Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology
About
I was born and raised in a Tibetan nomadic pastoral community in eastern Tibet. My research focuses on interdisciplinary studies of land, conservation politics, native struggles for land and life, environmental justice, indigenous epistemologies of land, Tibetan pastoralists' historical relationships with the land, enclosure of pasture land, and the resettlement of Tibetan pastoralists in China, Sino-Tibetan relations.
Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted with indigenous Tibetan pastoralists in Dzorge in eastern Tibet (2017-2019), my current project examines how indigenous notions of place and legal languages of property interact, clash, and dovetail in the everyday cultural politics of land use. In this research, I explore the impact of China's large-scale rangeland fencing and ecological resettlement policies on indigenous Tibetan pastoralists’ changing relationships to and experiences of land, water, home, and community. This research has been published in peer-reviewed journal articles in international journals such as Critical Asian Studies and Nomadic Peoples. I am the coeditor of the most comprehensive set of academic papers on ecological resettlement among Tibetan nomads in China available to date in English (Bauer and Gyal 2015). A number of my publications advocate for indigenous Tibetan pastoralists' notions of land, which has been ignored in China's technocratic and top-down environmental discourses and policies. These include widely-read online essays in my mother tongue, Tibetan, and a translation of political economist Elinor Ostrom's 8 Principles for Managing a Commons into the Tibetan language.
“One writes out of one thing only — one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.”
-James Baldwin
