Geography

Geography has been a dirty bomb in my mind. I didn't think about place before. Now I think about it a lot. And then I started thinking about space, too. It wasn't simply the impact of those five hundred pound concepts that flattened the mud hut of my stone age mind. It was the incipient uranium of their wild networks of implications that seeped into my water table and mutated my unborn thoughts.

This page will eventually host geographical things. Or will die trying.

For now, it will briefly describe my researches. Take a look below the Nagas to check it out.

November 15, 2006: I have submitted an abstract to the Association of American Geographers annual conference in San Francisco. It reads thus:

This paper will propose a methodology for understanding the way that naga serpent spirits mediate the relationship between people and environment in Nepal. From ancient aquifers and the texts that mythologize their history to contemporary debates on health, pollution, and falling water tables, people in Nepal have looked to nagas to represent their environment. Today, what was once thought of as a stable and spiritually endowed ecosystem is faced with increasing pressures from rural-urban migration, international refugees, and foreign tourism. Different emerging notions of nature, place, and spirituality interact, coexist, and occasionally conflict. My research will explore these relationships, their effects on the religious and ecological networks in Nepal, and the spiritual ecologies they produce.
My primary question is: How are people’s ways of knowing the world materially emplaced in the world? Further, how do knowledge systems, as materialities in the world, interact with natural processes? Specifically, do Buddhist beliefs in nonhuman spirits and meditative mind training affect people’s interaction with the natural world? How does this relationship manifest itself in the Himalaya where traditional and modern ways of knowing the world are in sharp relief? Furthermore, if we look at Nepal’s variety of Buddhist knowledge systems as modern ways of knowing, what kind of natures will these ways of knowing reveal to us?

June 15, 2006: I have submitted an abstract to a conference in Exeter called "Emerging Geographies of Belief. It looks similar to the 918 paper and reads thus:

This paper will look at the way Tibetan legendary history uses atavistic visions of female bodies to root its claims to religious universalism. Furthermore, it will explore the depth of a Tibetan universalized identity that is imagined to be more than an ethnic or political identity. As a religious nation, Tibetan Buddhist universalism claims to have compassionate hold of the minds of its citizens, as well as soteriologically transformative power for their benefit. The relationship between the atavistic image of the female body’s rooting of Tibetan Buddhist hegemony and the transformative power thought to infuse it is in the subjugation of the landscape by Buddhist missionary projects. In order to establish Buddhism in Tibet and transform all it displaced, the atavistic image of the demon had to be put down and, as we will see, thoroughly dominated.
In its larger situation, this paper attempts to articulate the way that EuroAmericanistic analysis can responsibly examine, interpret, and learn from Buddhist visions, beliefs, texts, and practices. The historical burden of orientalism does not relieve us of the responsibility to try to understand Buddhist worlds. Geography’s sensitivity to spatial presence, accreted place, and visions of landscape well founds its approach to emerging inquiries into belief.

May 1, 2006: I am writing a paper for Geography 918: Geographies of Identity and Difference. The working opening paragraph looks like this:

In this paper, I will look at the way Tibetan legendary history uses the atavistic female body to root its claims to nationhood. Furthermore, I will explore the depth of nationality imagined to be not only a ethnic or political nation, but a religious nation that claims to not only have hold of the minds of its citizens, but also claims to have soteriologically transformative power. The relationship between the atavistic image of the female body’s containment of the Tibetan nation and the transformative power thought to infuse landscape is in the subjugation of the landscape by Buddhist missionary projects. In order to establish Buddhism in Tibet and displace all it displaced, the atavistic image of the demoness had to be put down and, as we will see, thoroughly dominated.

March 31, 2006: Soon, I will be presenting at the Grad Student Symposium here at the Geography Department. The presentation is called "Tibetan Spiritual Landsccape: Networks of Articulated Subjectivity." The very short abstract goes like this:

"This paper will examine Tibetan spiritual landscape as a network of articulated subjectivity. Nonhuman aspects of landscape are assembled in a creative vision as a network of spirits. That is to say that parts of environment are attributed subjectivity analogous to human intentionality, sensitivity, and agency. This post-animistic Buddhist vision of landscape nuances the creation of places in ways that influence the feedback loop among individual practitioners, major cultural discourses such as Buddhism, social structures, and physical landscape."

January 30, 2006: I am writing a paper on Tibetan spiritual landscape the potential uses of Jurgen Habermas's notion of the public sphere in its analysis. A key paragraph in that paper is this:

"As landscape is integrated into the public sphere by way of its personification and endowment with privacy, the extent of structure is extended beyond human society to a larger public in which we find environmental forces integrated into a sphere that is communicable with humanity. This is remarkable for two reasons: 1) structure is often treated as a social form and of fundamentally social constitution and 2) those geographers who have extended structural influence to physical environment often treat it as dumb matter. The case of Tibetan spiritual landscape draws these two arguments beyond their comfort range by blurring the boundaries between the social, the physical, and the individual. By taking Habermas’s recognition of the public sphere as constituted by the assembly of private individuals, we can integrate a problem in spiritual landscape: namely, how does the project of human liberation find itself embedded in a society of oppression and hegemony."

Previous notes:.

Buddhist placemaking is my mot du jour (though, I guess it is not just a word). With this phrase I mean to indicate that there is a way (or a bunch of ways) in which Buddhist doctrine, literature, and practice guides people to make their places. I am trying to figure out how that process works. It may be a bigger nut than I had previously thought. Initially I thought that I would simply check out visualization meditations in which meditators imaginatively create a place in which they move symbols about. That manipulation of symbols is a manipulation of aspects of mind.

Now, having read a bit more about it, I think that there is more to it. Those imagined places are inextricably tied to actual places and the whole condition of spatiality.

My master's thesis, which has just taken a hit from a case of irresponsible reformatting traces four historical moments in the growth of Tibetan spiritual landscape.

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