Langri Workshop | Beautiful Country: Beauty, Memory, and Archive Along Tibetan Refugee-built Roads in Himachal Pradesh

The Global Studies in Migration and Diaspora Research Workshop is excited to announce the first fall quarter meeting featuring Khando Langri, a PhD student in anthropology at Stanford. Join us for an insightful presentation titled "Beautiful Country: Beauty, Memory, and Archive along Tibetan Refugee-built Roads in Himachal Pradesh." 

Food and refreshments will be provided. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A and an open discussion. 

Abstract: Tibetan poet Tsering Wangmo Dhompa writes: “We say we are good and loyal people because our land is so beautiful. Our land is our ornament” (Dhompa 2013, 51). What, then, becomes of beauty outside of land? How might one care for such ornament amidst dispossession? In this paper I engage with beauty in the context of road building camps in which Tibetan refugees labored in the first decade of exile (1959–71). In attending to beauty as it emerged in roadside contexts—songs, dances, tent altars, flowers—I seek to draw out an intimate archive, one in which Tibetan conceptions of beauty and its associated images are centered. I venture that adornment curated within the roadside can be conceived of as a form of daily care for homeland lost, a cultivation of a beauty and attentiveness that mirrors what Saidiya Hartman describes as “a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence [...] a will to adorn” (Hartman 2019).