<i>I sing the body ethnographic</i>: First prize winner for poetry in the Society for Humanistic Anthropology 2022 Writing Awards

I sing the body ethnographic here is my body it haunts glass boxes; exhibits where I lie unspooled, cracked open periodically for tasteful synecdoche - foreign catharsis. here is my thigh bone, which rings with foreboding, in each step the earth echoes incomprehensible. Pala says it is always given willingly: what use is a thigh bone in your next life anyways? you must always leave the body behind. here are my prayer flags, tangled in my ribs each one painted the colour of grass stains they flutter in the wind I bottle up; incense smoke and frying oil. You – who eats my hands – return me my limbs; I am my own museum of want archive of hunger spanning countless lifetimes Look in my mouth: behold my teeth Look at my wrathful heart. “In Tibet, ‘dresses, houses, furniture, paintings, ornaments, jewelry, whatever it may be, bears the impress of a country unlike any other country in the world. Every Tibetan, high and low, is a curiosity who ought to be in a museum’” (Captain WFT O'Connor, member of the Younghusband “Mission” to Tibet in a report of 1905 in Harris, 2012). This poem draws inspiration from Andrea Gibson's poem I Sing The Body Electric, Especially When My Power's Out (Gibson, 2011) which itself draws inspiration from Walt Whitman's I Sing the Body Electric (Whitman, 1892). In I sing the body ethnographic I poetically grapple with my lived experiences of being a Tibetan and cultivating kinship with Tibetan objects in British museums during my time as a master's student at the University of Oxford in 2020–2021. Tibetan poet Lekey Leidecker's haunting pronunciation that within the United Kingdom “there are more Tibetans in museums than outside” (Leidecker, 2020) guided my attempt to find community amid objects trapped behind glass windows—objects that are meant to be worn, touched, and loved by Tibetan hands. Feeling out of touch with my community and my sense of self, I connect this alienation to experiences of objects being deprived of context (an unworn traditional apron, an uncounted rosary, and a silent ceremonial trumpet). Many Tibetan refugees feel a ghostly gravitational pull toward objects long lost, many of which have ended up in museums and private collections. This poem blends the diasporic body with such objects which come to be reshaped in the contexts of exile. Within this poem, I also express my frustration with practices of ethnography that purport an intimacy with forms of Tibetanness that are unobtainable for exiled Tibetans, particularly with regard to language, land, and life. I instead imagine forms of ethnographic refusal (Simpson, 2014) for our objects and our bodies in an attempt to evade settler extraction. In addressing the reader directly I address those who enter museums and ethnographic contexts to consume the objects (and by extension bodies) of land dispossessed peoples (see hooks, 1992) and redirect their gaze to my mouth. Faced with their hunger I present my own: my body becoming wrathful implement which would eat the gloved hand of the curator.