Problems of Tibetan integration in Switzerland

Author(s) : Anna Elisabeth Ott-Marti

Source : https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/ethnologia-europaea/9/1/ee090105.pdf

Abstract:

“The term integration is often employed in a euphemistic manner. Everybody – generally even the people concerned – ignores the fact that it is a long, complex and painful process. The host population generally prefers to skip ever the potential problems and repress them. The minorities – often exotic immigrants – cannot possibly foresee the difficulties they will face before they are integrated in the host country. They have no notion that all their norms will be challenged and their fundamental values become unstable or even shattered and abolished. Nor do they know how
pretentious and irrefragable the norms of the majority are ; nor, finally, how harsh the conditions imposed by the receiving ethnic group will be. The immigrants have the choice of living in ghettos or abandoning most aspects of their culture and losing their ethnic identity”.