Sustaining culture without Context? Thoughts on Tibetan Losar in Diaspora

Festivals are “umbrella genres” that include a variety of other forms within itself: drama, foodways, material traditions, singing, ritual, and more. In Tibetan culture, they are also often the sites for generating auspicious circumstances for oneself and one’s community, and losar (ལོ་སར།), the Tibetan New Year is among the most significant of these festivals. Tibetan populations around the globe gather on this day to celebrate the start of the lunar new year with food, dancing, prayer, and sociality. The date sometimes (but not always) coincides with the Chinese New Year.

In the winter of 2016, my wife and I (with our then-infant daughter) spent losar outside of the Tibetan Plateau for the first time since we had met. Faced with the prospect of celebrating away from her extended family and friends, we worried about how we could keep this practice alive for our daughter and ensure she develops a strong knowledge of her mother’s culture at considerable distance from the Tibetan Plateau. How, we asked ourselves (and continue to ask ourselves), do we sustain Tibetan cultural knowledge outside of Tibet? Living in a small city without a sizeable Tibetan community, we also faced questions about how to do this at a remove from the sorts of dense networks of family and friends that characterize Tibetan communities. In essence: how do you raise a child in absence of a culturally sensitive village? Less poetically: how do you sustain culture without context?

Most of the work falls directly to us, and we make trade-offs in order to maximize limited time and resources to greatest effect. Perhaps the maintenance of traditions has always been like this, but somehow things feel more pressing, and each decision more momentous. We immediately found that language was extremely difficult to maintain in the absence of environments and lively speech communities. To further complicate matters, the weight of media, education, and everyday living environments made Tibetan extremely difficult to transmit. Especially as I am not a native speaker. Given the importance of religion in Tibetan society, we also considered linking to the global popularity of Tibetan Buddhism. But Buddhism as practiced in the West feels different from the Buddhism practiced in by the average Tibetan. Whereas Tibetans in my wife’s community might circumambulate religious sites and chant mani throughout the day, we found Western practitioners gathering for prayer service on Sundays and. It is still Buddhism, but it doesn’t quite feel not the same. Losar felt like our best bet.

In the years that we have passed, we have tried to focus our efforts on food, clothing and community. That first losar in 2016, I made a short video based on the making of huagogog, a form of fried bread made for losar celebrations in my wife’s hometown. Huagogog has continued to be central to our family’s traditions. We prepare it every year in the weeks leading up to the losar, and my daughter eagerly anticipates the day. We make sure that she is involved, and now she knows the name and looks forward to making it with her mother. We make other Tibetan delicacies as well: cakes made from Tibetan cheese and sugar, and more.

On the eve of losar, we make dumplings and eat them together. We make video calls to family in Tibet and wish them losar tashi delek. The next morning, the first of the new year, we replicate traditions with which my wife grew up. The ones with the most profound impact on her. We burn incense and offer bowls of fresh water at our small shrine, poured from a vessel with a silk scarf tied on the handle and a daub of butter on the spout.  We pour a combination of milk and water on each other’s foreheads and speak good wishes for the new year. We eat breakfast together with traditional foods of droma (a kind of sweet tuber) and tsampa (roasted barley flour), offering the first food to the shrine. In these ways, losar provides opportunities for our daughter to engage with key Tibetan practices, and the values that underpin them. Either on the first, or in the days that follow (depending on schedules), we also put on Tibetan clothing and visit the few other Tibetan families in our area, and find a time to visit the local Buddhist center for a blessing. Normally in my wife’s home area, the first day of the New Year is a day for family. But this year, we will visit on the first, because it’s a weekend day, and community seems more important these days.

It's not the same losar as she would experience in my partner’s home community, but the different genres within the festival umbrella create a multi-sensory and rich framework of culture. When we visit, my daughter builds limited Tibetan repertoires from the interactions she has with other Tibetans that day and the conversations she hears. She eats the food, and gets compliments for her beautiful clothes. She lives, at least for a few moments, a more authentically traditional Tibetan life. It is still about community and cultural shibboleths, but it is also very much about developing new cultural repertoires and identities. What I am witnessing with my daughter, and in fieldwork in Tibetan communities, is that culture comes down to the decisions made at the grassroots level. My family’s practice of losar is a reminder that intentional action is key to cultural sustainability, while indifference, hopelessness, and neglect can often play a powerful role in suppressing a tradition’s expression and sustainability. From my family and my corner of the world to yours, I hope that you have a happy and healthy wood dragon year.