Dan Smyer Yü
Dan Smyer Yü is Kuige Professor of Ethnology, School of Ethnology and Sociology at Yunnan University, a Global Faculty Member at the Global South Studies Center, the University of Cologne, and an advisory board member of Yale Forum for Religion and Ecology. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California at Davis in 2006. Prior to his current faculty appointment, he was the Founding Director of the Center for Trans-Himalayan Studies at Yunnan Minzu University, a Senior Researcher/Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, a core member of the Transregional Research Network (CETREN) at University of Göttingen, and a New Millennium Scholar at Minzu University of China, Beijing. He is the author of The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China: Charisma, Money, Enlightenment (Routledge 2011) and Mindscaping the Landscape of Tibet: Place, Memorability, Eco-aesthetics (De Gruyter 2015), and the co-editor of Religion and Ecological Sustainability in China (Routledge 2014), Trans-Himalayan Borderlands: Livelihoods, Territorialities, Modernities (Amsterdam University Press 2017), and Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas: Symbiotic Indigeneity, commoning, Sustainability (Routledge 2021). His research interests are religion and ecology, environmental humanities, transboundary state effects, climate change and heritage preservation, Buddhism and peacebuilding, and comparative studies of Eurasian secularisms. His externally funded projects are “Trans-Himalayan Environmental Humanities” (ICIMOD), “India-China Corridor Project” (the Swedish Research Council), “Cultural and Ecological Diversity of the Trans-Himalayas in the Context of China’s Belt and Road Initiative” (National Social Sciences Foundation of China), and “Sustainable Lives in Scarred Landscapes: Heritage, Environment, and Violence in the China-Myanmar Jade Trade” (The British Academy Sustainable Development Program). Aside from his academic work, he practices regenerative farming.
Phone: (86)139-1060-3084
Address: Dan Smyer Yü, Ph.D.
Kuige Professor of Ethnology
School of Ethnology & Sociology
Yunnan University, Donglu Campus
2 Cuihu Dong Lu, Kunming
Yunnan Province, China
Zip code: 650500
Phone: (86)139-1060-3084
Address: Dan Smyer Yü, Ph.D.
Kuige Professor of Ethnology
School of Ethnology & Sociology
Yunnan University, Donglu Campus
2 Cuihu Dong Lu, Kunming
Yunnan Province, China
Zip code: 650500
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Videos by Dan Smyer Yü
[documentary 55 min., a rough cut]
Directed by Dan Smyer Yu
This ethnographic film documents a pilgrimage of lamas, scholars, writers, filmmakers, and students to Mt. Amne Machen (Amne Machin) located in Golok, Amdo, currently in Qinghai Province of China. Most pilgrims, as an integral part of the film crew, are both behind and forefront of different scenes. The film crew pulls its focus on how Amne Machen symbolizes home, belonging, and humanization of natural landscapes. As Amne Machen is known as lha-ri or "soul-mountain" to which local communities and prominent historical figures entrust their collective memories, the sense of home and place-making are the primary topics of the pilgrims' reflections. Through the narratives of the pilgrims and cinematic capturing of the awe-inspiring landscape of the mountain, this film relives powerfully gripping moments when place becomes a placeless, flowing cultural consciousness in the minds of the pilgrims.
Papers by Dan Smyer Yü
Keywords: public theology – the Anthropocene – sacred – sentience – Deep Freedom – indigenous Earth
that the observable strength of Buddhist environmentalism is in local and global environmental advocacy grounded in the Buddhist ethics of interdependence, even as, canonically, Buddhism does not offer what is commonly recognized by scientists and scholars as traditional ecological knowledge or religious ecology. To substantiate this, this article offers a textual assessment of the Buddhist canon’s lack of systematic ecological knowledge, and a case study of how freeing domestic animals and advocating vegetarianism among contemporary Tibetan Buddhists in China, inclusive of non‑Tibetan converts, mainly benefits human wellbeing and at the same time is entangled in social affairs that have little to do with the ecological wellbeing of the Tibetan Plateau and urban China. This debate is by no means intended to negate the successes of Buddhist environmentalism; instead, it draws fine lines between the claimed canonic basis of Buddhist ecology, the strength of Buddhist environmental advocacy, the everyday practices of Buddhism, and the aspirations for strengthening the ecological foundation of Buddhist environmental activism. Thinking in line with eco‑Buddhists, the author concludes the article by proposing an Earth Sutra, a hypothetical future canonic text as the ecological basis of Buddhist environmentalism.
Keywords: freeing animals; vegetarianism; eco‑Buddhism; environmentalism; Earth Sutra
mountainous region is a home to both human diversity and biodiversity hotspots. However, this human-nonhuman mountain diversity is often shaded over inadvertently by the binary Sino-Tibet interface in the politically centred studies of the borderlands. This China-Tibet duality landmarked in the Hengduan Mountains is often characterised as ‘frontier’ (Gros 2019),
‘convergence zone’ (Jinba 2014: 6), and ‘the middle ground’ (Lipman 1997: xxxiii; Giersch 2006:3). As the region is a unique part of the Earth’s geological creativity and inter-Asian environmental connectivity, I take a Zomian approach to recontextualise Sino-Tibetan borderlands not merely as borderlands but also as a multitude of montane habitats with steep ecological gradients in close proximity, which promote biodiversity, ecologically niched human dwellings, and ethnolinguistic diversification. The Hengduan Mountains as Sino-Tibetan borderlands and as a unique ecogeological region of its own, deserve more complex understandings in both human and environmental terms. Environmentally, I intend to lay out a set of ecogeological affordances from the Hengduan Mountain region as an unacknowledged environmental basis of the human centric political duality of Tibet and China. On the human side, I recount the Hengduan Mountain region as a human diversity hotspot that is environed in the region’s biodiversity.
a phrase coined here with the intent to reexamine and reconceptualize
both connectivity and disconnectivity between Yunnan, Burma, and Bengal.
The proposed corridor geographies conceptually overlap process geographies but go beyond human geography by encompassing environmental flows and nonhuman aspects of transregionality—especially transboundary river systems, mountain ranges, and megafauna such as elephants.
[documentary 55 min., a rough cut]
Directed by Dan Smyer Yu
This ethnographic film documents a pilgrimage of lamas, scholars, writers, filmmakers, and students to Mt. Amne Machen (Amne Machin) located in Golok, Amdo, currently in Qinghai Province of China. Most pilgrims, as an integral part of the film crew, are both behind and forefront of different scenes. The film crew pulls its focus on how Amne Machen symbolizes home, belonging, and humanization of natural landscapes. As Amne Machen is known as lha-ri or "soul-mountain" to which local communities and prominent historical figures entrust their collective memories, the sense of home and place-making are the primary topics of the pilgrims' reflections. Through the narratives of the pilgrims and cinematic capturing of the awe-inspiring landscape of the mountain, this film relives powerfully gripping moments when place becomes a placeless, flowing cultural consciousness in the minds of the pilgrims.
Keywords: public theology – the Anthropocene – sacred – sentience – Deep Freedom – indigenous Earth
that the observable strength of Buddhist environmentalism is in local and global environmental advocacy grounded in the Buddhist ethics of interdependence, even as, canonically, Buddhism does not offer what is commonly recognized by scientists and scholars as traditional ecological knowledge or religious ecology. To substantiate this, this article offers a textual assessment of the Buddhist canon’s lack of systematic ecological knowledge, and a case study of how freeing domestic animals and advocating vegetarianism among contemporary Tibetan Buddhists in China, inclusive of non‑Tibetan converts, mainly benefits human wellbeing and at the same time is entangled in social affairs that have little to do with the ecological wellbeing of the Tibetan Plateau and urban China. This debate is by no means intended to negate the successes of Buddhist environmentalism; instead, it draws fine lines between the claimed canonic basis of Buddhist ecology, the strength of Buddhist environmental advocacy, the everyday practices of Buddhism, and the aspirations for strengthening the ecological foundation of Buddhist environmental activism. Thinking in line with eco‑Buddhists, the author concludes the article by proposing an Earth Sutra, a hypothetical future canonic text as the ecological basis of Buddhist environmentalism.
Keywords: freeing animals; vegetarianism; eco‑Buddhism; environmentalism; Earth Sutra
mountainous region is a home to both human diversity and biodiversity hotspots. However, this human-nonhuman mountain diversity is often shaded over inadvertently by the binary Sino-Tibet interface in the politically centred studies of the borderlands. This China-Tibet duality landmarked in the Hengduan Mountains is often characterised as ‘frontier’ (Gros 2019),
‘convergence zone’ (Jinba 2014: 6), and ‘the middle ground’ (Lipman 1997: xxxiii; Giersch 2006:3). As the region is a unique part of the Earth’s geological creativity and inter-Asian environmental connectivity, I take a Zomian approach to recontextualise Sino-Tibetan borderlands not merely as borderlands but also as a multitude of montane habitats with steep ecological gradients in close proximity, which promote biodiversity, ecologically niched human dwellings, and ethnolinguistic diversification. The Hengduan Mountains as Sino-Tibetan borderlands and as a unique ecogeological region of its own, deserve more complex understandings in both human and environmental terms. Environmentally, I intend to lay out a set of ecogeological affordances from the Hengduan Mountain region as an unacknowledged environmental basis of the human centric political duality of Tibet and China. On the human side, I recount the Hengduan Mountain region as a human diversity hotspot that is environed in the region’s biodiversity.
a phrase coined here with the intent to reexamine and reconceptualize
both connectivity and disconnectivity between Yunnan, Burma, and Bengal.
The proposed corridor geographies conceptually overlap process geographies but go beyond human geography by encompassing environmental flows and nonhuman aspects of transregionality—especially transboundary river systems, mountain ranges, and megafauna such as elephants.
The collective endeavour of the book is expressed in what the editors characterize as the clime studies of the Himalayan multispecies worlds. As a terrestrial concept, the individual case studies concretize the abstract concept of climate change in their place- and culturally-specific correlations of weather, climate pattern, and landscape change. Supported by empirical and historical findings, the concept in each chapter showcases climate change as clime change. As place, clime is discerned as both a recipient of and a contributor to climate change over time in the Himalayan context. It affirms climate change as multispecies encounters, as part of multifaceted cultural processes, and as ecologically-specific environmental changes in the more-than-human worlds of the Himalayas.
As the case studies complement, enrich, and converse with natural scientific understandings of Himalayan climate change, this book offers students, academics, and the interested public fresh approaches to the interdisciplinary field of climate studies and policy debates on climate change and sustainable development.
Protean Edging of Habitats and Empires
Edited by Dan Smyer Yü, Karin Dean
Book Description
This book explores the historical interconnections between Bengal, Burma and Yunnan (China) and views the corridor as a transregion that exhibits mobility, connectivity and diversity as well as place-based ecogeological uniqueness. With a focus on the concept of corridor geographies that have shared human and environmental histories beyond sharply demarcated territorial sovereignties of modern individual nation-states, it presents the variety and complexity of premodern and modern pathways, corridors, borders, and networks of livelihood-making, local political alliances, trade and commerce, religions, political systems, and colonial encounters. The book discusses crucial themes including environmental edgings of human-nonhuman habitats; transregional migratory routes and habitats of megafauna; elephant corridors in Yunnan–Myanmar–Bengal landscape; framing spaces between India and China; Tibetan–Myanmar corridors; transboundary river systems; narratives of a Rohingya jade trader; cross-border flow of De’ang’s fermented tea; householding in upland Laos; cultural identities; and trans-border livelihoods.
Comprehensive and topical, with its wide-ranging case studies, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of history, routes and border studies, sociology and social anthropology, South East Asian history, South Asian history, Chinese studies, environmental history, human geography, international relations, ecology and cultural studies.
Unique in scope, this book features case studies from Bhutan, Assam, Sikkim, Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sino-Indian borderlands, many of which are documented by authors from indigenous Himalayan communities. It explores three environmental characteristics of modern Himalayas: the anthropogenic, the indigenous, and the animist. Focusing on the sentient relations of human-, animal-, and spirit-worlds with the earth in different parts of the Himalayas, the authors present the complex meanings of indigeneity, commonings and sustainability in the Anthropocene. In doing so, they show the vital role that indigenous stories and perspectives play in building new regional and planetary environmental ethics for a sustainable future.
Drawing on a wide range of expert contributions from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanist disciplines, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental humanities, religion and ecology, indigenous knowledge and sustainable development more broadly.
https://www.routledge.com/Environmental-Humanities-in-the-New-Himalayas-Symbiotic-Indigeneity-Commoning/Yu-Maaker/p/book/9780367699796
This is the second Chinese translation volume of the Trans-Himalayan Studies Reader Series from Academy Press. Dan Smyer Yü is the chief editor of this ongoing translation and publishing project intended to introduce critical literature of Himalayan studies in the West to the Chinese language world. It particularly caters to graduate students and scholars based in China, who are having growing interest in Himalayan studies as a unique transregional studies. This volume hosts the works of high impact scholars such as Jean Michaud, Willem van Schendel, Sara Shneiderman, Gunnel Cederlöf, Sarah Turner, Geoffrey Samuel, and Georgina Drew. The conceptual gravity of this volume is on Zomia from the perspectives of James Scott, Willem van Schendel, Jean Michaud, and Sara Shneiderman, who are currently the leading luminaries in deciphering the theoretical and transregional significances of Zomia as a concept and as a differently perceived world region in terms of geography, geology, ecology, ethnolinguistics, and inter-state power dynamics. It is intend as a contribution to building an informed, international arena of scholarly debates in contemporary China. The volume is the outcome of the united understanding and appreciation of intellectual diversity from the co-editors, translators, and the original authors.
Trans-Himalayan Borderlands
Livelihoods, Territorialities, Modernities
The societies in the Himalayan borderlands have
undergone wide-ranging transformations, as the
territorial reconfiguration of modern nation-states since
the mid-twentieth century and the presently increasing
trans-Himalayan movements of people, goods and
capital, reshape the livelihoods of communities, pulling
them into global trends of modernisation and regional
discourses of national belonging.
This book explores the changes to native senses of
place, the conception of border - simultaneously as
limitations and opportunities - and what the authors
call "affective boundaries," "livelihood reconstruction,"
and "trans-Himalayan modernities." It addresses
changing social, political, and environmental conditions
that acknowledge growing external connectivity even as
it emphasises the importance of place.
"This book offers a diverse collection of fascinating case
studies that, taken together, present a transboundary
approach that challenges the 'trait geographies' upon
which much area studies is still based."
Tim Oakes, Professor of Geography, University of Colorado, Boulder
"This is an excellent collection of original works. It makes
an important contribution to transboundary studies and
a dialogic approach to spatial and social processes in
and beyond Asia."
Li Zhang, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Davis
Based on detailed cross-regional ethnographic work, the book demonstrates that the revival of Tibetan Buddhism in contemporary China is intimately bound with both the affirming and negating forces of globalization, modernity, and politics of religion, indigenous identity reclamation, and the market economy. The analysis highlights the multidimensionality of Tibetan Buddhism in relation to different religious, cultural, and political constituencies of China. By recognizing the greater contexts of China’s politics of religion and of the global status of Tibetan Buddhism, this book presents an argument that the revival of Tibetan Buddhism is not an isolated event limited merely to Tibetan regions; instead, it is a result of the intersection of both local and global transformative changes. The book is a useful contribution to students and scholars of Asian religion and Chinese studies.
The societies in the Himalayan borderlands have undergone wide-ranging transformations, as the territorial reconfiguration of modern nation-states since the mid-twentieth century and the presently increasing trans-Himalayan movements of people, goods, and capital reshape the livelihoods of communities, pulling them into global trends of modernization and regional discourses of national belonging. This book explores the changes to native senses of place, the conception of border – simultaneously as limitations and opportunities – and what the authors call “affective boundaries,” “livelihood reconstruction,” and “trans-Himalayan modernities.” It addresses changing social, political, and environmental conditions that acknowledge growing external connectivity even as it emphasizes the importance of place.
Dan Smyer Yü is professor and director of Center for Trans-Himalayan Studies at Yunnan Minzu University. Jean Michaud is professor of social anthropology at Université Laval, Canada.
its overarching themes, conceptual concerns, and individual chapter
highlights. It attempts to initiate a trans-Himalayan study aimed at an
ethnoculturally and ecologically coherent but geopolitically demarcated
world region. Based on the borderland perspectives of the contributors,
it deems the trans-Himalayan region a space of multiple state margins
between which connectivity and disconnectivity concurrently take place.
Concerning the diversity of trans-Himalayan livelihood, territoriality,
and modernity, the chapter emphasizes the criticalness of ecological
forces, which, along with human-induced global-local forces of change,
reshape the multidimensional borderland engagements between different
ethnic communities and nation-states in the greater Himalayan region,
including the highlands of Southeast Asia and Southwest China.
Keywords: Trans-Himalayas, Zomia, livelihood, horizontal connectivity,
multistate margins