Masters’ School Seminar 01.03.2023 3 p.m

The Masters’ School Seminar will be held on March, 01, at  3 p.m.

Our guest is prof. Charles Ramble.

Charles Ramble is a Research Professor (directeur d’études) in the History and Philology Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, PSL University, Paris, and director of the Tibetan Studies research team of the Centre for Research on East Asian Civilisations (CRCAO). From 2000 to 2010 he held the position of University Lecturer in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies that had recently been established at the University of Oxford, UK, with which he remains associated as a University Research Lecturer. From 2006 to 2013 he was President of the International Association for Tibetan Studies. He is currently director of the European Society for the Study of Himalayan and Central Asian Civilisations (SEECHAC). His research interests include the Bön religion, Tibetan pagan religion in the Himalayan region, the social history of Tibetan societies, pilgrimage and biography. He is the author or co-author of eight books, including The Navel of the Demoness: Tibetan Buddhism and Civil Religion in Highland Nepal (2008) as well as three volumes in a series entitled Tibetan Sources for a Social History of Mustang (Nepal), (2008, 2015, 2019).

Title and abstract:

Human Sciences in the Service of “People without History”: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Uncovering the Past in Himalayan Highland Communities

Charles Ramble

Historical research on Tibet has tended to concentrate on major political movements, wars and the biographies of powerful rulers and religious figures, while the daily lives of ordinary people remain largely unknown. The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s saw the destruction of literally millions of Tibetan legal and administrative documents. While such documents may have been symbols of social and economic oppression, they were also a window onto the lives and hardships of villagers, windows that were effectively closed for ever by these acts of immolation. More recently, the immense value of such documents for our understanding of the social history of Tibetan societies has been demonstrated by the discovery of archival collections in Himalayan areas adjacent to the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. These collections, which are the property of temples, private households or village communities, include a wide variety of documents such as wills, contracts, legal cases and even entire law codes. To these materials we may add other sources, such as travellers’ accounts, Tibetan autobiographies and even modern fiction writing. While all these genres of literature present their own technical difficulties, even an ability to read the words on a page may be of little use without a knowledge of the cultural, religious or political context in which they were written. This lecture will illustrate how the lives of ‘people without history’ can be brought light thanks to a combination of methods from a range of fields such as philology, anthropology, religious studies and archaeology.