Please join us for a lecture and new documentary film with Huatse Gyal, Rice University.
Film Screening of Khata: Purity or Poison?
12:30pm on Friday, March 8 | Guggenheim 201E
Please RSVP via Eventbrite, lunch provided. Limited to 15.
This 45-minute film juxtaposes the sense of "purity" and good intentions behind the Tibetan tradition of offering long white scarves to religious teachers with the "pollution" of the environmental impacts of its mass proliferation. The film follows the proliferation of the custom in contemporary society and how scarves are now offered or otherwise employed in a variety of contexts, and colors. Huatse Gyal released his first feature-length documentary film in September 2023.
Tibetan Pastoralists as Analytical Agents: Epistemic Diversity, Documentary Filmmaking, and Collaborative Theorization
3:30pm on Friday, March 8th in Guggenheim 205
Drawing on a group of Tibetan pastoralists’ efforts to make environmental documentary films as a means of creating alternative narratives of their relationship to their ancestral land, this talk details how documentary films produced by Tibetan pastoralists subtly challenge the power/knowledge structures and discourses through which they have been framed and known. The aim of this talk is to present how documentary filmmaking can serve as sites of theoretical production, decolonizing learning, and as well as community restoration efforts by blurring the conventional boundaries between theory vs. practice, analysts vs. informants, text-based scholarship vs. multimodal forms of knowledge production. In doing so, the talk crafts a larger argument about how ethnographic attention to different modes of knowledge production may offer us opportunities to participate in a process of collaborative theorization, where our interlocutors are not just information providers, but also analytical agents, knowledge producers, or image-makers alongside us.
Huatse Gyal (དཔའ་རྩེ་རྒྱལ།) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Anthropology Department at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He received his Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Huatse Gyal has contributed peer-reviewed articles to international journals such as Critical Asian Studies, Nomadic Peoples, and Ateliers d’anthropologie. He is the co-editor of a volume, entitled, Resettlement among Tibetan Nomads in China (2015). He recently co-edited a special issue, entitled, Translating Across the Bardo: Centering the Richness of Tibetan Language in Tibetan Studies (2024). His research explores the interdependent and intimate relationships between land, language, and community, with concerns about state environmentalism and climate change, and an interdisciplinary approach to land-based indigenous revitalization movements in a global context.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies, the Tibet Himalaya Initiative, and the Geography Department.