THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Anna SEHNALOVA
Summoning up the Forces of the Environment: Glaciers, Deities, Ancestors, and Treasures in Pilgrimage and Healing in East Tibet
Friday 25 April 2025, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
The talk explores landscape and ancestor cosmologies in East Tibet. Local communities and their leaders in East Tibet are intimately bound to land and landscape in all its diversity, and especially to the hierarchically highest non-human actors, which can at the same time be perceived as their own human ancestors of both distant and recent past. These cosmologies have over centuries been in interactions with another, universal and transregional cosmological system - Buddhism. Furthermore, in recent decades, they have significantly shaped local reactions within the political and economic environment of the modern Chinese state. This talk explores how all these different forces interact in shaping Eastern Tibetan cosmologies today.
Anna Sehnalova is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Research Institute for the Humanities, the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
The HKAS is a member of the World Council of Anthropological Associations