Open seminar: Affordances of Tibetan Landscape

Open seminar with Professor Dan Smyer Yü, Founding Director of the Center for Trans-Himalayan Studies, Yunnan Minzu University.

Affordances of Tibetan Landscape: Eco-aesthetics and Post-Orientalism in Contemporary China

Abstract

This talk, based on Dan Smyer Yü's latest book entitled Mindscaping the Landscape of Tibet: Place, Memorability, Eco-aesthetics (De Gruyter 2015), presents a case study of the affective aspect of Tibetan landscape and its wider implications in art, film, literature, and cultural critique in contemporary China. It addresses the conceptual and ethnographic topics of what Smyer Yü calls the “affordances” and “the mirage effects” of Tibetan landscape in the social arenas of Buddhist practices, tourism, entertainment, and political engagements. While it converses with the existing scholarly critiques on what is known as the “imagined Tibet,” it presents an argument that the imagined Tibet is not merely an affair of human cultural and political encounters but, more critically, is also a geopsychic and geopoetic effect of Tibet’s unique eco-geological landscape. Based on his ethnographic research, Smyer Yü expands the frontier of landscape studies by reconceptualizing environmental affordances and the interfaces of mindscape-landscape, place-psyche, and eco-aesthetics and geopolitics.

Short bio: Dan Smyer Yü

Dan Smyer Yü is Professor and Founding Director of the Center for Trans-Himalayan Studies at Yunnan Minzu University. He received his doctoral degree in anthropology from the University of California at Davis in 2006, specializing in trans-regional studies of ethnic relations, religious revitalizations, Sino-Tibetan Buddhist interactions, and globalization. Prior to his current faculty appointment, he was a Research Group Leader at Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and a core member of the Transregional Research Network (CETREN) at University of Göttingen. His recent publications include The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China: Charisma, Money, Enlightenment (monograph, Routledge 2011) and Mindscaping the Landscape of Tibet: Place, Memorability, Eco-aesthetics (monograph, De Gruyter 2015). His current research directions are theories of transregional studies, transboundary governance of natural and human heritages, water and religious diversity, religion and peacebuilding, comparative studies of secularisms in the greater Himalayan region. His projects and publications have been funded by the Swedish Research Council, Canadian SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, the National Social Sciences Fund of China, the German Ministry for Education and Research Fund, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and the Pacific Rim Research Program (President’s Office, University of California). He is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker. His widely screened films include Embrace (50 min. Tibetan mountain culture and ecology 2011) and Rainbow Rider (55 min. Tibetan Buddhism in China 2013).

Professor Dan Smyer Yü is a keynote speakers at the conference Buddhism, business and economic relations - in Asia and beyond, 12-14 October at University of Copenhagen.

Photo (c) Dan Smyer