region: Central and Western Tibet

Area Studies in universities is a field undergoing great change.  The art, religion, and history of Tibet are important in their own right but have been studied less than they should have in both Asia and the West.  Within Tibetan studies, some of the newest scholarship has begun to emphasize Tibet’s frequent contacts with the cultures surrounding it.  Himalayan culture as a whole, while still debated and poorly understood, is increasingly recognized as an important part of Asian studies.  One of the contributions of the study of the Silk Road and Inner Asia to the world of scholarship, in fact, has been to demonstrate the ways in which many different parts of Asia were in vital contact with each other centuries before the formation of modern nation-states.  And within the field of Chinese history, there is fresh appreciation of the Chinese state as a multi-ethnic empire with complicated relations with its internal and external neighbors, including Tibet.  Whereas earlier generations of Western scholars tended, as one commentator put it recently, “to stand in Tibet and look south,” stressing the continuities between India and Tibet, more recent work is looking at connections between Tibet and the regions to its north and east.  These developments, together with the surge of interest in multidisciplinary Buddhist studies, point to significant opportunities for new scholarship and the need to train a new cadre of scholars.

Research in Tibet now is radically different than it was even five years ago.  Tibet has remained largely inaccessible to scholars until recently.  On-site study by Chinese scholars began in 1979, and foreign scholars under close supervision were permitted inside Tibet beginning in 1985.  Even now, most of the Western scholars expert in Tibet spent their formative years of study not inside Tibet but with Tibetan communities in exile in India, Nepal, and the West, or solely in Western universities.  The Chinese government continues to relax restrictions on travel, especially for groups, and scholars native to Tibet and other areas in China are looking for avenues of collaboration with foreign colleagues.  Local monks appear to be granting more open access to temple complexes in central Tibet, and many archaeological sites in western Tibet are being opened to foreign researchers.  For these and other reasons, the new generation of graduate students and the broader field of Asian humanities will benefit greatly from a site seminar in Tibet.