Thesiss

Self-immolation is a complex rhetorical gesture that confounds many traditional norms of analysis, because it is an act in which the rhetorical canvas is the body. In this dissertation I analyze mediated responses to self-immolation in order to account for when self-immolation i…

The Sino-Indian relationship marked by mutual mistrust for the last six decades has seen definitive changes since the late 1980s. Though considerable issues remain unresolved, the two have begun establishing mechanisms to establish a certain level of trust that began with the vi…

The question upon which this study focuses is: what are the essential elements of decision making regarding the territorial composition of states? The analytical framework, strategic construction, seeks to answer this question. Strategic construction posits that in order to unde…

In Gonto La valley, southern Tibet, a continuous, planar, ∼10°N dipping detachment horizon juxtaposes Tethyan slates over a footwall of leucogranite that intrudes a S-dipping injection complex layer that I regard as a rotated Southern Tibet Detachment System (STDS) horizon. This…

On 31 August 1907, a convention of mutual cordiality was signed between Britain and Russia, formalizing relations between these two competing nations in Central Asia, a region which had become the focal point of the Anglo-Russian rivalry. The 1907 Agreement has been categorized …

Based on ethnographic research on exiled Tibetan political institutions and practices in India, this thesis investigates sovereignty in exile. The Tibetan Government-in-exile (TGiE), based in India since 1960, remains internationally unrecognised, has limited judicial powers and…

This thesis focuses on the socio-cultural and anthropological aspects of Tibetan medicine in contemporary Russia and investigates how Tibetan medicine is practised, consumed and represented in two major Russian cities, Moscow and St Petersburg. It is the first case-study of such…

Defying our usual image of the late Qing as a victim of internal decline and diplomatic ineffectiveness, the empire exhibited surprising rigor in Kham Tibet in its last decade, suppressing monasteries, removing hereditary chieftains and fashioning localities in the image of Chin…

A major problem in the art history of the medieval Himalayas has been the difficulty in reliably determining provenance of copper alloy statues. This difficulty is caused by many factors, including the lack of statues recovered from controlled archaeological excavations, few ref…

In this dissertation the section on the Western Barbarians in Tu Yu's early 9th century encyclopedic T'ung Tien is translated into English and annotated. The period from the Han Dynasty through the early T'ang is covered, with emphasis on the latter; geographically, Tu Yu's full…

This dissertation examines the cultural and political basis of Tibetan nationalism, the history of Sino-Tibetan relations, and the issue of Tibetan self-determination. The primary thesis of this dissertation is that Tibetan nationalism has strong foundations in ethnic identity, …

The uplift history of the Himalaya and Tibet is crucial to understanding both the geodynamic evolution of the orogen and its influence on the Asian climate system. Here we reconstruct paleoelevation in the northern Himalaya using the hydrogen isotope composition (δD) of synkinem…

This dissertation ethnographically explores the lived experiences of Tibetan women in Jackson Heights, New York City. I explore these lives through gendered readings of the literature on Tibetan Studies, diaspora, food studies, memory and reproduction. Reflecting on the long his…

This dissertation investigates the social-political mechanisms utilized by the Tibetan rulers and local societies of the Chone Kingdom to cope with China’s transformation from an empire to a nation-state from 1862 to 1952. Combining written records and field materials, it offers…

Buddhist thought diagnoses human suffering as the result of a fundamental misperception of reality. As such, Buddhists have developed practices that aim to replace or improve ordinary ways of seeing the world. In Tibet, one such practice is pilgrimage to holy mountains. This dis…

Before the late nineteenth century, very little about Tibet was known in the West. In fact, Western knowledge of Tibet developed during the waning of imperial Chinese power there and with Tibet's brief "independence period" (1904 - 1950). This meant that when Westerners went to …

This dissertation examines Tibetan medicine and its roles in Tibetan politics and culture throughout history with a focus on the seventeenth-century and the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama (1617-1682) and his last regent, Desi Sanggyé Gyatso (1653-1705). It explores the role that …

Tectonic models of continental orogens seek to reconstruct the deformation processes associated with large-scale continental collision events. Geographically broad field surveys provide two spatial dimensions, and geochronology provides a third temporal dimension. The missing fo…

This is a two-pronged study of how the Chinese and Tibetan literary traditions have become intertwined in the modern era. Setting out from the contention that the study of minority literatures in China must be fundamentally multilingual in its approach, this dissertation investi…

This dissertation is a contemplation of the meaning of a Tibetan Buddhist monastic ritual within its transnational context of exile. The meaning of the ritual, for the monks who performed it, ranged from its meaning expounded within relevant Tibetan Buddhist discursive tradition…