Application for publication costs for the social scientific book Source of Life. Revitalisation Rites and Bon Shamans in Bhutan and the Eastern Himalayas.

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Antoni Huber
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; Asian Studies
• Term: from 2018 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 420065581

Longstanding political restrictions on research access to the eastern Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau margins between Bhutan and southwest China mean many of the region's highland societies remain among the least known to science of all peoples in Asia. The monograph Source of Life presents three new inquiries into some of these highland societies based upon the first long-term and in-depth ethnographic project to be permitted in eastern Bhutan and western Arunachal Pradesh (India). Its major contributions together demonstrate heretofore unknown trans-Himalayan cultural and ancestral connections between different peoples in the region. Volume I presents the first extensive documentation of any shared eastern Himalayan cultural practices and perspectives existing over a larger area. The focus is a subregional ancestral cult dedicated to revitalisation, procreation and fertility, called bon and led by shamans (bonpo), and evident across eastern Bhutan and far western Arunachal Pradesh. Study of this cult allows for the book's second main contribution: critical reconsideration of possible relationships between such bonidentified cultural phenomena and shamans. Bon and shamans are considered to belong to the region's oldest evident cultural patterns, and so continue to feature in discussions about highland societies between west Nepal and southwest China, as well as the adjacent Tibetan Plateau. Yet, any relationship between them remains both superficially studied and controversial in the existing literature. The book's new assessment reveals these two phenomena are more deeply entangled, and stand in a different relationship to the organised Tibetan Bon religion, than previously realised. The book's first two contributions provide data for the third: Exploring new hypotheses about ethnolinguistic identities and prehistory of speakers of certain language branches within the Tibeto-Burman phylum. Volume II presents dense empirical evidence of ancestral heritage shared between peoples of eastern Bhutan and adjacent western Arunachal Pradesh who speak East Bodish languages, and populations now called Qiang and Naxi dwelling ca. 900 km eastwards in China. This finding addresses a newly emerging hypothesis on prehistoric peopling of the region. It offers evidence indicating the south-eastern Tibetan Plateau and its margins were once a far larger prehistoric settlement zone for speakers of Qiangic languages.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants