Living Eastern and Western Understandings of Dialogue and Narrating Practices of Language Revitalization in Tibet

Abstract

This essay dramatizes three key characteristics of dialogue shared between Eastern and Western voices. They have been vividly enacted during the first author’s ongoing 7-year ethnographic encounters with Tibetans organizing through communicative relationships to preserve their mother tongue. Emerging from the intertexuality among Zhuang Zi’s and Martin Buber’s ideas and the (auto)ethnographic activities involved in composing this account, the characteristics include boundless bound (the cultivation of immanent freedom), purposeless purpose (dialogue as a process and context for purpose to evolve), and being while becoming (creativity in momentary transformation).

Organizing as Tong (通): Decolonizing Organizational Communication from the Roots

“…To allow for subaltern knowledge to penetrate academic narratives, our ethnographic research and theorizing are guided by a dialogical approach centering on intersubjectivity, plurality, and reciprocity (Bakhtin, 1981; Kang & Rawlins, 2017, 2020; Kang & Utah Sodeke, 2017; Xu, 2013). Kang and Utah Sodeke (2017) suggested that dialogical research accounts should not suppress the ongoing struggles that accompany a genuine desire to engage in situated research contexts.…”