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

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).