Are the Tibetan Women the Backbone of Their Family's Prosperity?

The Tibetans and the Navajo Native Americans are from different cultures. The Tibetan’s have lived intertwined with China for centuries. They tried to free themselves from China rules yet they failed. The 14th Dalai Lama fled China and found exile in India. China to this day has total control over Tibetan people. “Using all the tools of repression to deter and punish Tibetan resistance” as stated on Free Tibet. The people of Tibet are dedicated to the Dalai Lama. The monks and nuns play a vital part in the community, furthermore they are viewed as teachers and mentors. The Chinese did not want the Dalai Lama to have the followers that he had. If a person how any paraphernalia of the Dalai Lama could lead to their incarceration and or torture. The Chinese monitors and controls the religious aspects in Tibet. Consequently, the Chinese government found the devotion of the Tibetans to the Dalai Lama as a danger to their political goals. By way of contrast with the conflict with the Chinese government, the monks live a simple life. The Tibetan monks believes in the liberation of all being, personal enlightenment, compassion and nature around us.

Not only is she forced into an arranged marriage, but she has no love for the boy that she is about to marry. From the day that she is arranged into a marriage and thereafter, she must deal with the fact that she will belong to someone else and that she is going to be the property of her husband. Her departure begins when her own family treats her “as if [she] belonged to someone else” (51). This shows the beginning of her departure because it is the start of the trials that she must overcome and deal with to continue with her journey. To make matters worse, Lindo’s family has to leave her because of a flood that wiped out all of her family’s land. Another trial that she faces is to get out her love-less marriage. She must leave safely while also keeping the honor and dignity of her family name intact. In order to overcome these trials, Lindo must transition to the fulfillment stage.

As a young girl, her mother betrothed Lindo to a boy younger than her.  Before Lindo left to live with her soon to be husband, Tyan-yu, and his family, her mother made her promise to be a good wife.  In this time period, according to Chinese beliefs, you were a bad wife if your husband left you.  Even though Lindo was not happy, nor in love, she stayed in her marriage to Tyan-yu.  She stayed in the marriage only because she honored and obeyed her parents, and she did not want them to lose face.  Lindo promised herself that she would never forget her true identity.  “That was the day I was a young girl with my face under a red marriage scarf.  I promised not to forget myself (Tan 63).”  Lindo had secretly blown out the Tyan-yu’s end of the tradition marriage red candle that determined if a relationship was going to be doomed.  Months later, Lindo had not bore any children for Tyan-yu because they weren’t having sex.  After Huang Taitai, Tyan-yu’s mother, took away all Lindo’s jewelry because she hadn’t bore any children, she realized her true worth again.  Lindo woke up one morning ranting and raving about how the ancestors said her and Tyan-yu’s relationship was doomed.  She said they told her that the wind

Marriage plays an essential part in lives of !Kung women. Marjorie Shostack in depth describes each step of Nisa’s life in her book “The Life and Words of a ! Kung Woman”. Nisa, a fifty year old !Kung San woman, tells about her numerous marriages, husbands and lovers. Nisa vividly described the relationships between men and women. Furthermore, she states that children become aware of sex at a young age because the children share a single hut with their parents. In the !Kung society, first marriages are arranged by the parents. Girls at this point are rather young, whereas males are twenty to thirty. In order for a boy to get marred it’s necessary for him to gain a hunting skill. These marriages are called “trial marriages.” The outcome of the first marriages is usually a divorce, initiated by the girls due to pressure from their husbands to have a sexual intercourse.

The article Polyandry: When Brothers Take a Wife by Melvyn C. Goldstein is about different types of marriages fraternal polyandry which is when a women is married to brothers and they live and share their land together. It explains how the brothers are fathers to all the children and they do not try to figure out who the biological father is. Then the older brother is the authority figure mostly for the children and the wife. This type of marriage is common in Tibet just like in America monogamy is the only allowed form of marriage. This type of marriage is used primarily so that land is not split and duties can be shared between the husbands and it’s a way that the family can live without having to in poverty as bad because they can get

Throughout the history of the world, many races, religions, genders, sexuality and many more have been oppressed for doing something out of the norm. But women have gotten hit the hardest of them all. In almost all cultures of the world; women were little more baby factories, and their only purpose was to keep house and child. Prejudice against anybody is based off nothing, and can lead to a much worse encounter. The women of ancient China were hardworking, but all wanted to be a housewife forever; certainly not Hua Mulan.

In the beginning of the Poem, she is very uncomfortable with her new husband and was very unhappy with him. As their time together got longer she realized she was in love with him. While she was married to him she learned to be happier and laugh more. Once he left for his long journey through the Gorges of Ch'u-T'ang, she was heart broken. There are many similarities between the girl in the poem and more modern day girls. Their similarities start with how both of them will be angry and be uncomfortable with their husbands that they were forced to marry. Another similarity is how eventually they will learn to love their husbands and will miss them when they're gone. Some evidence that shows me that she is happier with him is when the poem says

Steeped in rich traditions, Tibet is a land of rugged, breathtaking beauty and intriguing spirituality. But political repression and population engineering are radically changing the cultural landscape. Can Tibet's traditions, ethnicity and customs survive in such controversial and precarious times? To what extent has Tibet been able to maintain its cultural identity?

Tibet is located at the western part of China into the Himalayas with disputed country origin (Crowe 2013). In addition to the central Tibet, it also forms the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) along with Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan provinces composed of a total population of approximately 5 million (Crowe 2013). There are also Tibetans living in regions of India composed of different religions and Sikkim, Bhutan, and Nepal (Crowe 2013). The relationship between Tibet and China has drawn significant attention worldwide as each state view themselves as the superior state. In Tibetans’ perspective, they are the “agents of their own civilizing project with regard to the spiritual life of the Mongols.”

In Chapter one Mathangi Subramanian describes how she went back to India in 1999 when she went was nineteen. She describes how even though she was nineteen her grandmother was asking “ Mathangi when are you going to get married” and her mother tells her grandmother “ that I always told her and her brother that they should be independent”. This story remind me of my own mother who raised me and my siblings to be independent and that we should only marry someone if we are in love. She wanted us to focus on our education and the things that we love such as running, reading, and dancing. Many young girls are not taught independence at a young age, but pressure to get married before they become “too old”. In addition, in this article Subramanian

Today, Tibet looks more like China because of increasing number of Chinese residents, Chinese letters on the street, and even Chinese schools are getting popular due to better opportunities for children after school. One way in which China is infiltrating in Tibet is through investment in infrastructure projects and economic development that bring thousands and thousands of workers of Han Chinese descends. For example, from the 1950s to 1999, over 200,000 Han workers have migrated to Tibet to work on infrastructure projects (Hessler, 1999). Some people fear that Tibet will become just like the Inner Mongolia where Mongolians are the minority to Chinese people. If we ask a random Chinese person on the street about Tibet, that person is likely to say that Tibet is a part of China. Likewise, according to Liang Xiangming who is a researcher in Beijing stated that "The dialogue between Dalai and the central government is not a dialogue between two

In the southwest region of Asia lies Tibet, home of Tibetan pastoralists and agriculturalists. Anthropologist Robert B. Ekvall studied these people over a long period of time during his life: 1926-1927, 1929-1935, and 1939-1941. In addition, in the years 1961-1964, Ekvall had the opportunity to conduct research with a small group of Tibetans. Although Tibet is a relatively large area with many different people, nomadic pastoralists were the main focus of Ekvall’s ethnography.

In Hindu culture, the sex of a baby is more significant than in western cultures. In eastern countries, boys are revered and cherished while girls are considered “curses” since being born a girl brought to the father the burden of paying a dowry. This type of gender hierarchy is exemplified in Mukherjee’s novel by Jasmine’s statement, “I had a ruby-red choker of a bruise around my neck and a sapphire fingerprints on my collarbone after my birth. When I revealed this to Taylor’s wife, […] she missed the point and shrieked at my ‘foremothers’ […]. My mother was a sniper. She wanted to spare me the pain of a dowryless bride” (Mukherjee 40). Mukherjee utilizes Jasmine’s nonchalant description of her near death experience coupled with her rationalization to show that the brutal treatment of baby girls is a common occurrence in her culture. Conversely, the reaction of Taylor’s wife is a metaphor for the western perception that the conduct of Jasmine’s mother is a form of barbarism. By using Jasmine’s birth, Mukherjee exposes the realties of a male patriarchal society in which girls bring considered dilemmas to families.

First, the choice of a marriage partner, the choice, wishes or preferences of the girl is completely ignored. She is owned and is expected to give full allegiance to parents. When she refuses to heed to the expectation of the society, she is looked upon as a rebel. Laila displays her feminist trait by refusing to be condemned to marriage. On the whole, Baram Alkali through the character of Laila succeeds in communicating the message that the woman expects her self-will to be respected and that indeed she can enforce her choice and react when intimidated and subsumed. Feminist writers usually claim that the parental choice of a husband for their daughters is primarily predicated upon economic benefits of their daughter’s bride price. They argue

Set in rural China in the early to mid 1800s, historical context plays a major role in defining the value placed on women by their society. Seen from the beginning, a young girl in a family acts only as a burden on them by being an extra mouth to feed and less valuable than a son. Young women at the time were only given value based on who they married, whether they had sons, and if they followed the conventions set before them. The main character, Lily states that her mother looked at her as “a temporary mouth to feed and a body to dress until I went to my husband’s home” (See 12). By setting the stage of the time period, See defines the role of women as child-bearers first, and servants to her husband’s family second. Despite protests to that idea in contemporary times, women then understood their roles as being miserable so that their children may one day succeed. Pain and convention controlled a woman’s everyday life, such as, “When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son” (See 24). Women held the lowest status in the social