Indigenous Futures in the Himalayas - Prof. Charisma Lepcha on More-than-Human Relations in a time of Climate Change on Thursday, March 7.
Location:
JSC Morrison Lounge
Event Date: Mar. 7, 2024
"Thirsty hunters and non-human inlaws across broken bridges in the Sikkim Himalaya"
How are human and more-than-human beings impacted by unplanned infrastructural development and resource extraction in the Sikkim Himalayas? How do Indigenous communities care for their relatives across dimensions in a time of melting glaciers, glacial lake outburst floods, and road and bridge breakdown? Professor Lepcha, a leading anthropologist from the Rong (Lepcha) community in Mayel Lyang, the Sikkim Himalayas, critically engages with these questions by drawing on Indigenous cosmovisions, demonstrating how ancestral knowledge is forging new futures in the mountains.
Professor Lepcha teaches anthropology in Sikkim University, India, where she works with young people from the region to decolonize how they study their own cultures. Her research interests include religion, indigeneity, environment, material culture and visual anthropology of Sikkim and Darjeeling Himalaya. She has published numerous articles and co-edited The Cultural Heritage of Sikkim (2019) and Communities, Institutions and Histories of India’s Northeast (2022). She was a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (IIAS), Shimla (2018-2019) and a Visiting Scholar (Linguistic and Semiotic Anthropology Training Program) at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
This event is part of RELS120: Religion and Climate Change. Please contact Prof. Holmes-Tagchungdarpa (tagchung@oxy.edu) with questions or to make a time to talk more with the speaker.
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