Tibetan and Himalayan Religions Unit
We are looking forward to another year of excellent THRU programming in 2025 in Boston!
As a reminder, you do not need to be an AAR member to submit a proposal to the annual meeting; however, you do have to become a member to present at the annual meeting.
Proposals are welcome on any theme or topic related to the Tibetan and Himalayan Religions Unit. The presidential theme for 2025, suggested by incoming president Leela Prasad, is "Freedom." Proposals do not need to relate to the presidential theme but we encourage you to read Prasad's summary of the theme, and to engage with it if it speaks to you.
Please see below the proposed panel sessions we've received, and which we are now publicizing through this call for papers. Contact details of the organizers are below, and you should reach out to them to express your interest. And you are more than welcome to propose your own panel or paper outside of what is listed here.
- Roundtable: Privilege and Positionality across Fieldwork Experience and Interpretation of Texts
- Contact: Natasha Mikles (n.mikles@txstate.edu),
- Technologies of Governance in Tibet and the Himalayas
- Thinking with the 2025 theme of 'freedom', this panel invites papers on developments in the ways religion factors into the governance of bodies and minds in Tibet and the Himalayas. Relevant topics include but are not limited to: material culture in governmental technology; the monastery as governing institution; theories of governance in Buddhist and/or Bönpo philosophy; gender and the gendered body as sites of bondage, freedom, and governance; shifting views of the dharmarāja in the Buddhist state; the conflux of political and soteriological liberation. Contact: Seth Auster-Rosen (sethausterrosen@uchicago.edu)
- Roundtable: New Frontiers of Buddhism: Challenging Norms and Opening Doors (Potential co-sponsorship with the Buddhism Unit)
- This roundtable discussion invites scholars in Buddhist Studies to explore areas of rapid transformation as Buddhism intersects with newly emerging practices and phenomena, such as online religion and developments in contemporary science. These and similar developments challenge the traditional norms of Buddhism long dominated by institutional, textual, and ritual frameworks and transcend conventional boundaries. Such interdisciplinary engagements create new opportunities for Buddhism to directly impact modern scientific and secular practices. We will examine the evolving frontiers of Buddhism, both by challenging established norms and by opening new doors for innovation and collaboration in a global context. Contact: Dhondup T. Rekjong, dhonduptashi2025@u.northwestern.edu
- Liberation Narratives in Tibetan Buddhism and Speculative Fiction (Potential co-sponsorship with the Religion and Science Fiction Unit)
- We are looking for papers that pair a Tibetan/Himalayan Buddhist narrative source of any genre with a piece of speculative fiction to explore one of the following thematic binaries: freedom/oppression, imagination/reality, enlightenment/delusion, birth/death, or humanity/other sentience. The focus is on the ways that liberation narratives in both Tibetan/Himalayan Buddhism and speculative fiction may serve as mutually enriching heuristic devices for deepening interpretation and understanding. Contact: Joie Szu-Chiao Chen (chens@g.harvard.edu) and Seth Auster-Rosen (sethausterrosen@uchicago.edu)
This Unit’s mission is to create an environment that promotes discussion among scholars taking diverse approaches to the study of Tibetan and Himalayan religions. Our identity and cohesion derive from the fact that we deal with a delimited geocultural space, but the intellectual excitement comes from the fact that we are specialists in different historical periods and cultural areas, from the fact that we are interested in different religious traditions, and from the fact that we have different methodological approaches to the study of religion. In particular, we encourage scholarship that approaches Tibetan and Himalayan religions through a wide range of approaches:
Multidisciplinary focus — we are committed to methodological diversity and to promoting scholarship that challenges the traditional disciplinary dichotomies through which the field has defined itself, such as text/practice, written/oral, philology/ethnography, and humanistic/social scientific study.
Transregional focus — we encourage a holistic approach to the study of Tibet and the Himalaya as a region, albeit a diverse one. One of the most important features of religious traditions in our field — perhaps in every field — is the degree to which they are inextricably connected, and it is only through the exploration of such interconnections that the phenomenon of religion in the Tibeto-Himalayan region can be understood. Such interconnections often cut across ethnonational boundaries.
Focus on cultural history — in recent times, the study of Asian religions has taken a quite drastic cultural/historical turn. Nowhere is this more evident than in the study of Tibetan and Himalayan religions. A previous generation of scholars was concerned principally with elite religious institutions — and more specifically with their doctrinal/philosophical texts. Today scholarship is much more diverse. A new generation of scholars is concerned, for example, with folk religious practices, religion and material culture, the politics of religious institutions, the representation of Tibetan religions in the media, and the historical construction of the field itself.
This Unit is committed to fostering such a multifaceted approach to the cultural history of Tibet and the Himalayas.