Tradition and Modernity in Tibet and the Himalaya

This project is a study of tradition, its encounter with modernity, and its relation to political and ethnic dynamics in the Tibetan and Himalayan world today. It is modelled on an earlier initiative funded by the FWF from 1992-2000 in conjunction with the Austrian Academy of Sciences which, working closely with Tibetan scholars, documented traditions relating to mountain cults in Tibet and the Himalayas. The three-year project will use a similar collaborative method to document traditions, but over a wide range of social, political and cultural areas. In addition, it will use an inter-disciplinary approach to examine the interaction between tradition and modernity and to analyse its relationship with the ways in which local communities relate to centres of power and authority, especially in states which attempt to include a diversity of ethnic groups in their populations. The project will compare the approaches to be found in the mountain and high-plateau areas of four states - China, India, Bhutan and Nepal - where issues of tradition, ethnicity and cultural difference have become increasingly significant in state-community relations. Its eleven case-studies will look in detail at the re-emergence of epic song cycles in Tibet and Inner Mongolia; at myths of origination, at pasture-management, and at place-names; and at the interaction between local "traditional" communities and "modern" political movements in Communist China, Maoist areas of Nepal and federal India. The project team of five principal investigators, three Tibetan research assistants, three international participating researchers, two research students, and five Tibetan research associates will produce a series of publications on the written and oral traditions documented by the case studies, as well as developing a series of broader reflections concerning the tradition-modernity dynamic in these societies and its intersection with centre-periphery tensions. Two discussion meetings involving the project`s international co- operating scholars will be organised in 2003 and 2004 and their findings will be published. The project aims to advance co-operation between the international community and the centres of scholarship in Tibet, in the framework of an agreement between the Tibetan Academy of Social Sciences and the Austrian Academy of Sciences which was renewed in the year 2000. The project`s collaborators include the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Columbia (New York), the CNRS in Paris and Leipzig University, besides the participating institutions in Tibet and Austria.

The cultures and peoples of Tibet and the Himalayan regions have for centuries been seen by foreigners as principal sites for the study of the "traditional". Today, as those areas face compelling challenges from global and regional change, it is the interaction between tradition and modernity that has become a central question for contemporary social scientists, whether foreign or local. The project "Tradition and Modernity in Tibet and the Himalayas" carried out research from 2001 to 2005 into aspects of the tradition-modernity issue in these understudied regions. Through the promotion of cooperative and interdisciplinary approaches to research, it produced a wealth of new materials based on primary field studies. The studies sought to delineate the profile of tradition and modernity in four areas of social life. The first - song and performing art - documented the revival of epic song cycles, the re-emergence of Tibetan opera, and the creation of a popular music culture in different regions of Tibet. The second looked at revitalized rituals with pre- Buddhist origins, such as the horse festivals in Nagchu, and oracle practices in Tibetan villages. The third dealt with the construction of landscape, as seen through traditionally inspired adaptations of pasture land management in southern Tibet, place-names in the Tsal area, and urban architecture in contemporary Lhasa. The fourth focus- area concerned political responses to tradition. It included studies of appointment practices, of female activists, and of women cadres among the new elite in central Tibet, as well as research into ethnic and political conflicts in the Tamang and Magar areas of Nepal, and in Ladakh in North-west India. The project`s methodologies were drawn from the disciplines of cultural and social anthropology, history and political studies, while its research sites included areas in Nepal and Ladakh, and in central, southern and eastern Tibet. In the eastern sector, the project worked collaboratively with scholars from Inner Mongolia to study contemporary expressions of the historical and cultural links between these peoples, as part of a move to document the so-called "Tibetan-Mongolian Interface". The project, based in Austria, constructed a network of cooperation between research institutions in Europe, the United States, Inner and Southern Asia, and included a two year workshop with scholars from 10 countries on the study of cadres and discourse in late socialist societies. New material that came to light during the course of the project, as a result of close collaboration with local scholars, included a collection of 11th century texts from Ke ru monastery in south central Tibet, and manuscripts and murals about the most important line of female incarnated lamas in Tibet, the Samding Dorje Phagmo, whose current embodiment is also a cadre in the Chinese administration. In these case studies the project members were able to present primary data and theoretical insights into the impact of globalisation, modernity and state construction on traditional cultures. The studies offer examinations of both the interweaving of re-constructed traditional practices within rapidly modernising local communities, and of the co- option by states and sub-state parties of traditional concepts within political discourse, adding to cultural and intellectual understanding of contemporary society in the mountain and high plateau areas that lie at the interface of Southern and Eastern Asia.