Upcoming Events

Poetry as Resistance | Reading and Conversation with Bhuchung D. Sonam - Sunday Oct 27

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 22:29:19 +0000

Poetry as Resistance | Reading and Conversation with Bhuchung D. Sonam - Sunday Oct 27 Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/09/2024 - 16:29

Date: Sunday, October 27 at 6 pm

Location: The Trident Cafe, Pearl Street, Boulder

The Tibet Himalaya Initiative invites you to a special evening with poet, writer, and publisher Bhuchung D. Sonam. He will be reading from his new book The Other Side of Blue Skies and join CU Professor Carole McGranahan in a conversation about writing as resistance in the Tibetan exile community.

About the Poet:

Bhuchung D. Sonam is an exile Tibetan poet, writer, translator and publisher. His books include Songs from Dewachen and Yak Horns: Notes on Contemporary Tibetan Writing, Music and Film & Politics. He has edited Muses in Exile: An Anthology of Tibetan Poetry, and has compiled and translated Burning the Sun’s Braids: New Poetry from Tibet. He is a founding member and editor of TibetWrites and its imprint Blackneck Books, which promotes and publishes the creative works of Tibetans. His writings are published in the Washington Post, Asahi Weekly, Journal of Indian Literature, HIMAL Southasian and Hindustan Times among others. He was recently the subject of a New York Times article – “An Exiled Publisher Creates a ‘Brotherhood Across Tibetans’.”

About the Event:

This event is free and open to the public. For information about the event, please contact Professor Carole McGranahan carole.mcgranahan@colorado.edu

This event is sponsored and hosted by the Tibet Himalaya Initiative in conjunction with the Trident Bookstore and Cafe, and with thanks to our co-sponsors the CU Center for Asian Studies and Department of Anthropology.

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Ningwasum Film and Indigenous Climate Futurism Event - Monday Oct 14

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 03:08:31 +0000

Ningwasum Film and Indigenous Climate Futurism Event - Monday Oct 14 Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/08/2024 - 21:08

A panel discussion on Indigenous climate futures with filmmaker Subash Thebe Limbu, Phurwa Gurung (CU Geography), Clint Carroll (CU Ethnic Studies), Jennifer Fluri (CU Geography), and Shae Frydenlund (CU Center for Asian Studies), will take place on Zoom on Monday, October 14th at 9:30am. The Q&A session will follow the panel discussion.

Event: Ningwasum Film and Indigenous Climate Futurism

Date: Oct 14, 2024, at 9:30am on Zoom

Zoom link for Panel Discussion:

https://cuboulder.zoom.us/j/ 4474063892

If you are interested in watching the film Ningwasum, please email shae.frydenlund@colorado.edu

About the Film

Directed by Subash Thebe Limbu, Ningwasum follows two time travellers – Miksam and Mingsoma – to a futuristic Himalayas where indigenous sovereignty and technology meet a new climate reality. The film weaves together Yakthung folk tales, music, and language to foreground indigenous perspectives and challenge typical portrayals of indigenous backwardness.

This event is sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies, and the Tibet Himalaya Initiatives.

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Keynote Lecture: "The Dalai Lama's Future Succession" - Friday 9/13

Anonymous — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 01:11:22 +0000

Keynote Lecture: "The Dalai Lama's Future Succession" - Friday 9/13 Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/03/2024 - 19:11

The Dalai Lama's Future Succession: Understanding the 14th Dalai Lama and His Formidable Contributions
Dr. Dawa Lokyitsang
Friday, September 13 at 4 pm

Hale 230 | Reception to follow

All are invited to join us on Friday, September 13 for a keynote lecture by Dr. Dawa Lokyitsang on "The Dalai Lama's Future Succession: Understanding the 14th Dalai Lama and His Formidable Contributions." Scholars Tenzin Dorjee (Columbia University), Cameron Warner (Aarhus University), and Nicole Willock (Old Dominion University) will be the respondents for the lecture. Free and open to the public, plus livestreamed at: https://cuboulder.zoom.us/j/93464212808

Talk abstract:

At a recent tenshug, a long-life ritual and prayer ceremony offered by the Tibetan, Mongolian, and Himalayan communities to the 14th Dalai Lama in New York, the Dalai Lama affirmed once again that he would live well past the age of 100. The crowd responded with boisterous applause. Yet, everyone including the Chinese government, Western governments and academics, former Tibetan politicians and activists have been in a rush to weigh in on his future succession. Why is this? My presentation will answer this question by contextualizing the 14th Dalai Lama’s legacy as a refugee who created foundational Tibetan institutions in exile for the thrivance of the Tibetan refugee community and their cause for freedom. In addition, given the Dalai Lama’s status as a formidable leader with immense global influence, he is capable of shaping and challenging the People’s Republic of China’s international relations and its legitimacy in Tibet. Understanding how and why international debates about the Dalai Lama’s succession have evolved requires a detailed consideration of his leadership accomplishments in exile.

Sponsored by the University of Colorado Department of Anthropology, Center for Asian Studies, and Tibet Himalaya Initiative together with the School of Culture and Society at Aarhus University. Co-sponsored by JLF Colorado.This is part of the Leadership and Reincarnation of the Dalai Lamas Project (LEAD): A Research Network on Succession, Innovation, and Community.

For further information, contact Professor Carole McGranahan at carole.mcgranahan@colorado.edu

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Dumra/The Secret Garden – Commemorating the CIA-Tibet Training Program at Camp Hale, June 7-9th

Anonymous — Sun, 19 May 2024 00:15:59 +0000

Dumra/The Secret Garden – Commemorating the CIA-Tibet Training Program at Camp Hale, June 7-9th Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 05/18/2024 - 18:15

Dumra/The Secret Garden – Commemorating the CIA-Tibet Training Program at Camp Hale, 1958-1964

Together with the Colorado Tibetan community, the Vail Symposium, and CU’s Department of Anthropology, the Tibet Himalaya Initiative is pleased to invite you to a special event this summer linked to Professor Carole McGranahan's longstanding research. On Sunday, June 9 at 12 noon, we will hold a memorial gathering at Camp Hale National Monument in Colorado. This event is to commemorate the CIA-Tibet training camp which operated at Camp Hale from 1958-1964. The Tibetan men who trained there were members of the Chushi Gangdrug army, a citizens’ army formed to defend the Dalai Lama, Tibet, and Buddhism against the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The CIA offered training and support to the Tibetan resistance, including this secret project at Camp Hale. The CIA officers called the training camp “The Ranch.” The Tibetan soldiers called it “Dumra,” meaning garden. The event is free and open to the public.

Co-Sponsors for the event are Polar Star Properties, 10^th Mountain Whiskey, and from the University of Colorado: The College of Arts and Sciences, the Departments of Communication, Ethnic Studies, Geography, History, Linguistics, Religious Studies, and Sociology, the Center for the American West, the Center for Asian Studies, the Institute for Behavior Science, and the Museum of Natural History.

Additionally, on Friday, June 7 at the Vail Symposium, Professor McGranahan, India-based filmmakers Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin, and retired CIA officer Bruce Walker will present a research talk "Dumra at Camp Hale: The CIA's Tibetan Resistance Program" about the secret CIA training camp for Tibetan resistance soldiers at Camp Hale that operated from 1958-1964. This presentation is the basis for a book they are co-authoring about Camp Hale’s Tibetan history. Their presentation will be live-streamed, and tickets are free for webinar access.

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Conversation about Tibetan History and Politics with Jamyang Norbu on Friday April 26

Anonymous — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 03:57:05 +0000

Conversation about Tibetan History and Politics with Jamyang Norbu on Friday April 26 Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 04/13/2024 - 21:57

Echoes from Forgotten Mountains: A Conversation about Tibetan History and Politics with Jamyang Norbu

April 26, Friday, 4 pm, Hale 230. Reception to follow

Join us for a conversation and book signing with critically acclaimed writer Jamyang Norbu about his just-released book – Echoes from Forgotten Mountains: Tibet in War and Peace. This magnum opus documents and comments on contemporary Tibetan history from an insider’s perspective. Ranging from detailed insights about aristocratic life to his personal experiences in the Tibetan resistance to invaluable analyses of Chinese and Tibetan government politics, Echoes from Forgotten Mountains offers perspectives gleaned over a lifetime of activism, criticism, and commitment. All are welcome to join us for this very special event.

Jamyang Norbu is the leading writer and critic of the Tibetan exile community. Novelist, historian, playwright, polemicist, and scholar, he is at the forefront of documenting and shaping contemporary Tibetan history. Author of The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes, former director of the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, online essayist extraordinaire at Shadow Tibet, Jamyang Norbu has been praised as the “Lu Xun of Tibet” and denounced by Beijing as a “radical Tibetan separatist.” He was a member of the Tibetan resistance force based in Mustang, Nepal in the 1970s and is currently founder and director of High Asia Research Center in New York City.

This event is co-sponsored by the Tibet Himalaya Initiative, the Anthropology Department, the Center for Asian Studies, the UVA Tibet Center, and the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF).

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Lecture on Mediating Feuds and Making Minorities on the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands of Late Republican and Early Maoist China | Benno Weiner on Thursday, April 11

Anonymous — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 22:18:29 +0000

Lecture on Mediating Feuds and Making Minorities on the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands of Late Republican and Early Maoist China | Benno Weiner on Thursday, April 11 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/15/2024 - 15:18

Mediating Feuds and Making Minorities on the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands of Late Republican and Early Maoist China.

April 11 Thursday, 6pm, GUGG 205

In early 1941, the Kuomintang dispatched a well-known scholar-official, Gao Yihan, to investigate a “grassland dispute” between two Tibetan chiefdoms on the Qinghai-Gansu border. As Gao quickly discovered, the Gyelwo-Gengya feud was part of a much larger contest put into motion by the collapse of Manchu Qing power and competition between a host of regional actors to shape the post-imperial order. It also pitted statist desires to create and enforce bounded political-legal jurisdiction against the mobile nature of pastoral society and the norms of monastic/religious authority that often stretched across state boundaries and into sometimes distant, non-contiguous communities. A decade later, state media touted the Chinese Communist Party’s purported success in finally resolving the Gyelwo-Gengya feud to be one of its foremost achievements in “nationality work” during the early period of the PRC. This paper examines efforts by the late-Republican and early-PRC states to mediate grassland disputes as key components in state-making processes designed to territorially and epistemologically discipline the Sino-Tibetan frontier according to the demands of progressively more powerful and interventionist state formations. It also suggests that the state’s inability to eliminate these types of disputes is an avenue through which to measure the incomplete nature of these transformations.

Benno Weiner is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. He is author of the Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier and co-editor of Contested Memories: Tibetan History under Mao Retold. His most recent article, “‘This Absolutely is not a Hui Rebellion!’ The Ethnopolitics of Great Han Chauvinism in Early Maoist China,” was published in the October issue of the journal Twentieth Century China.

Co-Sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies and the Tibet Himalaya Initiative.

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Lecture on Towards Contemplative Fluency: Framing Tibetan Meditation Practices | Michael Sheehy on April 3

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 17:59:18 +0000

Lecture on Towards Contemplative Fluency: Framing Tibetan Meditation Practices | Michael Sheehy on April 3 Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/14/2024 - 10:59

Towards Contemplative Fluency: Framing Tibetan Meditation Practices

Wednesday, April 3, 2024, 6pm - 7:30pm
Eaton Humanities 250

Meditation is an ancient human practice. Our ability to artfully cultivate attentive, imaginal, and embodied modes of consciousness, and more so, intentionally design and apply techniques to transcend ordinary experience are deeply integral to the human contemplative heritage. Such practices have historically been innovated, tested, refined, and documented in magnificent diversity by the world’s great contemplative traditions. Yet, despite this historical record and an ever-growing popular interest, the study of meditation is gravely underdeveloped. In this talk, I present novel models and methods to study meditation based on a view that the underlying building-blocks and mechanisms at work in contemplative practices can be discerned, and by doing so, we can learn contemplative fluency – a practical know-how sensitive to distinct skills, contexts, and potentials. We pilot typologies of contemplative styles and contexts, discuss a generative framework, and use case examples from historical Tibetan practices to consider transdisciplinary futures of meditation research.

Michael Sheehy is a Research Assistant Professor and Director of Research at the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia where he directs the CIRCL: Contemplative Innovation + Research Collaborative Lab and is executive editor of the Journal of Contemplative Studies (JCS). His research translates practices from Tibetan meditation manuals to experiments and dialogues in the humanities, cultural psychology, and cognitive sciences.

Co-Sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies, the Tibet Himalaya Initiative, and Religious Studies.

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CAS Luncheon Series - Buddhist Feminism in Tibet: Promoting Women’s Education, Health, and Equality in the Nuns’ Journal, Gangkar Lhamo | Padma 'tsho on March 21

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 17:50:21 +0000

CAS Luncheon Series - Buddhist Feminism in Tibet: Promoting Women’s Education, Health, and Equality in the Nuns’ Journal, Gangkar Lhamo | Padma 'tsho on March 21 Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/14/2024 - 10:50

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Lecture on Tibetan Pastoralists as Analytical Agents and Screening of Documentary "Khata" | Huatse Gyal on Friday, March 8

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 15:48:38 +0000

Lecture on Tibetan Pastoralists as Analytical Agents and Screening of Documentary "Khata" | Huatse Gyal on Friday, March 8 Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 02/02/2024 - 08:48

Please join us for a lecture and new documentary film with Huatse Gyal, Rice University.

Film Screening of Khata: Purity or Poison?

12:30pm on Friday, March 8 | Guggenheim 201E
Please RSVP via Eventbrite, lunch provided. Limited to 15.

This 45-minute film juxtaposes the sense of "purity" and good intentions behind the Tibetan tradition of offering long white scarves to religious teachers with the "pollution" of the environmental impacts of its mass proliferation. The film follows the proliferation of the custom in contemporary society and how scarves are now offered or otherwise employed in a variety of contexts, and colors. Huatse Gyal released his first feature-length documentary film in September 2023.

Tibetan Pastoralists as Analytical Agents: Epistemic Diversity, Documentary Filmmaking, and Collaborative Theorization
3:30pm on Friday, March 8th in Guggenheim 205

Drawing on a group of Tibetan pastoralists’ efforts to make environmental documentary films as a means of creating alternative narratives of their relationship to their ancestral land, this talk details how documentary films produced by Tibetan pastoralists subtly challenge the power/knowledge structures and discourses through which they have been framed and known. The aim of this talk is to present how documentary filmmaking can serve as sites of theoretical production, decolonizing learning, and as well as community restoration efforts by blurring the conventional boundaries between theory vs. practice, analysts vs. informants, text-based scholarship vs. multimodal forms of knowledge production. In doing so, the talk crafts a larger argument about how ethnographic attention to different modes of knowledge production may offer us opportunities to participate in a process of collaborative theorization, where our interlocutors are not just information providers, but also analytical agents, knowledge producers, or image-makers alongside us.

Huatse Gyal (དཔའ་རྩེ་རྒྱལ།) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Anthropology Department at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He received his Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Huatse Gyal has contributed peer-reviewed articles to international journals such as Critical Asian Studies, Nomadic Peoples, and Ateliers d’anthropologie. He is the co-editor of a volume, entitled, Resettlement among Tibetan Nomads in China (2015). He recently co-edited a special issue, entitled, Translating Across the Bardo: Centering the Richness of Tibetan Language in Tibetan Studies (2024). His research explores the interdependent and intimate relationships between land, language, and community, with concerns about state environmentalism and climate change, and an interdisciplinary approach to land-based indigenous revitalization movements in a global context.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies, the Tibet Himalaya Initiative, and the Geography Department.

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Feeding Asceticism: Himalayan Buddhist Renunciation, Devotion & Embodied Intimate Care | Lecture by Annabella Pitkin at 6pm on February 22nd

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 21:51:55 +0000

Feeding Asceticism: Himalayan Buddhist Renunciation, Devotion & Embodied Intimate Care | Lecture by Annabella Pitkin at 6pm on February 22nd Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/30/2024 - 14:51

Please join us for a lecture by Annabella Pitkin, Lehigh University on:

Feeding Asceticism: Himalayan Buddhist Renunciation,
Devotion & Embodied Intimate Care

6pm on Thursday, February 22nd
Humanities 250

In Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist biographies, devotion frames stories of the intimate, emotionally intense connections between gurus and disciples. By contrast, Tibetan Buddhist accounts of renunciation often highlight separation, departure, and absence, themes that appear in tension with the intimacy of the devotional ideal. This talk focuses on accounts of the life of the reclusive twentieth century Himalayan Buddhist meditator and poet, Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen (1895-1977), highlighting the impact of his renunciation on his closest disciples, especially women. Khunu Lama’s female students, in particular the renunciant meditator Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin (1927-1979), attempted to practice embodied forms of devotional care for him, while grappling with the separations his renunciation required. Stories about disciples’ devotional care for Khunu Lama highlight the role of longing as a bridge between renunciation and devotional practice.

Annabella Pitkin is associate professor of Buddhism and East Asian religions at Lehigh University. Her research focuses on Tibetan Buddhist theories of modernity, Buddhist ideals of renunciation, miracle narratives, and Buddhist life-story writing. She is the author of Renunciation and Longing: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint (2022), which explores themes of renunciation, memory, and teacher-student relationship in the life of Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen.

Co-sponsored by Religious Studies, the Tibet Himalaya Initiative, and the Center for Asian Studies.

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