So what's the title of this week's class? Locating Tibet, Ideology, Geography, and History.

Okay, we're going to talk first about geography and history, and then we'll get to ideology

a little bit. But honestly, talking about different discursive representations of Tibet

is a little bit fraught for obvious reasons, but also for the purposes of an introductory

lecture. Historically, nations with colonial ambitions in Inner Asia, predominantly England,

the United States, Russia, and China, and yes, I include China in that list, they all

projected stereotyped identity discourses onto Tibet. And rather than trying to summarize

all of that from the get-go, what I want to do is provide you with, all of you, with

a broad enough historical awareness to begin to draw your own conclusions, regardless

of any polemical or ideological assumptions that we might have or that we might bring

to the course. So this first course is going to be about what Tibet is. Where do we locate

Tibet geographically, historically, and culturally? And really only towards the end of the entire

course in weeks 12, 13, and 14, are we going to begin talking more seriously about how

Tibet is imagined discursively. Yeah, how Tibet is represented in different cultural

discourses. In particular, as seen by the West, the Chinese, and of course by the Tibetans

themselves. But first, over the next few months, I'm going to be using the term Tibet in a

number of different ways that I want to define before we dig too deeply into our material.

And I'm going to be taking some coffee breaks as we go, because it's the morning and I'm

exhausted. Now, culturally, Tibet is defined by the classical Tibetan language. And this

is spoken in a relatively large geographical zone from sections of eastern Pakistan, where

you find the Balti people in Gilgit-Baltistan who speak a Tibetic language, that linguists

consider to be the sister language of Ladakh, which is spoken in northern India just across

the border in Ladakh. It's also spoken across much of western China and north India, predominantly

in Himachal Pradesh, Ladakh, Uttar Pradesh, and Arunachal Pradesh over here in the east,

as well as parts of western Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim. And the material culture of the

Tibetan plateau is also extremely important. There are aspects of material culture, cuisine,

art, and architecture that are shared across Tibetan speaking regions. And I'll refer to

this as the Tibetan cultural sphere or as ethnocultural Tibet, which is not linked by

nationality, but rather by aspects of shared language and culture. And within the Tibetan

cultural sphere, one of the most important aspects of shared culture is the central importance

of Tibetan Buddhism. And we're going to be talking a lot about Tibetan Buddhism over

the course of the next few months. Now, some of these people living in ethnocultural Tibet

wouldn't consider themselves Tibetan. Aspects of ethnicity or pre-modern history are often

not as important as self-identifying with a nationality or a national identity discourse

in contemporary politics. But we still use the term ethnocultural Tibet as like a kind

of shorthand for discussing the broader linguistic and cultural zone in which pre-modern Tibet

and Tibetan Buddhism were both extremely important. Now, politically, the term Tibet most commonly

refers to one of two things. The first is the Tibetan Autonomous Region, the TAR, which

is an administrative province in the People's Republic of China that was established formally

in 1965. And geographically speaking, that makes up roughly one half of what I mean when

I say ethnocultural Tibet. And that's the second largest, but the least densely populated

provincial district in the PRC. Now, when Tibetan authors use the term Tibet in a geographical

sense, they often refer to something different, the much larger territory that was ruled by

the fifth Dalai Lama in the 17th century. And that's the period that a lot of people

view as like a kind of golden age in pre-modern Tibet. Pre-modern Tibet, this is important.

When I say pre-modern Tibet, I'm referring to Tibet prior to 1949 and 1950, when Tibet

was either invaded and annexed or liberated, depending on who you ask, by the Army of the

People's Republic of China. The second prevailing political usage of the term Tibet is in reference

to the Tibetan diaspora, which began in 1959 when the Dalai Lama fled the Tibetan capital

of Lhasa and took up residence officially as a stateless refugee in North India. And