Sanggay Tashi awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. The Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship program is designed to support emerging scholars as they pursue bold and innovative research in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.
Sanggay's research explores how Tibetan nomads skillfully assert their cultural, political, and religious identity to thrive amidst structural changes of state-making and development as modernization. Through ethnographic research, “Indigenous Innovations” demonstrates Tibetan nomads’ self-reliance and innovative efforts to not only continue their cultural, linguistic, and religious practices but also actively recreate and promote them in the new socioeconomic structures of China. By centering community-based innovative practices such as educational centers, entrepreneurship, scholarship, and new religious practices, this research builds on Tibetan nomads’ reliance on their cultural materials, relationships, knowledge, and skills to remake and reorganize their lives in the current world that are profoundly strategic, insightful, and innovative.