Himalaya Research Guide Introduction
This Research Guide introduces students, faculty, and community at UBC to academic resources, journals, dictionaries, and other databases about the Himalayan region, including Bhutan, China, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and the Tibetan cultural zones that traverse all these countries.
The guide introduces core resources for those embarking on projects, assignments, or other initiatives to learn more about the Himalayan region. This is not a comprehensive listing of all resources in the field, but rather offers a starting point for further exploration.
The guide is built to work in tandem with the courses planned under the UBC Himalaya Program academic initiative in the Faculty of Arts, in Departments such as Anthropology, Art History, and Asian Studies. The books and resources cited are either available via UBC library or are open access materials. Please ensure that you are logged into your UBC library account for the best access to resources cited in this guide.
The ‘Digital collections’ tab has a drop-down option for ‘Other resources’; please click on that for information on films and newspapers.
UBC Faculty Publications on Himalayas
Rituals of Ethnicity : Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India by Call Number: DS493.9.T46 S56 2015Publication Date: 2015Rituals of Ethnicity is a transnational study of the relationships between mobility, ethnicity, and ritual action. Through an ethnography of the Thangmi, a marginalized community who migrate between Himalayan border zones of Nepal, India and the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China, Shneiderman offers a new explanation for the persistence of enduring ethnic identities today despite the increasing realities of mobile, hybrid lives. She shows that ethnicization may be understood as a process of ritualization, which brings people together around the shared sacred object of identity.
Dragon in the Land of Snows by Call Number: DS786 .T737 1999ISBN: 0712665331Publication Date: 1999Based entirely on unpublished primary sources, this remarkable book -the first authoritative history of modern Tibet - is also the first to provide detailed accounts of: * The covert political manoeuverings in Tibet and the role of the Tibetan, Chinese and British governments; * The Dalai Lama's escape in 1959; * The CIA's involvement and the establishment of a secret military base in the Nepalese Himalayas; * The British government lying to the UN and Douglas Hurd's role in that process; * The power struggles during the Cultural Revolution and the mass uprising against the Chinese that has remained secret until now.
A Grammar of the Thangmi Language by Call Number: PL3801.T41 G73 2012ISBN: 9789004155268Publication Date: 2011-12-09This monograph is a grammar of Thangmi, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the districts of Dolakha and Sindhupalcok in central-eastern Nepal. The language is spoken by upwards of 30,000 people belonging to an ethnic group of the same name. The Thangmi are one of Nepal s least documented communities.These two volumes include a grammatical description of the Dolakha dialect of Thangmi, a collection of glossed oral texts and a comprehensive lexicon with relevant examples. In addition, the reader will find an extensive ethnolinguistic introduction to the speakers and their culture.For students and scholars of anthropology and linguistics, this study is a compelling illustration of the interweaving of these disciplines in the context of Himalayan studies.With financial support of the International Institute for Asian Studies (www.iias.nl).
Sustainable Livelihood Systems in Nepal by ISBN: 9789937846721Publication Date: 2015Sustainable Livelihood Systems in Nepal: Principles, Practices and Prospects, edited by Ambika Adhikari and Govinda Dahal et al., is a collection of 16 articles related to the current issues of Nepal. The topics covered are agriculture, natural resources, gender, energy, tourism, and health care. In “Reforming Health Insurance Policy in Nepal: An Integrated Self-Financing Model”, Ratna Shrestha draws upon the experiences with the existing community-based health insurance policies in Nepal and proposes a new scheme in which the enrollment from the formal sector employees is mandatory. With this mandatory enrollment, Shrestha argues, the problem of financial risk diversification associated with the community-based schemes, where the enrollment is voluntary, can either be eliminated or minimized.
A Timely Message from the Cave: The Mahāmudrā and Intellectual Agenda of dGe-bshes Brag-phug-pa dGe-’dun-rin-chen (1926–1997), the Sixty-Ninth rJe-mkhan-po of Bhutan by ISBN: 9783945151105Publication Date: 2020A Timely Message from the Cave addresses the longlasting debate about the Mahāmudrā doctrine and meditative system that was first elicited through Sakya Paṇḍita (1182–1251)'s systematic critique in the thirteenth century. For the first time, the positions of eminent Bhutanese Drukpa Kagyü masters between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries are made accessible to the English-speaking reader. The Tibetan text corpus deals with the entire spectrum of the crucial controversial topics about the Mahāmudrā doctrine and meditative system. Some of those topics were discussed over centuries, partially reaching back to earlier philosophical disputes in India. Furthermore, this Tibetan text corpus shows how oral discourses formed into new elite Buddhist textual traditions addressing the Mahāmudrā doctrine and meditative system and gained trans-regional and trans-cultural relevance among both Tibetan and Bhutanese Buddhist masters in the eighteenth century. A Timely Message from the Cave includes a critical edition as an editio princeps, a richly annotated translation, and a comprehensive analysis of the Sixty-ninth Chief Abbot of Bhutan Geshe Drapukpa Gendün Rinchen (1926–1997)'s dense Mahāmudrā commentary in verse, the Timely Messenger, comprising the Ninth Chief Abbot of Bhutan Shākya Rinchen (1710–1759)'s root text, the Pointed Spear of a Siddha.
Nepali and Tibetan Language Open Educational Resources
Designed by UBC Himalaya Program and Asian Studies language instructors Binod Shrestha (Nepali) and Sonam Chusang (Tibetan) as self-paced, open access courses, these Open Educational Resources (OERs) offer learners a basic introduction to each language, with lessons on script, grammar, basic vocabulary, and guidance on how to carry out a basic conversation. Click below to be directed to the OERs:
Himalaya Research Guide Project
The development of this Himalayan Studies research guide was supported by a UBC Faculty of Arts Arts Undergraduate Research Award. We would like to thank Aadil Brar, student assistant, who worked on this project over the summer of 2016. This guide was designed under the supervision of Dr. Sara Shneiderman. For any questions about the design of this research guide or about accessing any resources mentioned, please contact Belinda Suen, the Himalaya Program Assistant: himalaya.arts@ubc.ca.