Sally Falk Moore
This is a detailed and unsentimental book. It examines and explains the remarkable financial success of the Tibetan refugees in Nepal, by exploring the effects of powerful foreign assistance and lively Tibetan cooperation. The agendas of the political patrons of the Tibetans and the motives of the Tibetans themselves are inspected in a global framework of engineered transformations and organized responses. This is mandatory reading for anyone interested in international affairs and the newest achievements in anthropological fieldwork.
—Harvard University
Stanley Tambiah
Ann Frechette's book Tibetans in Nepal (2002) is an incisive and systematic account that begins with how Tibetan exiles, who arrived in Nepal some forty years ago, poor and stateless, were able with the help of international assistance to develop and control Nepal's largest industry, the manufacture and export of handmade woolen carpets. The crux of Ann's impressive achievement - ethnographic, interpretive and theoretical - is to set aside the romantic narratives of Tibet-as-Shangri-La, and of Tibetans in exile as focused on preserving and protecting their traditional identity and religio-cultural heritage, and to engage in tracing the dynamics of the trajectory and effects of the interaction between international assistance and the Tibetan exiles. These dynamics include not only the successful formation of settlement camps, monasteries and schools, but also the imbibing of Western patrons' liberal democratic themes and values, such as the right to self determination, protection of the environment, support for multiculturalism, etc., as consistent with Tibetan traditions and concerns. Moreover, international assistance and its ideological baggage both assist and complicate the efforts of Tibetan exiles to define themselves as a national community and to seek recognition as such by international powers and agencies. This recognition, though subject to continuing construction and contestation, is crucial for the Dalai Lama's exile administration's efforts to seek recognition for the Tibetan community's membership in the international family of nations, to publicize the Tibetan political cause, and to claim a share of international resources.
Ann Frechette's multi-sited and multidimensional study, moving back and forth between the local and the global, should serve as a necessary resource for scholars studying other communities in exile or in diasporic circumstances.
—Harvard University
Levent Soysal
Frechette explicates the social and institutional conditions of Tibetan success in exile in a globalizing world ... A stimulating ethnographic excursion into the landscape of globalization.
—European College of Liberal Arts, Berlin
