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Tibetans in Nepal: The Dynamics of International Assistance among a Community in Exile. Ann Frechette. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. 220 pp.
Given the long history of international assistance to Tibetan refugees, how have aid organizations influenced individual and community norms and values among Tibetans? This question drives Ann Frechette's Tibetans in Nepal, allowing her to cover such varied ground as early Swiss and U.S. aid, the particularities of Nepal as host country, and relationships between Tibetans in Nepal and the Dalai Lama's India-based exile Tibetan government. She argues that exile issues of authority, identity, loyalty, and sovereignty are all inextricably impacted by international organizations, complicating internal Tibetan efforts at defining community.
The Tibetan case provides an example of what Frechette calls the "entitlement model" of international assistance. Beyond humanitarian assistance or politically strategic interventions, the entitlement model recognizes that resources such as norms and values are dispensed alongside more visible transactions such as economic aid. According to Frechette, the economic success of the Tibetan refugee community is not easily translatable to other groups. Despite a shared model, each ethnographic case will be distinguished by context-specific relations between aid organizations,...