traditional rhymes. The video explores the theme of losing and finding one's Tibetan identity and how it is performed and re-enacted. It has gone viral on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram and sparked debates among the Tibetan transnational political circuits and diaspora, as they imagine and envision a free Tibet.
Namling discusses how polarization on social media can hinder genuine dialogue and subsequently have long-term effects on activism practices. He believes that Tibetans are overly influenced by outside politics and the digital world, leading to a sense of delusion. Although digital technologies play a role in his activism efforts, Namling stresses the importance of street activism for creating true impact and garnering support.
“Not only preserving Tibetan culture but also making bridges… undiscovered bridges. You need an open heart as music is boundless, once you are without expectation and you do it just for the love of music then every door and window opens, and that is so beautiful you know…” (Loten Namling)
In addition to his tireless work as an activist and his desire to collaborate with musicians from all around the world, Namling devotes a significant amount of his time to community building and knowledge sharing. To achieve this, he utilises WhatsApp to share live performances and talks in real-time with his followers.
Gerbaudo & Trere (2015) posit that collective identity is closely tied to internal social media communication. They state, “social media represents not only the organizational backbone of contemporary social movements, but also multifaceted ecologies where a new, expressive and humorous ‘communicative resistance grammar’ emerges.” In addition, they discuss the use of protest avatars during the 2011 wave of popular protests, including the Egyptian revolution, the Spanish indignados movement and Occupy Wall Street. Loten, who uses himself as an avatar too, is always in a constant search for new bridges, narrative possibilities and collaborations as he states: “theatre is quite my inspiration, I need to be interesting, I need to bring in humour to this sad story, so I can raise hope and make Tibetans inside Tibet, happy”.
Conclusions
The advent of online and digital activism has brought a new set of challenges, such as algorithmic control and censorship that can impede activism on the ground and digital citizenship. Activists and artists, like Namling, seek support and response from society. Namling throughout all his work uses himself as an avatar by creating different characters for each of his music videos. The videos explore themes of losing and finding one's Tibetan identity and how it is performed and re-enacted. Our productions go viral on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram and sparked debates among the Tibetan transnational political circuits and diaspora, as they imagine and envision a free Tibet. Our paper examined how Namling and other activists have reclaimed their citizenship through digital activism, inspired by various forms of art such as theatre, music, and performance. We also explore how the boundary between real life and digital theatre has become blurred. Finally, we aim to understand how the merging of digital, street, and artistic activism can be used as a multimodal intervention to reclaim lost citizenship.
References Cited
Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
Auslander, P (2008) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. USA and Canada: Routledge.
Gerbaudo, P. & Trere, E (2015) In search of the ‘we’ of social media activism: introduction to the special issue on social media and protest identities, Information, Communication & Society, 18:8, 865-871, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2015.1043319
Gorkem Yavuz, S (2017) The weakest link or the magic stick?: Turkish activists’ perceptions on the scope and strength of digital activism, Turkish Studies, 18:1, 102-124, DOI:10.1080/14683849.2016.1272048
Maalouf, Amin. In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong
Saba Akım, M (2021) "Liveness And Interacting: An Ontological-Historical Investigation On Digitalized Theatre And Seeing Regime," Sanat Yazıları , no.44, 31-47
Tibet, E.E. & Deeq, A. (2022) “Learning to Be Freed: Affective Multimodalities in Third Space”. Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology 27 (April):58-77.
Verstraete, P(2019) In Search of a New Performativity after Gezi: On Symbolic Politics and New Dramaturgies in Turkey.
Links
2021 “The Tibet Inside of Me” Antropolojik Documentary TV program at HABITAT TV (23mins, filmed by E.E.Tibet & Cihan Elci) https://vimeo.com/504557772
2020 “Tibetan Nomads” Loten Namling & Porok Karpo (5 mins, Directed by Eda Elif Tibet ,filmed by E.E.Tibet & Cihan Elci) https://youtu.be/ML5HKwIjbZ4
2020 “Lo Thopo” Top of the World. Loten Namling & Ponrtohulla (6 mins, Directed by Eda Elif Tibet , filmed by E.E.Tibet & Cihan Elci) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nDoiNAh9gs&feature=youtu.be
2020 “Tibetan Warriors” Loten Namling & Porok Karpo (4.32 mins, Directed by Eda Elif Tibet, filmed by E.E.Tibet & Cihan Elci with Archival Footage on Tibet): https://vimeo.com/449225978
2020 “Kyi Pai Lungpa” Beautiful Mountains. Loten Namling & Porok Karpo (4.58 mins, Directed by Eda Elif Tibet , filmed by E.E.Tibet & Cihan Elci) https://vimeo.com/431166103