Cooler Than Us: Tibetan Nomads
A Tibetan Nomad. From National Geographic Vol.175 No. 6 – June 1989
I don’t want to trivialize the difficult complexities of the Tibetan diaspora by saying things like “this guy is cooler than we’ll ever be!” But – just this once, forgive me – this guy is cooler than we’ll ever be. I mean, look at him. He will hack your system, friends. With his mind.
This arresting National Geographic image of a Tibetan nomad on the Riotclitshave photo blog prompted me to search around for more information and images on Tibetan nomads. I found an incredible series of black and white portraits from 2001 taken by Daniel Miller, a story about the Tibetan nomads’ adoption of motorcycles on the NYT, and a great image gallery on BBC. Here are my favorite quotes from the BBC gallery, accompanied by images:
- “Many of my friends have bought motorcycles instead of using horses. They enjoy decorating the cycle with tassels and carpets like we do our horses.”
- “At night, right before bed, we howl into the dark to remind would-be thieves, wolves and local hungry ghosts to stay away from our herds.”
- “We offer butter and yoghurt to the lama. He hasn’t gone to town for years so doesn’t have much use for paper money.”
This unique community continues to dwindle under the Chinese regime. Government policy aims to settle more and more nomads into these faceless-looking settlements, and according to the BBC, the transition to this lifestyle is difficult for most.
April 8th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Nadya, thanks for posting this.
I just watched Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan at Film Forum last night. More dessert dwellers there – the shepherds of the Kazakh steppe. I hope this great, great film comes to Los Angeles or will otherwise become accessible to more people.
April 8th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
Sweet Jesus, I now have a new sartorial lodestar.
April 8th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Steampunk *this*, suckas.
April 9th, 2009 at 4:14 am
There were some movies that I have seen lately that remind me of this, such as Mountain Patrol: Kekexili (2004) and Mongol (2007) with Tananobu Asano, where I discovered the beauty of Mongolian Muslim dress.
April 9th, 2009 at 6:36 am
Fantastic shot.
April 9th, 2009 at 9:08 am
A couple of years ago I was hiking through Bulgaria. Near the North border with Romania and Serbia there’s basically an area where nobody wants to live because there’s hardly a functioning economy. During the Bosnian war 14 years ago, large groups of gypsies fled into that area and managed to establish a sort of permanent residence there, because nobody drove them out.
So what you can see there in the local ghetto’s is a revival of a gypsy culture that has been under permanent attack for centuries.
There’s houses with windows made out of car parts, horses living on top floors while families are living below, half trailers sticking out of houses as balconies, horse carts made of car wrecks, kids rushing down hills on the weirdest constructions made of old bikes and again car parts (Lada is their favorite brand).
Everything is covered in ornamental fringes and filth, the smell of burning plastic is omnipresent and when night falls, some sort of rubbery smog fills the muddy streets. And seriously, these guys make everything out of brass. They also happened to have stolen my camera, so I can’t upload any pictures. But if anybody on this site has the opportunity, go there!
April 9th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
@Kale Kip: “They also happened to have stolen my camera, so I can’t upload any pictures. But if anybody on this site has the opportunity, go there!” — That might be the best travel pitch I’ve ever heard :)
This guy looks like he’s about to bitch-slap Luke Skywalker’s hover-car in half.
April 9th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
I recently read Namma: A Tibetan Love Story. It gives a fascinating first-hand account of Tibetan life from a Western womans experience.
April 9th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
I love you guys. <3
April 10th, 2009 at 6:49 am
Here is the style I was talking about: http://www.axelmenges.de/buch/GypsyArchitecture.pdf
This is what happens when gypsies actually have the money to build big houses. When they don’t, they use their creativity (and an old Lada) to get the job done.
April 12th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
I would so kill for those boots. Thanks for the share . Some point int the near future I Will re visit this page to replicate said boots.
much love
April 13th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
“At night, right before bed, we howl into the dark to remind would-be thieves, wolves and local hungry ghosts to stay away from our herds.”
I can relate. Some nights, I do the same thing in my neighborhood. It seems to work quite well.
April 14th, 2009 at 9:30 am
I KNEW you guys would do something on this.
This is amazing.