The conventional rhetoric of legal documents from local Tibetan communities recognises disparitie... more The conventional rhetoric of legal documents from local Tibetan communities recognises disparities of power, for example when the inhabitants of a given territory are invoked with expressions such as “all members of the community, be they mighty or lowly (drag zhan)”. However, the rhetoric is equally clear that (in contrast with early Tibetan legal codes) all are ideally equal under the law and execrates reprehensible forms of behaviour associated with economic inequality, in which “a rich man has his wealth and a poor man his recklessness.” This paper explores the degree to which this ideal was a reality in Geling, a large community in northern Mustang, over the course of roughly half a century from 1880 to 1930. Geling has a substantial community archive with documents dating mainly from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The archive contains evidence that the interests of the poorest members of settlement were protected by law, but there are also cases in which individuals were severely disfavoured by their poverty. In one case from 1909, for example, an indigent vagrant who was unable to pay the fine for a theft was condemned to having his hand severed; however, he was saved when his partner, a local woman, agreed to give her daughter to the village as a slave, who was later sold on to a private buyer.
The emergence of social history within the domain of Tibetan Studies in recent years has been mar... more The emergence of social history within the domain of Tibetan Studies in recent years has been marked by a closer interest in the lives of people who would not usually be the subject of biographical studies. While there is also a Tibetan tradition of writing about the lives of sacred objects that has in turn attracted a certain amount of scholarly interest, the anthropological practice of documenting the histories of everyday artefacts remains relatively undeveloped. Following an examination of some of the dominant themes that emerge from the life stories of famous relics in the Christian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, this essay will take the case of two objects that have acquired some fame in their village setting to illustrate how the same themes—such as the importance of the objects as links to a sacred past, the existence of conflicting narratives, and the device of substitution —all feature equally prominently in the narratives associated with them.
On a Day of a Month of the Fire Bird Year. Festschrift for Peter Schwieger on his 65th Birthday, 2020
Ya ngal is the name of an illustrious Bonpo lineage who feature in numerous legendary and mythic ... more Ya ngal is the name of an illustrious Bonpo lineage who feature in numerous legendary and mythic narratives, as well as historical sources (such as the dBa’ bzhed) that place them in Central Tibet during the Imperial period. The oldest surviving Bonpo settlement in what is now Nepal, the village of Lubrak (Klu brag) in southern Mustang, was founded by a scion of the clan in the twelfth century. A branch of the clan then moved to Dolpo, where it continues to flourish, but by the second half of the nineteenth century it had all but died out in Lubrak. The last surviving member was an elderly nun named Chos mdzad nyi shar, who was left with the task of finding an heir to the estate. This article presents a translation and discussion of her last will testament, written in 1872, which gives a poignant account of the hardships she underwent as an solitary and elderly woman in her struggle to ensure the survival of the estate.
A short introduction to the figure of Tönpa Shenrab Miwo, revered by Bönpos as the founder of the... more A short introduction to the figure of Tönpa Shenrab Miwo, revered by Bönpos as the founder of their religion, as presented in various Bön and Buddhist sources
The Tibet novel that forms the subject of this article is Trashi Palden’s Phal pa’i khyim tshang ... more The Tibet novel that forms the subject of this article is Trashi Palden’s Phal pa’i khyim tshang gi skyid sdug, “The Life of an Ordinary Household,” first published in 1995 and again in 2002. The novel has featured in short English-language studies by at least two scholars: Tsering Shakya and Riika Virtanen, who situate Phal pa in broader discussions of modern Tibetan literature that provide important insights into the field in general and this novel in particular. The present article focuses more narrowly on the question of how this one novel might be regarded as a contribution to Tibetan social history, by drawing parallels with the value of the Wessex novels of Thomas Hardy for our social-historical understanding of nineteenth-century rural England.
Tibet offers a wide range of techniques for revealing past causes and future events. The purpose ... more Tibet offers a wide range of techniques for revealing past causes and future events. The purpose of all these methods is to establish a threshold at which the boundary between the everyday world and the realm that holds this knowledge is infringed, and the information that we seek can be communicated to us. The technique may entail an element of chance, since it is through randomly generated numbers and configurations that the gods or other powers transmit their message at this threshold. However, thresholds do not always need to be generated by artifice: there are signs all around us that serve as portals onto the knowledge we require, if only we knew how to recognize and interpret them. This article is primarily concerned with Tibetan procedures for the analysis of certain types of natural signs that have not yet been the subject of detailed studies.
Commerce and Communities: Social and Political Status and the Exchange of Goods in Tibetan Societies, 2018
An account of trade and trade relations along Nepal's Kali Gandaki Valley over the course of appr... more An account of trade and trade relations along Nepal's Kali Gandaki Valley over the course of approximately a century, based mainly on local Tibetan and Nepali archives.
Une journée dans une vie, une vie dans une journée, Aug 22, 2018
HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific re... more HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
Une journée dans une vie. Une vie dans une journée. Ascètes et moines aujourd’hui, 2018
"Bonpo lama and householder in the Tibetan borderlands of the Himalaya": the narrative of a day i... more "Bonpo lama and householder in the Tibetan borderlands of the Himalaya": the narrative of a day in the life of a Bonpo householder-priest in southern Mustang, presented as a window through which we can see something of the religious and secular concerns that feature in his life.
Manuscripts and Archives: Comparative Views on Record-Keeping, 2018
While Tibetan literary production generally evokes images of cloth-bound loose-leaf longbooks fil... more While Tibetan literary production generally evokes images of cloth-bound loose-leaf longbooks filling the shelves of monasteries, the culture also has a well-developed, though less widely known, archival tradition. The documents that make up these archives differ from books with respect to terminology, form, script, content and storage. Archival literature has received relatively little scholarly attention, but it nevertheless constitutes a vitally important source for our understanding of domains such as law, taxation and social history. Archives from Central Tibet tell us about the relations between authorities-mainly the government, the church and the aristocracy-and the peasantry; but it is mainly thanks to archival collections from culturally Tibetan areas in countries adjacent to China (notably India and Nepal) that we can obtain a privileged insight into the lives of local communities in past centuries.
Studies in Historical Documents from Nepal and India, 2018
The disappearance of Tibetan as the written medium of secular communication and administration in... more The disappearance of Tibetan as the written medium of secular communication and administration in Nepal’s Mustang District in the past few decades has been rapid and complete. This apparent suddenness conceals the fact that the shift was actually the culmination of a process of transition that had been taking place over the course of more than a century. Educated Tibetans who are familiar with the diplomatic conventions of the Ganden Phodrang government of the Dalai Lamas react with bafflement when confronted with documents from South Mustang. The confusing features include the arbitrariness of the spelling and the presence of terms in the local Tibetan dialect and the Tibeto-Burman Seke language, neither of which have standard written forms. These traits been perennial features of local documents since the earliest times, and make up what we might think of as the diplomatic sociolect of South Mustang. The result was a truly hybrid Tibetan-Nepalese diplomatic practice whose main exponents were local lamas, aristocrats and their scribes. With the coming of age of a generation educated in Nepali in local government schools, the tradition was rapidly displaced. The article presents some of the distinctive features of this obsolete diplomatic tradition.
According to histories of the Sakyapa (Sa skya pa) school of Tibetan Buddhism, the name of the fo... more According to histories of the Sakyapa (Sa skya pa) school of Tibetan Buddhism, the name of the founding family, Khon (’Khon) is dervived from a dispute (Tib. ’khon) over a woman. The woman is named Yadrum Silima (g.Ya’ ’brum Si li ma) and the two rivals are Yapangkye (g.Ya’ spang skyes), the ancestor of Khon line, and a demon named Kyareng Trakme. For Giuseppe Tucci, the protagonists represent the crucial elements of a medical myth: Yadrum Silima stands for smallpox; Yapang, verdigris, a treatment for the disease; and Kyareng Trakme – “pale, stiff, bloodless” – represents death. The same trio appear in certain divination tables recently published by Alexander Smith. The present article focuses on the least-known member of the triad: the demon Kyareng Trakme. Although he seems not to appear in Buddhist sources outside the Sakyapa histories, he does feature in Bonpo works from Amdo and, especially, Mustang, where he is still worshipped as a territorial divinity of some importance.
Tibetan and Himalayan Healing: An Anthology for Anthony Aris. Kathmandu: Vajra Books.
The title of this article may require a few words of explanation. Anthony Aris, a publisher who p... more The title of this article may require a few words of explanation. Anthony Aris, a publisher who produced many fine books on themes related to Tibet and the Himalaya, passed away on 14 October 2015. When, in June 2014, we (Ulrike Roesler and I) learned that he was ill, we decided that an appropriate way of expressing our support for him and our appreciation for everything he had accomplished, would be to dedicate to him an anthology on Tibetan and Himalayan healing. “This book” in the title of the article is a reference to that anthology.
This is a panel proposal for the IATS conference 2016. Those interested in participating can cont... more This is a panel proposal for the IATS conference 2016. Those interested in participating can contact us.
Animals that transgress culturally-sanctioned taxonomic boundaries are often the object of specia... more Animals that transgress culturally-sanctioned taxonomic boundaries are often the object of special beliefs. Tibetan ritual texts, especially those of the so-called ‘Lower Vehicles’ of Bon, sometimes feature semi-divine animals that play an important role as protectors. These creatures, though natural, are perceived as concatenations of the body-parts of numerous other natural species, and may be understood as different varieties of chimera. The two examples considered here are the bat and the camel. In addition to real animals the literature also features imaginary creatures that exhibit the physical or behavioural characteristics of several natural species. Each of the animals that provides a component is presented as wielding a specific type of capability, and it is the concentration of these multiple capabilities that gives the chimera, whether real or imaginary, its extraordinary power. While the particular form that the cult of these chimeras takes may be indigenous to Tibet, the similarities they bear to the divinities of Tantric Buddhism may ultimately have led to the usurpation of their role and their marginalisation.
The conventional rhetoric of legal documents from local Tibetan communities recognises disparitie... more The conventional rhetoric of legal documents from local Tibetan communities recognises disparities of power, for example when the inhabitants of a given territory are invoked with expressions such as “all members of the community, be they mighty or lowly (drag zhan)”. However, the rhetoric is equally clear that (in contrast with early Tibetan legal codes) all are ideally equal under the law and execrates reprehensible forms of behaviour associated with economic inequality, in which “a rich man has his wealth and a poor man his recklessness.” This paper explores the degree to which this ideal was a reality in Geling, a large community in northern Mustang, over the course of roughly half a century from 1880 to 1930. Geling has a substantial community archive with documents dating mainly from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The archive contains evidence that the interests of the poorest members of settlement were protected by law, but there are also cases in which individuals were severely disfavoured by their poverty. In one case from 1909, for example, an indigent vagrant who was unable to pay the fine for a theft was condemned to having his hand severed; however, he was saved when his partner, a local woman, agreed to give her daughter to the village as a slave, who was later sold on to a private buyer.
The emergence of social history within the domain of Tibetan Studies in recent years has been mar... more The emergence of social history within the domain of Tibetan Studies in recent years has been marked by a closer interest in the lives of people who would not usually be the subject of biographical studies. While there is also a Tibetan tradition of writing about the lives of sacred objects that has in turn attracted a certain amount of scholarly interest, the anthropological practice of documenting the histories of everyday artefacts remains relatively undeveloped. Following an examination of some of the dominant themes that emerge from the life stories of famous relics in the Christian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, this essay will take the case of two objects that have acquired some fame in their village setting to illustrate how the same themes—such as the importance of the objects as links to a sacred past, the existence of conflicting narratives, and the device of substitution —all feature equally prominently in the narratives associated with them.
On a Day of a Month of the Fire Bird Year. Festschrift for Peter Schwieger on his 65th Birthday, 2020
Ya ngal is the name of an illustrious Bonpo lineage who feature in numerous legendary and mythic ... more Ya ngal is the name of an illustrious Bonpo lineage who feature in numerous legendary and mythic narratives, as well as historical sources (such as the dBa’ bzhed) that place them in Central Tibet during the Imperial period. The oldest surviving Bonpo settlement in what is now Nepal, the village of Lubrak (Klu brag) in southern Mustang, was founded by a scion of the clan in the twelfth century. A branch of the clan then moved to Dolpo, where it continues to flourish, but by the second half of the nineteenth century it had all but died out in Lubrak. The last surviving member was an elderly nun named Chos mdzad nyi shar, who was left with the task of finding an heir to the estate. This article presents a translation and discussion of her last will testament, written in 1872, which gives a poignant account of the hardships she underwent as an solitary and elderly woman in her struggle to ensure the survival of the estate.
A short introduction to the figure of Tönpa Shenrab Miwo, revered by Bönpos as the founder of the... more A short introduction to the figure of Tönpa Shenrab Miwo, revered by Bönpos as the founder of their religion, as presented in various Bön and Buddhist sources
The Tibet novel that forms the subject of this article is Trashi Palden’s Phal pa’i khyim tshang ... more The Tibet novel that forms the subject of this article is Trashi Palden’s Phal pa’i khyim tshang gi skyid sdug, “The Life of an Ordinary Household,” first published in 1995 and again in 2002. The novel has featured in short English-language studies by at least two scholars: Tsering Shakya and Riika Virtanen, who situate Phal pa in broader discussions of modern Tibetan literature that provide important insights into the field in general and this novel in particular. The present article focuses more narrowly on the question of how this one novel might be regarded as a contribution to Tibetan social history, by drawing parallels with the value of the Wessex novels of Thomas Hardy for our social-historical understanding of nineteenth-century rural England.
Tibet offers a wide range of techniques for revealing past causes and future events. The purpose ... more Tibet offers a wide range of techniques for revealing past causes and future events. The purpose of all these methods is to establish a threshold at which the boundary between the everyday world and the realm that holds this knowledge is infringed, and the information that we seek can be communicated to us. The technique may entail an element of chance, since it is through randomly generated numbers and configurations that the gods or other powers transmit their message at this threshold. However, thresholds do not always need to be generated by artifice: there are signs all around us that serve as portals onto the knowledge we require, if only we knew how to recognize and interpret them. This article is primarily concerned with Tibetan procedures for the analysis of certain types of natural signs that have not yet been the subject of detailed studies.
Commerce and Communities: Social and Political Status and the Exchange of Goods in Tibetan Societies, 2018
An account of trade and trade relations along Nepal's Kali Gandaki Valley over the course of appr... more An account of trade and trade relations along Nepal's Kali Gandaki Valley over the course of approximately a century, based mainly on local Tibetan and Nepali archives.
Une journée dans une vie, une vie dans une journée, Aug 22, 2018
HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific re... more HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
Une journée dans une vie. Une vie dans une journée. Ascètes et moines aujourd’hui, 2018
"Bonpo lama and householder in the Tibetan borderlands of the Himalaya": the narrative of a day i... more "Bonpo lama and householder in the Tibetan borderlands of the Himalaya": the narrative of a day in the life of a Bonpo householder-priest in southern Mustang, presented as a window through which we can see something of the religious and secular concerns that feature in his life.
Manuscripts and Archives: Comparative Views on Record-Keeping, 2018
While Tibetan literary production generally evokes images of cloth-bound loose-leaf longbooks fil... more While Tibetan literary production generally evokes images of cloth-bound loose-leaf longbooks filling the shelves of monasteries, the culture also has a well-developed, though less widely known, archival tradition. The documents that make up these archives differ from books with respect to terminology, form, script, content and storage. Archival literature has received relatively little scholarly attention, but it nevertheless constitutes a vitally important source for our understanding of domains such as law, taxation and social history. Archives from Central Tibet tell us about the relations between authorities-mainly the government, the church and the aristocracy-and the peasantry; but it is mainly thanks to archival collections from culturally Tibetan areas in countries adjacent to China (notably India and Nepal) that we can obtain a privileged insight into the lives of local communities in past centuries.
Studies in Historical Documents from Nepal and India, 2018
The disappearance of Tibetan as the written medium of secular communication and administration in... more The disappearance of Tibetan as the written medium of secular communication and administration in Nepal’s Mustang District in the past few decades has been rapid and complete. This apparent suddenness conceals the fact that the shift was actually the culmination of a process of transition that had been taking place over the course of more than a century. Educated Tibetans who are familiar with the diplomatic conventions of the Ganden Phodrang government of the Dalai Lamas react with bafflement when confronted with documents from South Mustang. The confusing features include the arbitrariness of the spelling and the presence of terms in the local Tibetan dialect and the Tibeto-Burman Seke language, neither of which have standard written forms. These traits been perennial features of local documents since the earliest times, and make up what we might think of as the diplomatic sociolect of South Mustang. The result was a truly hybrid Tibetan-Nepalese diplomatic practice whose main exponents were local lamas, aristocrats and their scribes. With the coming of age of a generation educated in Nepali in local government schools, the tradition was rapidly displaced. The article presents some of the distinctive features of this obsolete diplomatic tradition.
According to histories of the Sakyapa (Sa skya pa) school of Tibetan Buddhism, the name of the fo... more According to histories of the Sakyapa (Sa skya pa) school of Tibetan Buddhism, the name of the founding family, Khon (’Khon) is dervived from a dispute (Tib. ’khon) over a woman. The woman is named Yadrum Silima (g.Ya’ ’brum Si li ma) and the two rivals are Yapangkye (g.Ya’ spang skyes), the ancestor of Khon line, and a demon named Kyareng Trakme. For Giuseppe Tucci, the protagonists represent the crucial elements of a medical myth: Yadrum Silima stands for smallpox; Yapang, verdigris, a treatment for the disease; and Kyareng Trakme – “pale, stiff, bloodless” – represents death. The same trio appear in certain divination tables recently published by Alexander Smith. The present article focuses on the least-known member of the triad: the demon Kyareng Trakme. Although he seems not to appear in Buddhist sources outside the Sakyapa histories, he does feature in Bonpo works from Amdo and, especially, Mustang, where he is still worshipped as a territorial divinity of some importance.
Tibetan and Himalayan Healing: An Anthology for Anthony Aris. Kathmandu: Vajra Books.
The title of this article may require a few words of explanation. Anthony Aris, a publisher who p... more The title of this article may require a few words of explanation. Anthony Aris, a publisher who produced many fine books on themes related to Tibet and the Himalaya, passed away on 14 October 2015. When, in June 2014, we (Ulrike Roesler and I) learned that he was ill, we decided that an appropriate way of expressing our support for him and our appreciation for everything he had accomplished, would be to dedicate to him an anthology on Tibetan and Himalayan healing. “This book” in the title of the article is a reference to that anthology.
This is a panel proposal for the IATS conference 2016. Those interested in participating can cont... more This is a panel proposal for the IATS conference 2016. Those interested in participating can contact us.
Animals that transgress culturally-sanctioned taxonomic boundaries are often the object of specia... more Animals that transgress culturally-sanctioned taxonomic boundaries are often the object of special beliefs. Tibetan ritual texts, especially those of the so-called ‘Lower Vehicles’ of Bon, sometimes feature semi-divine animals that play an important role as protectors. These creatures, though natural, are perceived as concatenations of the body-parts of numerous other natural species, and may be understood as different varieties of chimera. The two examples considered here are the bat and the camel. In addition to real animals the literature also features imaginary creatures that exhibit the physical or behavioural characteristics of several natural species. Each of the animals that provides a component is presented as wielding a specific type of capability, and it is the concentration of these multiple capabilities that gives the chimera, whether real or imaginary, its extraordinary power. While the particular form that the cult of these chimeras takes may be indigenous to Tibet, the similarities they bear to the divinities of Tantric Buddhism may ultimately have led to the usurpation of their role and their marginalisation.
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