A Brief Update from Dan Smyer Yü

Dear friends and colleagues,

Long time no see! Hope you’re all healthy, happy, and productive as usual in spite of the colossal health and geopolitical crises.

I have kept myself happily busy since the last time I posted my update. There’re just too many things to share with you; So let me stay with the essentials. After serving as a professor of anthropology and the founding director of the Center for Trans-Himalayan Studies for five years at Yunnan Minzu University, I took a faculty appointment from Yunnan University as a Kuige Professor of Ethnology, just a few blocks away within the same University Town of Kunming. All academic routines stay pretty much the same with the focus on religion and ecology, Sino-Tibetan Buddhist modernity, and environmental humanities. Since coming to Yunnan, the geography of my research has been expanded from western China/Tibetan Plateau to Myanmar, Bhutan, Nepal, and India. Annual traveling to South Asia and Southeast Asia becomes a routine. Fieldwork beyond East Asia and the Tibetan Plateau has surely added fresh perspectives and place-based knowledge to my scholarly productivity.

My modern Buddhist studies, likewise, are increasingly taking ecological perspectives and are steadily resituated in environmental humanities. Through working with native peoples in Tibet, Yunnan, Bhutan, Nepal, and Myanmar, I continue to see the environmental value of Buddhist cultures and civilizations. At the same time, I’m also having a deeper awareness of indigenous, pre-Buddhist ecological knowledge and practices among Buddhist communities in the greater Himalayan region. This awareness compels me to re-examine the claimed ecological knowledge in the Buddhist canonic texts. Admittedly, the indigenous practices done in the name of Buddhism turn out to be a formidable contribution to what we know as Buddhist ecology. My recent publications, such as Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas: Symbiotic Indigeneity, Commoning, Sustainability (Routledge 2021), Yunnan-Burma-Bengal Corridor Geographies: Protean Edging of Habitats and Empires (Routledge 2021), and “The Critical Zone as a Planetary Animist Sphere: Etho-graphing an Affective Consciousness of the Earth” (JSSRNC 2020), are all dedicated to indigenous ecological knowledge surviving under Buddhism and other world religions. I’m currently making a new book Multipolar Climes of the Himalaya, Andes and Arctic: Climate and Water in the Anthropocene. It’s a comparative study of terrestrial experiences of climate change in the world’s highlands. It should be out in March 2023.

One more thing – I recently happily accepted a partial appointment from the University of Cologne as its Global Faculty member while I keep my professorship at Yunnan University. I’ll be in Germany for 1-2 months annually and very much look forward to my first visit this July and August and reconnecting with friends there. In fact, Almut already invited me to contribute a paper to her co-organized workshop, a part of the Lecture Series on Religion and Ecology. Hope many of us will join the event, too!

Cheers,
Dan Smyer Yü