The Plateau Culture Initiative

By Pakpa Dondrup, The Plateau Culture Initiative

Pakpa Dondrup will discuss how the ETP (English training program) started in Xining. These trainees are also involved in producing English, Tibetan and Chinese language materials for the Plateau Culture initiative.

The Plateau Culture Initiative is comprised of three projects; Plateau Music Project, Plateau Photography Project, Asian Highland Perspectives (an Annual Journal).

The Plateau Music Project was founded in order to preserve endangered songs on the Tibetan plateau. Most of this music will disappear in the next decade. Their members, all local volunteers from English Training Program, Nationalities Teacher’s College, Qinghai Normal University, Qinghai Province, PR China, have since 2005 recorded more than five hundred Tibetan traditional songs. Beginning in late 2007, our project expanded to record endangered songs of other ethnic minority groups such as the Naxi and Pumi ethnicities in China’s Yunnan Province.

The Plateau Photographers Project has trained 62 young image makers (32 females and 30 males). Members come from rural communities in four provinces (Qinghai, Yunnan, Sichuan and Gansu) and although are primarily Tibetan, also include other ethnicities – Naxi, Namuyi, Pumi and Monguor (Tu). Each six months, new members train in basic photography and camera use. At the same time, returned members collate and archive their images before displaying them online and in their communities.

Sponsored by the East Asia Center and the Tibet Center at the University of Virginia.

Tangut Legends and Legacies in Tibet

By Elliot Sperling, former chair of the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University, director of the department’s Tibetan Studies Program

The Tanguts, a Tibeto-Burman people, were a major presence on the Sino-Tibetan frontier for centuries, ultimately establishing a strong dynastic state known as Xixia in Chinese. The state’s destruction by the Mongols led to a migration of many Tanguts back onto the Tibetan Plateau where, under their Tibetan appellation, Mi-nyag, they appear as components of lineages stretching from Khams and A-mdo in Eastern Tibet, to Sikkim, in modern India, and even into Western Tibet. Claims of descent from the Tangut imperial clan appear in several Tibetan clan
histories; indeed in the lineage of Sikkim’s traditional rulers as well. Although the Tangut state still looms as little more than a bit of arcane lore for most Tibetanists, the fact is its impact on the Tibetan and Himalayan world-and particularly on the way that world imagined itself-was greater than many have long assumed

Sponsored by the East Asia Center and the Tibet Center at the University of Virginia.

Sustainable Development in Practice: Education, community development and urban planning

Panelists:

Gitile Naituli: Associate Professor of Business Management at the Department of Business Management, Multimedia University, Kenya. The presentation will focus on the significance of education to sustainable development.

Shuaib Lwasa: PhD Candidate in Geographic Information Systems for Urban Planning and management at Makerere University, Uganda. The presentation will focus on the relationship between urban poverty and environmental burdens in the context of sustainable development and how communities, researchers and civil society organizations have teamed up to find local solutions to local problems.

Thupten : Field staff at Winrock International working in community development on the Tibetan plateau. The presentation will focus on community development and a case study of Eco-tourism service and waste disposal in Tibet.

Sponsored by Machik at UVa.

Improving Maternal Health Outcomes in Tibet

By Dr. Kunchok Gyaltsen, MIIM, MPH, PhD

Dr. Gyaltsen is a Tibetan medical doctor, Buddhist monk, and leader in Tibetan rural development. He will present his work on maternal health and education in Tibet. Dr. Gyaltsen has worked on public health initiatives within Tibet through NGOs, and the Chinese government. Dr. Gyaltsen is currently a PhD candidate at the UCLA School of Public Health.

Sponsored by the Tibet Center and Machik at UVa

Ellen Bayard Weedon Lectures in the Arts of Asia presents:

Interpretations of a Tibetan Buddhist Temple: An Art Historical and Ethnographic Analysis

By Melissa Kerin, Visiting Scholar and Assistant Professor, College of William and Mary

Following completion of her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008, Melissa Kerin received a Mellon/ACLS Recent Doctoral Recipients Fellowship to continue her research on West Tibet’s late medieval painting traditions. While documenting and analyzing the art and architecture of the Tibetan cultural zone, Kerin pays particular attention to socio-political and aesthetic interactions between Tibet and its neighboring areas of India, Nepal, and China. Within this geographic scope, much of her published and current work relates to thematic issues of reuse, appropriation, memory, and replication. Kerin’s most recent publication is a catalogue entitled Artful Beneficence: Selections from the David R. Nalin Himalayan Art Collection (Rubin Museum of Art, 2009). For the current academic year, Kerin is a Visiting Scholar and Assistant Professor at the College of William and Mary, where she is teaching courses on Indian, Nepalese, and Tibetan art history.

With the generous support of the Ellen Bayard Weedon Foundation, the Museum presents four lectures on South and East Asian art each year.

Machik at UVa presents: Nomad Life in Tibet

This panel will serve as a reflection on the lives and culture of Tibetan nomads, as well as a discussion of their concerns as their pastoral traditions confront rapid modernization. Q&A to follow.

A 15 minute trailer of the upcoming documentary release “A Nomad’s Life” will also be screened.

Participants, who are all former nomads, will include Gen. Thubten Phuntsok, Yangmotso, and Rabten Shatsang.

Sponsored by Machik at UVa and the Tibet Center at UVa.

Tibetan Medicine and Global Health: Rethinking the Relationship between Tradition and Modernity

By Thubten Phuntsok, Professor of Tibetology at Central Nationalities University in Beijing and founder of Tibetan Aids Prevention Association (TAPA)

Prof. Thubten Phuntsok will discuss the relationship between traditional Tibetan ideas of a healthy ecosystem and the modern conception of Global Health.  The lecture will introduce the Four (or Five) Elements theory in Tibetan Medicine, the causes of disease as imbalance, and the relation of Traditional Tibetan Medicine to the environment. During the course of the lecture Prof. Thubten Phuntsok will also address related aspects of Tibetan history and religion. 

Thubten Phuntsok is a Distinguished International Fellow and Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia for 2009. He is a senior professor of Tibetology at Central Nationalities University in Beijing and a leading scholar of Tibetan medicine and Tibetan history. Trained as a medical doctor in the Tibetan tradition, he has published numerous books in a range of disciplines. Among his publications are a Grammar of Tibetan Language (1987) Chengdu, a two-volume History of Tibet (1994) Chengdu, Elements for the Study of the Physical Condition (1999) Beijing, Therapeutic Principles in Tibetan Medicine (2000) Beijing, The Relationship Between Mind and Body (2003) Lhasa, and Elements for the Study of Tibetan Medicine (2009) Beijing.

Professor Thubten Phuntsok is the founder and president of TAPA (Tibet Association for the Prevention of AIDS), the first non-governmental organization on the Tibetan Plateau focused on advancing AIDS awareness and medical training. He also serves on the advisory board of the non-profit Machik.

Sponsored by the Tibet Center

Living with Joy

By Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Ligmincha Institute

Please join us at the University of Virginia for this unique opportunity to experience Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche’s personable teaching style, humor and warmth while receiving teachings from the ancient Tibetan Bon Buddhist tradition.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche is the founder and spiritual director of Ligmincha Institute. Rinpoche is the author of The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep; Tibetan Sound Healing; Wonders of the Natural Mind; Healing With Form, Energy and Light: The Five Elements in Tibetan Shamanism, Tantra, and Dzogchen; and Unbounded Wholeness (with Anne Carolyn Klein).

Banditry, Feuding and Conquest: The Rise of Gonpo Namgyel, an Eastern Tibetan Chieftain in the 19th Century

By Yudru Tsomu, Assistant Professor of History in the History Department at Lawrence University

This talk considers the local history surrounding the rise of Gonpo Namgyal, a secular personality who dominated Eastern Tibet in the nineteenth century. Gonpo Namgyal was a minor chieftain from the Nyarong region in Eastern Tibet. His rise can be analyzed from several perspectives which shed light on the nature of this understudied area. Research in this area calls attention to certain presumptions commonly found in accepted scholarship. Looking into the background that paved the way for Gonpo Namgyal’s success, an underlying motivation of this research is to demonstrate the importance of secular sources for obtaining a balanced history of Tibet, as well as to show how local history effects the direction of larger national history.

Yudru Tsomu is currently an Assistant Professor of History in the History Department of Lawrence University. She received her Ph.D. from the Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Program at Harvard University in 2006, and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University in 2007.

Co-sponsored by the Tibet Center and the East Asia Center

Tibet’s Strategic Importance and Sino-Indian Relations

By Dr. Dibyesh Anand, Associate Professor in International Relations, University of Westminster, UK

Dr. Dibyesh Anand

Charting the history and politics of introduction and implementation of ideas and practices of sovereignty, liberation, buffer state, and border, I will argue that Tibet’s strategic location has been constructed through an interaction between imperial histories, shifting geopolitics, and postcolonial state formation in China and India. What are the main strategic priorities for the two Asian countries in the Himalayan region? It is not the presence of many Tibetan exiles in India but the legacy of traditional Tibetan polity on boundary issue that is a source of tension in China-India relations. The lecture will offer a new perspective by ascribing the sensitivities over the border to a combination of Tibet’s strategic importance (military, economic, ecological) to China and India’s evolution into what I call ‘Postcolonial Informal Empires’.

Dr. Dibyesh Anand is a Reader (Associate Professor) in international relations at Westminster University in London. His publications are in the areas of Global Politics, Tibet, China, Hindu Nationalism, and Security. He is the author of Geopolitical Exotica: Tibet in Western Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Hindu Nationalism in India and the Politics of Fear (Palgrave Macmillan, Forthcoming). He is currently working on a book China’s Tibet, a research project on Sino-Indian border regions, and majority-minority relations in India and China.

Sponsored by the Tibet Sustainable Governance Program and the East Asia Center