Commentary: Clear and Present Danger: Dodging and Dealing with Risk and Uncertainty in Everyday Life

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingBook chapterResearchpeer-review

This chapter explores aspects of distrust, conflict, and guilt over the burden of acknowledging extraordinary risks, mainly through ordinary narratives of bitterness displayed by former Tibetan prisoners in Dharamsala. A small town located in the scenic Kangra Valley in Himachal Pradesh, one of the states along the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, Dharamsala is the exile home of thousands of Tibetan political prisoners. I highlight some of the ways in which groups of political prisoners harnessed diverse material cultures to endorse their experiences of political activism, arrest, and incarceration in China, with the intention of building a powerful political future within a rapidly modernising Tibetan refugee community. The ethnographic material collected from my fieldwork frames and intersects with the analysis of risk and danger embedded in the chapters by Kolling, Blasimme, and Trueba.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationExtraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives : Logics of Precariousness in Everyday Contexts
EditorsBeata Świtek, Allen Abramson, Hannah Swee
Place of PublicationCham
PublisherSpringer
Publication date2022
Pages119–136
ISBN (Print)9783030839611
Publication statusPublished - 2022
SeriesCritical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty

ID: 301638510