Paper short abstract:

Each year, friends of a small Tibetan family in Australia share a celebratory New Year meal involving the ritual invocation of a spirit made tangible through food and offerings. Such ritualised hospitality shows how diasporic kinship is adaptive and mediated through more-than-human engagements.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the challenges arising from physical and temporal displacement from homeland, family and tradition within the Australian Tibetan community. Australia is home to a Tibetan population of around 2,000 people, most of whom were resettled from India as humanitarian entrants or family reunification cases. They are a relatively small community within a broader transnational diaspora of approximately 150,000 Tibetans who reside outside of their homeland.

The focus is on a young woman and her father, who for almost 20 years have been separated from family remaining in Tibet. Even as exiles in India, they lived apart for work and education until winning a visa lottery for former political prisoners that brought them to Australia. Resettling in Brisbane together has motivated them to re-enact certain family-based Buddhist ritual traditions through which they forge bonds of kinship and belonging in their new home.

Each year, friends and “orphans” in their extended community are invited to participate in a pre-New Year (Losar) celebration. Together the group prepares and consumes a meal and conduct a ritual that symbolically dispels negativity from the home. This ritual “cleansing” is only possible due to the presence of a spirit – made tangible through food and offerings – who is banished at the meal’s end. It is argued that the ritual enactment of hospitality and kinship in this context powerfully shows how diasporic relationships can be mediated through more-than-human engagements.