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Identity and Support for Political Communities Based on Language Choice Data in Tibet

National sentiment and identities are affective orientations of diffuse political support toward political communities. Language choice is suggested be a reliable indicator of community identity in Tibet for theoretical, historical, and practical reasons. Tibetan, Mandarin, and English are three language choices that are used to indicate three identities and three political communities in this paper. By using the language orientations of Tibetan high school students as the indicators of their community identities, I demonstrate the patterns of identity of Tibetan students with survey data. I also use empirical evidence to test the attitudinal and demographic sources of the students¡¯ variation in their community identities. The results reconfirm that the constructivist theory of the identity construction, which includes the primordialist and circumstantialist factors, has a fairly good explanatory power regarding the community identities of students in Tibet. And policy implications are offered from the educational perspective.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-04222008-112435
Date04 June 2008
CreatorsHu, Yiyang
ContributorsB. Guy Peters, Emily McEwan-Fujita, Wenfang Tang
PublisherUniversity of Pittsburgh
Source SetsUniversity of Pittsburgh
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-04222008-112435/
Rightsunrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report.

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