Huatse Gyal is an environmental anthropologist at Rice University. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork research conducted with Tibetan Drokpa (pastoralists) in eastern Tibet (2017–2019), his dissertation project broadly explores how indigenous notions of place and legal languages of property interact, clash, and dovetail in the everyday cultural politics of land use. He studies the impact of the large-scale rangeland fencing and resettlement policies on Tibetan pastoralists’ changing relationships to and experiences of divine landscape, water, home, and community specifically in Dzorge in eastern Tibet. He has contributed peer-reviewed articles to international journals such as Critical Asian Studies, Ateliers d’anthropologie,and Nomadic Peoples. He is the coeditor of the most comprehensive set of academic papers on resettlement among Tibetan nomads in China available to date in English.
Dr. Huatse Gyal
