Glocal Place, Lived Space: Everyday Life in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery for Nuns in Northern India

This PhD Thesis from Dr. Elles Lohuis focuses on the daily life experience in small Tibetan Buddhist monasteries for women in the remote parts of the Northern Himalayas of India. Supported by the Jamyang Foundation, an NGO founded by Venerable Prof. Dr. Karma Lekshe Tsomo, in Dharamsala, India in 1987 these monasteries are the first of its kind to provide monastic and secular education for Tibetan Buddhist women in the Indian Himalayas. This study discusses the global support, the process and the impact of this global support on the daily lives of the nuns in the monasteries in the time frame from 2006-2013. By applying a combination of engaged scholarship methods, photography and spending long periods of time with the nuns, an important part of this study was undertaken in collaboration with the nuns. The vast amount of data collected explores the daily lives of the nuns as well as the necessary context, content and process of change through time. Analysis of the data is done though an integrated, inclusive frame of theories which includes Appadurai’s concept of scapes and work of the imagination (1996), Bauman’s concept of liquidity and individualization (2000), De Certeau’s theory on the duality of place and space (1984) and Bourdieu’s concepts of field and capital (1977).