(2 credits) This introduction to the history and culture of modern and contemporary Tibet will deepen students’ appreciation for the many changes the Tibetan people have navigated in the past one hundred years to reveal a complex society that cannot be reduced to the simplistic representations constructed for them as political victims, feudal serfs, or romanticized Buddhists, but rather as one which has achieved remarkable cultural and religious sustainability balancing tradition and innovation, including in regard to Buddhism.
From the early modern (17th c.) to 19th c., encounters with foreigners increased but were part of the continuity of the Tibetan civilization’s millennia of political, economic, religious, and cultural influential contact with its neighbors, trading partners, and religious pilgrims, even as technologies and geo-political concepts evolved. The beginning of the century is remembered by the agrarian and nomadic clans comprising the majority of the population and cosmopolitan Lhasans, all ruled to some extent by the government of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, as relatively peaceful. The mid-20th century ended Tibetan control over their land and people with the colonial invasion and annexation and the traumatic losses of the Cultural Revolution that ravaged Tibet and the occupying People’s Republic of China. Struggles for human rights and episodic political tensions have coincided with the founding and growth of exile or diasporic communities and institutions outside of Tibet from the 1960s after the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was granted asylum in India, and cultural and religious revivals and creativity since the 1980s inside Tibet.
To illumine these historical upheavals and resiliency, we will engage with autobiographical literature, documentary film and photography, historical primary sources, Tibetan produced and Hollywood movies, contemporary music and art, fiction and poetry in translation, modern monastic Buddhist education and pilgrimage, and how Tibetan Buddhists relate their religion to everyday lives, seeking, as much as possible, Tibetan representation of Tibetan lives in all their diversity and what contributes to a shared sense of Tibetan identity among them. Students will learn an interdisciplinary approach to the study of a unique region, highlighting the interactions of Tibetan communities with others globally and Tibetan visions for their and human futures together.