La SFEMT a le plaisir d’annoncer la tenue de la présentation des ouvrages suivants :
Old Literary Tibetan: A Comprehensive Grammatical Description Based on the Old Tibetan Annals
par Joanna Bialek (Trinity College Dublin) en discussion avec Camille Simon (Université de Picardie Jules Verne-LACITO)
le jeudi 12 décembre 17h30-18h30 en salle 3.15 à l’INALCO et via Zoom (https://shorturl.at/ryQZ2)
et
Queens Without a Kingdom Worth Ruling- Buddhist Nuns and the Process of Change in Tibetan Buddhist communities
par Chandra Chiara Ehm (EFEO/CRCAO) en discussion avec Nicola Schneider (IFRAE)
le jeudi 12 décembre 18h30-19h30 en salle 3.15 à l’INALCO et via Zoom (https://shorturl.at/ryQZ2)
Les deux présentations seront suivies par un cocktail.
Résumés des ouvrages :
Old Literary Tibetan: A Comprehensive Grammatical Description Based on the Old Tibetan Annals de Joanna Bialek
Linguistic contributions were among the very first studies published in European languages in connection with Tibet and its culture(s). Works of Isaac Jacob Schmidt, Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, Anton Schiefner, Heinrich August Jäschke, and Sarat Chandra Das, to mention just the most prominent pioneers, opened the gate to Tibet for Western scholars by making Tibet’s languages intelligible to wider circles of the academic community. Since then, literature on Tibetic languages has immensely grown, and we continue to discover new areas of literary activities of Tibetans in the past centuries. It suffices to mention here the invaluable corpus of Old Tibetan documents recovered from the sands of Central Asian oases in the early 20th c., or the most recent revelation of religious pagan texts found in Eastern Tibet and studied currently by Charles Ramble and his team in the ERC-funded project “PaganTibet: Documenting the first reconstruction of pre-Buddhist practices in Tibet”. In my talk, I shall present yet another publication that, I hope, will allow us to navigate more securely through the intricacies of a Tibetic, extinct language: Old Literary Tibetan. “Old Literary Tibetan: A Comprehensive Grammatical Description Based on the Old Tibetan Annals” is the first grammar of Old Tibetan ever written and the first modern grammar of a literary Tibetan language. The book incorporates the most recent research results on the language that has enjoyed a remarkable revival of interest in the academic community in the last twenty years. However, the lack of any grammatical description of Old Literary Tibetan has tremendously impeded in-depth studies of its rich corpus. So I hope that the work introduced in this talk will not only close the gap in the description of Tibetic languages but also foster studies of pre-Buddhist culture on the Tibetan Plateau.
Joanna Bialek, Ph.D. (2016), is a PI of the MSCA-funded project “Tibetan Obsolete Mortuary practices and afterlife Beliefs. Language conservatism of religious writings in the service of Proto-Bodish reconstruction” (TOMB) based at Centre for Asian Studies (Trinity College Dublin). She is working at the crossroads of historical linguistics and religious studies. She has published Compounds and Compounding in Old Tibetan and A Textbook in Classical Tibetan, as well as articles on Old Tibetan, history of the Tibetan Empire, Dunhuang manuscripts, and funerary practices on the Tibetan Plateau.
Queens Without a Kingdom Worth Ruling- Buddhist Nuns and the Process of Change in Tibetan Buddhist communities de Chandra Chiara Ehm
Looking through the walls of a cloistered monastic community, such as a Tibetan Buddhist nunnery, is nearly impossible as lay person. These religious communities are multi-layered in being simultaneously places of spiritual development, Buddhist scholasticism, and religious devotion. Chandra Chiara Ehm lived for nearly a decade behind the walls of Khachoe Ghakyil Ling nunnery in the Nepalese Himalayas. During this time, she collected the nuns’ stories and studied their lifestyle and their scholarship. This book invites the reader to step through the convent’s walls to explore Tibetan monastic life from the perspective of the nuns. Her ethnography offers a first-hand account of life in the nunnery, carefully calibrated within a theoretical frame to investigate the historical social aspects of monastic institutions. Another important theme Ehm depicts is the religious hierarchy and the remarkable changes that globalisation, feminism, and secularisation have brought to this gender balance and the nuns’ monastic life in recent years. This vivid and comprehensive study of female monastic life provides novel insights with essential implications for the inter- and intra-religious analysis of monasticism today.
Chandra Chiara Ehm, Ph.D. (2024), is a researcher in Tibetan and religious studies is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) in the Project Natinasia with Fabienne Jagou and affiliated with the Centre de recherche sur les civilisations de l’Asie orientale (CRCAO). She works with both philological and qualitative research methods, drawing on extensive fieldwork.
