Kelzang T. Tashi
Kelzang T. Tashi is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to joining Heidelberg, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, and a Research Associate in the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the Australian National University in 2020. His research interest includes religion and society, social change and land use, kinship and gender, health and healing, migration, and the environment, with a regional focus on South Asia and the eastern Himalayas.
Post-Doctoral Research
Doctoral Research
Dr Tashi’s first book, based on his PhD dissertation, was recently published by Oxford University Press as part of the American Academy of Religion’s book series: Religion, Culture, and History Series. It investigates why people, despite shifting contexts, continue to practice and engage with Bon, a religious practice that has survived over a millennium of impatience from a dominant Buddhist ecclesiastical structure in Bhutan.
Select Publications
Books/Monographs
- Tashi, T. K. (2023). World of Worldly Gods: the persistence and transformation of Shamanistic Bon in Buddhist Bhutan. New York: Oxford University Press.
Book Chapters
- Tan, G. Gillian and Tashi, T. Kelzang (2024, forthcoming book chapter) Agro-Pastoral Rivers of Bhutan and Tibet. In edited volume Climate Change and Himalayan Rivers. London: Routledge Environment Series (project funded by Australian Research Council.
Selected Articles
- Tashi, T. K. (under review). Fluid beings: socioeconomic status, human-environmental relations, and Bhutanese perspectivism.
- Tashi, T.K. 2023. The Bon Religious Practice in Bhutan. The Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Asian History.
- Tashi, T. K. (2022). Life on the porch: marginality, women, and old age in rural Bhutan. Journal of Anthropological Research, 78(1), 35-58.
- Tashi, T. K. (2021). The (un)Changing Karma: Pollution Beliefs, Social Stratification, and Reincarnisation in Bhutan. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 22(1), 41-57.
- Tashi, K (2020). Contested past, challenging future: an ethnography of pre-Buddhist Bon religious practices in central Bhutan. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. The Australian National University.
https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/202646
. - Tashi, K. (2015). A quantitative analysis of practice of distributed leadership: Teachers’ perception of their engagement in four dimensions of distributed leadership in Bhutanese schools. Asia Pacific Education Review, 16(3), 353-366.