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Strike a pose: Han Chinese tourists have overrun Tibet, taking pictures inside temples, gawking at sacred rituals, and making a mockery of a culture.
[Washington Monthly]
By Pearl Sydenstricker
How tourism has become a tool of occupation.
High on a mountain in eastern Tibet is a platform where corpses are fed to vultures. It’s a dizzying slope carpeted in grass, with a web of sun-bleached prayer flags fluttering overhead. Traditional Tibetan “sky burials” ritualize nature’s reclamation of human life, rather than denying it.