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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 , 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.

Dr. Huatse Gyal is an anthropologist, writer, and filmmaker. He earned his B.A. in Anthropology from Reed College in 2013, and MA and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2022. Dr. Gyal's work falls into three interrelated areas. First, Dr. Gyal explores the interdependent relationships between land, language, and community, focusing on state environmentalism and climate change, as well as an interdisciplinary approach to land-based indigenous revitalization movements in a global context. His scholarship and community service are deeply informed by Critical Indigenous Studies scholars who see revitalization of indigenous ways of relating to land and language as essential to the mission of empowering indigenous communities and unmaking settler colonialisms. Second, Dr. Gyal focuses on environmental anthropology. Drawing on Tibetan genres of land-based indigenous storywork, such as origin stories, sacred place narratives, traditional songs and folktales, epic stories, stories of nonhuman actors, ritual texts, as well as long-term ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Tibet, his current research analytically centers indigenous Tibetan pastoralists’ ways of theorizing and relating to their ancestral lands now jeopardized by large-scale rangeland fencing and resettlement policies. Third, Dr. Gyal is a visual anthropologist. He has been collaborating with a network of native/indigenous community artists, writers, and environmentalists in eastern Tibet, whose work strives to construct alternative narratives of Tibetan pastoralists’ relationality with their ancestral land through documentary films, paintings, children's books, and community-led land-restoration projects.