Tibet and the Himalayas as a Cultural Region

The Himalayas

Our Digital Library and Information Community is devoted to a specific area of the world which we name "Tibet and the Himalayas." Like all such human demarcations of areas, its boundaries are not precise and its very identity is the constructed result of complex histories and agendas themselves not easy to chart in their fullness. While there is a certain arbitrariness to such demarcations, there are also multiple environmental, cultural and historical logics at work rendering them useful.

"ASIA"

In order to understand the rationales for our demarcation of this region of the world as the base for an international community of all interested in knowledge about it, it is necessary to first briefly survey the way in which "Asia" itself has been geographically understood and constructed. Historically, "Asia" has been geographically divided by academics and other writers in a wide variety of ways with corresponding labels and agendas. These agendas have been driven by interests in politics, economics/trade routes, language, environment, culture and many other factors, each producing a very different set of considerations for defining certain territories as units, and having familial relationships with certain other defined territories, but not with others. Of course the rubric "Asia," itself driven by a certain history of agendas and concerns, and does not possess entirely clear boundaries marking it off from other reified global regions such as "Europe" or "Africa."

The most stable modern academic divisions of Asia are no doubt the demarcation of "Indology" and "Sinology" as academic fields of study corresponding to the great political and military poles of the contemporary nation states of India and China. These are also extended to include surrounding countries under the rubrics of South Asia and East Asia. Thus South Asia is constructed to include the nation of India and smaller adjacent or near-by countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka; East Asia then in a similar manner embraces China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. These two broad regions – defined in terms that are alternatively linguistic, cultural, economic and environmental in character – are complimented by grouping together the nation states of Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malayasia, and Indonesia under the rubric "Southeast Asia." A little less typical but still quite common, the entire Mediterranean coast to Iran is classified as "West Asia."

The most problematic classification, however, is that of the vast territories situated between India and China. Some use the term "Inner Asia" to refer to the whole of the Euro-Asia continent less the primary sedentary civilizations of China, India, Iran, and Southeast Asia. This category thus includes the cultures of Tibet and Mongolia; the southern Himalayan regions now politically included in Nepal, Bhutan, certain parts of India, and Kashmir; the historically Buddhist populations (in the pre-Islamic period) of the so-called Silk Route consisting in a chain of oasis towns in what is now Afghanistan, the new countries south of Russia which formerly made up "Soviet Central Asia"; and Xinjiang to the north of Tibet and west of China. The term "Central Asia" is also used in a shifting manner. It is often reserved for a particular region within "Inner Asia," namely the oasis towns which operated as a link between China and the West, and possessed their own distinctive cultural, economic, and religious patterns; but at times this is used more loosely to refer to Tibet and Mongolia. Another rubric is "Central Eurasia," used by a contemporary academic organization (http://www.fas.harvard.edu/cess) to signify the regions from the Black Sea to Mongolia, including notably the Caucasus, "Central Asia" and "Inner Asia," Iranian, Turkic, Caucasian and Tibetan linguistic regions from the Iranian Plateau through the Hindu Kush and Himalayas, north to the steppe zone extending across Mongolia, Siberia and Southern Russia.

Amongst this confusing array of labels and regions, the term "Himalayan" is at times used to refer to cultures situated along the southern slopes of the Himalayan mountain range situated to the north of India, and especially the historical kingdoms of Nepal, Bhutan, Ladakh and others. At other times it is used to extend into much of cultural Tibet located to the north of that same mountain range. However, it is unclear just how far north and east such a classification extends, given that much of cultural Tibet is far distant from the actual mountain range. At times writers have used the rubric "Greater Himalayan" to cover the entirety of cultural Tibet as well the southern Himalayan cultures. "Tibet" itself is another rubric which has been used to signify the largest territorial expanse of this entire region. This rubric is in fact fairly coherent when defined on ethno-linguistic terms, although such an expanse greatly exceeds any political unit in existence since the disintegration of the ancient Tibetan empire, and clouds the great internal diversity of languages, cultures and political formations that historically characterized that area. Indeed, the Tibetan word translated as "Tibet" (bod) and "Tibetan" (bod skad, bod pa) is explicitly understood by many regions of Cultural Tibet like Kham (khams) and Amdo (a mdo) as signifying Central Tibet, its languages and its inhabitants. As near as a few hours outside of Lhasa, such as in the Basum (brag gsum) area of Kongpo (kong po) we find communities which do not even speak a dialect of Tibetan.

Turning to Southern Himalayan cultures, and specifically the nation state of Nepal, we find an even more complex array of communities. For cultural, historical, linguistic and even ecological purposes, the country is best understood as being comprised of three interlinking horizontal belts. The northern third of the country, including areas such as Solu-Khumbu, Yolmo (Helambu), Dolpo, Manang and Mustang, constitutes the southern extremity of cultural Tibet. In these regions Tibetan Buddhism is widely practiced and the ethnic groups speak languages which are commonly – albeit erroneously - referred to as dialects of Tibetan. It is fair to say, however, that literacy in these parts of Nepal is traditionally higher in the Tibetan language than it is in Nepali, and that historically speaking, trade and politics likewise shared more with political Tibet than with the court of Kathmandu. The second third of Nepal, the middle belt, is the area which is most distinctively Nepali from a cultural viewpoint. It is in these middle hills that many of Nepal's ethnic groups and communities reside, predominantly agricultural peoples practicing some trade with neighboring valleys and beyond. Two language families are dominant in these middle hills: Tibeto-Burman and Indo-Aryan. By and large, the peoples who speak Tibeto-Burman languages are also ethnically Mongolian and practice forms of shamanism and spirit trance related to that seen in Siberia and Mongolia. The Indo-Aryan speaking people are often divided by caste distinctions, from the ritually higher Brahmins (known in Nepali as Bahun) through to the occupational castes. These groups predominantly speak Nepali, the national language, and practice Hinduism. A further interesting feature of the middle hill cultures of Nepal is their religious pluralism, which blends elements of Hinduism and Buddhism in with indigenous knowledge systems, ritual practices and medical understanding. Some of the socially prominent and populous ethnic groups in this middle belt are Gurung, Tamang, Kiranti, Rai, Limbu, Magar, and Thakali. The Kathmandu valley has been settled for many centuries by the Newar people, who speak a Tibeto-Burman language heavily influenced by Indic. The urban Newar communities in and around Kathmandu are recognized for their great ritual and material elaboration and for having a corpus of written texts in their own script. The southernmost belt of Nepal shares features with the plains of northern India. Hinduism is the dominant belief system, Indo-Aryan languages such as Nepali, Hindi and Maithili are widely spoken and more rice is cultivated in the plains than in the hills. For the present purposes, we consider the Himalayas to extend through the first high altitude belt of Nepal and into the middle hills, but do not include the plains regions within the nation state of modern Nepal.

The contemporary nation state of Bhutan also presents a complex case. Its national language of Dzongkha (rdzong kha) is by any criteria a dialect of Tibetan, and its cultural traditions are dominated by Buddhist practices that form a clear literary, ideological and institutional continuity with Tibetan Buddhist forms overall. However, many other languages spoken in Bhutan fall outside of the range of Tibetan proper, and Bhutan has existed as a separate political unit with its own distinctive cultural traditions for a number of centuries. Most importantly, it has achieved the status of an independent nation state in the modern era, and contemporary identity statements indicate a strong sense of distinctness from "Tibetans."

Of course all of these complex issues have been rendered even more complex by constant migrations by different ethnic groups, both throughout history and in the present. The well known Chinese immigration into parts of Cultural Tibet, and the influx of Nepali populations into Bhutan, are some of the most well documented such migrations occurring in the last century.

Tibet and the Himalayas

Despite all these disjunctures, there are broader cultural and environmental continuities that bind these communities together into a meaningful broader region, even with its is boundaries shifting and fuzzy in character. Due to the loose sense of unity of many of the cultural areas as belonging to "Tibetan" culture, on the one hand, and the dominating importance of mountain ranges throughout the region and especially the majestic Himalayan range that bisects it, we have chosen to call the area "Tibet and the Himalayas," and secondarily the "Greater Himalayas."

This region is divided into northern and southern areas by the roughly East to West arc of the Himalayan range proper. It runs from the Hindu Kush and Pamirs in the west, to the edge of the Sichuan Basin in the east, to Assam, northern Burma and Yunnan in the southeast, to the Loess Plateau in the northeast, and to the Gansu Corrider and Tarim Basin in the north. Our practical focus at present is on the central expanse of this region, which is dominated by religious cultures of Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as by Tibeto-Burman and Indo-European language families. In particular, we are focused on areas now administratively governed by five nation states – China, Nepal, India, Pakistan and Bhutan. Of course there are other nations that include segments of the broader area – Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Bangladesh and Burma – as well as other language families on the peripheries, such as Austroasiatic, Daic, Dravidian, Burushaski and Altaic. There are significant omissions in our present scope of projects, including the full range of Kashmir, the broad range of non-Tibetan ethnic minorities in the Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu and Yunnan, Mongolian culture with its broad cultural continuities with Tibet, and so forth. We thus remain open to expanding our focus as we form new partnerships and gain new financial resources, and welcome contact from interested organizations and scholars in this regards.