Based on ethnographic research on exiled Tibetan political institutions and practices in India, this thesis investigates sovereignty in exile. The Tibetan Government-in-exile (TGiE), based in India since 1960, remains internationally unrecognised, has limited judicial powers and lacks de jure sovereignty over territory in both Tibet and in exile. However, this exiled administration claims legitimacy as the official representative of the Tibetan population, attempts to make its voice heard within the international community and performs a number of state-like functions in relation to its diasporic 'citizenry'. Given that conventional political theory is premised on the territorially-bounded sovereign nation-state as a container for political activity, and governments are legitimated according to the territory over which they hold authority, this is an exceptional case of a government which appears to refute these orthodox assumptions. As such, this study of the form, functioning and limitations of TGiE and of its existence and state-like operations within another sovereign state, raises important theoretical issues which speak directly to political geography's concerns with power and space. These include the nature of sovereignty, the extent to which sovereignty can be disentangled from jurisdiction over territory, and the role of 'the exception' in geopolitical discourses. Employing multi-sited ethnographic methodologies, the broad aims of this research are to investigate what kind of political entity the TGiE is, and to examine the nature ofthe sovereignty it articulates. To do so, attention is paid to Tibetan settlements in exile as sites of sovereignty, TGiE's construction of a Tibetan 'population' in exile and its management of livelihoods, the negotiation of exilic political identities, and the strategic spatialities of TGiE's election systems. Rejecting realist arguments that polities such as TGiE should be viewed merely as discrepant forms of political practice, it is argued that if sovereignty is understood as historically contingent and socially constructed - and the state, sovereignty, and territory thereby conceptually disentangled - this opens up the theoretical possibility of territorial-less sovereign polities.

This thesis is a study of knowledge practices in contemporary eastern Tibetan villages, where indigenous knowledge, the modern state's rationality and modern science intermingled. The place is rich in the interplay of forms of knowledge. Based on ethnographic observation and reading in hydropower archives, I focus on local knowledge controversies, where there were clashes between the claims of villagers on the one hand, and local officials and visiting scientists on the other. Through the collection of controversies, I observed how different knowledge claims came into contact or conflict with each other, how these conflicts were resolved either in acquiescence or in coordination, and how a conclusion about knowledge was reached in each particular case. In challenging some common assumptions about knowledge production, the thesis makes a contribution to knowledge studies. When researching this subject, scholars have generally studied either the suppression of folk / native knowledge by modern science, or the pure local forms of knowledge as a means of resistance against scientificization. The thesis argues that in contrast to this standard presumption, an alternative form of knowledge production exists. Suppression or resistance are not the only options, hybridization can also be a procedure to produce knowledge, where the outcome is not necessarily purely scientific or purely folk. The case studies I examine do not show either a ruthless plunge into the universe of modern science or an eradication of the modern side and a return to entirely local knowledge. Although modern meteorology prevailed in the face of Tibetans' claims for compensation for destruction of crops by a storm, villagers on the wind-impacted farmlands deconstructed and re-legitimized the science of weather, they did not merely face a simple choice between science and the folk. In another case, villagers clashed with one another on how to delimit the mountain boundary in legal documents, and the state officials took a passive role in these controversies: the geographical entity was not born through suppression, but through villagers' free intellectual movement on the knowledge landscape, from state forestry archives, to local foraging histories, to personal biographies. A controversy over activities related to hydropower manifests the absence of suppression most clearly. Villagers clashed with scientists over seismic damage to local houses, with each side seeking to prove that the damage was or was not caused by a hydropower explosion experiment. The resulting memorandum of understanding that resolved the controversy does not certify scientific explanation nor the folk claim, but is rather a hybridization of incompatible elements from both sides. In this way, the outcome of knowledge-formation through controversies in these Tibetan villages did not fit straightforwardly with the 'logics' of either side. Nevertheless, they were made intelligible and valid as a knowledge in place, in time, and as produced by local groups of people. Simple suppression does not explain local knowledge formation, knowledge derives from complex interplays between scientific, indigenous and administrative practices and narratives.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 132-150).

Mémoire : Histoire : Paris, EPHE : 1979. / Relié avec : Histoire du cycle de la naissance et de la mort. Mémoire présenté à l'École pratique des hautes études de Paris en 1979. Contient le texte traduit de "Histoire du cycle de la naissance et de la mort", "Skye çi 'khor ba'i čhos kyi yige" et la reprod. en fac-sim. du ms. tibétain. Bibliogr. p. 91-93.

published_or_final_version / Earth Sciences / Master / Master of Philosophy

The Tibetan plateau is arguably the most important geological feature on Earth, yet its formation and evolution are poorly understood. This investigation utilizes Cretaceous sedimentary strata exposed in the Lhasa terrane of southern Tibet in order to constrain the paleogeography and tectonic setting of the region prior to the Indo-Asian collision. Lower Cretaceous strata consist of clastic sedimentary units that were deposited in shallow marine and fluvial environments. In northern Lhasa these sediments were deposited in a peripheral foreland basin that formed in response to the Lhasa-Qiangtang collision. The lower Cretaceous sediments in southern Lhasa are quartzose and were derived from cover strata exposed by local uplifts. A marine limestone of Aptian-Albian age overlies the lower Cretaceous clastic strata and was deposited in a shallow continental seaway. The paleogeography of the Lhasa terrane during deposition of the carbonate units was dominated by the effects of the Lhasa-Qiangtang collision, although other conditions, such as a high eustatic sea-level, influenced sedimentation as well. The Upper Cretaceous Takena Formation is composed of a basal member of marine limestone and an overlying member of fluvial red beds. The arkosic strata of the Takena Formation were deposited in a retro-arc foreland basin that formed to the north of the Gangdese magmatic arc. Collectively, the Cretaceous sedimentary strata indicate significant tectonic activity occurred in southern Tibet prior to the Indo-Asian collision. Moreover, the data suggest the crust of southern Tibet was thickened and possibly at high elevations before the Cenozoic.

A thorough understanding of Tibetan Plateau growth requires knowledge of the geological evolution of the Tibetan terranes as they were accreted to the Eurasian margin during the Phanerozoic. This dissertation research addresses the tectonic evolution of the southernmost of these, the Lhasa terrane of Tibet from the Late Jurassic to Eocene. The data and insights presented herein are the result of extensive geologic fieldwork in the northern and central Lhasa terrane of Tibet. In this work I present new geologic mapping and thermochronologic data that reveals a terrane scale passive roof thrust belt in the northern Lhasa terrane that accommodates significant upper crustal shortening without exhuming basement rocks. Through the development of a geospatially referenced database of igneous crystallization ages, I show that Cretaceous magmatism on the Lhasa terrane was not static, but exhibited significant temporal-spatial migrations. I interpret these movements as the result of variations in Neo-Tethyan slab dip and suggest that these variations are a major factor in shaping the Cretaceous tectonics of the Lhasa terrane. Finally, I present the Cretaceous-Eocene tectonic evolution of the Lhasa terrane that shows that the Lhasa terrane was above sea level and likely had attained significant elevation prior to the accretion of India to Eurasia and that the development of the high elevation Plateau developed outward from a central core, rather than from south to north as is commonly thought. These insights refute the widely held view that the Tibetan Plateau is the result of the Cenozoic Indo-Asian collision.

Understanding the development of the Himalaya is critical to elucidating continental collisional processes. The Greater Himalayan sequence (GHS), the exhumed mid-crust of the Himalayan orogen, records the tectonometamorphic evolution of the Himalaya from its deep hinterland to its foreland. The GHS in central Nepal and adjacent Tibet is deformed pervasively; quartz c-axis orientation fabrics from across the GHS indicate that it was deformed at high temperatures (~550-650˚C). The asymmetries of these quartz c-axis fabrics confirm field observations that define a reversal in shear sense from top-south shear near the bottom and middle of the GHS to top-north shear near the top of the package proximal to the South Tibetan detachment system (STDS). Estimates of mean kinematic vorticity from across the GHS indicate a pure shear contribution between 33% and 67%. U-Pb geochronologic data from the upper GHS exposed in the Changgo culmination in south Tibet indicate that melt crystallization and metamorphism related to crustal thickening occurred at ca. 35 Ma and was succeeded by a second metamorphic episode and syn-kinematic voluminous anatexis at ca. 22 Ma. The upper GHS was thinned vertically by 50% and extended horizontally during and immediately after the second metamorphic event, in a manner typical of the deep hinterland regions of orogens. In central Nepal, the ductile lateral extrusion of the upper GHS between the Main Central thrust (MCT) below and STDS above ceased by ~19 Ma. The cessation of lateral extrusion followed the collapse of the orogenic wedge and a reduction in the gravitational potential necessary to drive the propagation of deformation southwards towards the foreland. To restore the geometry of the wedge, deformation stepped out-of-sequence into southern Tibet, with the exhumation of the Changgo culmination and the North Himalayan antiform, before migrating incrementally back toward the foreland. Subsequently, the MCT migrated downward structurally adding material to the lower GHS as thrust slices, characteristic of foreland-style deformation. Thus, the transition between the upper and lower GHS in central Nepal records the transition from hinterland-style deformation to foreland-style deformation. / Thesis (Ph.D, Geological Sciences & Geological Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2009-04-13 11:48:45.702