The history of Tibet remains obscure in many of its parts, despite the research accumulated during the past decades. And yet, there are tens of thousands of pages of historiographical material that remain unexploited. This documentation takes the form of religious genealogies–series of biographies of individuals belonging to institutions which represent themselves as families. Writing history often has to do with constructing legitimacy; in Tibet, it takes the form of the narration of the spiritual pedigree of religious masters: the transmission of tantric materials has to be authentic, continuous, and illustrated by heroic figures who, in each generation have illustrated the power and value of what they were transmitting. Thus, in order for the historian to achieve a global view, one must first follow these many and singular threads–and then try to reweave them the way they were actually interwoven into the real fabric of Tibetan history. This compels us to an intermediate stage between the primary sources and the historian proper's syntheses: the task of the philologists, editing and comparing the documents, restoring their meaning, detailing what is reported as facts while trying to locate and date them through crossing the available sources, with also the idea to give them more context. For such a preliminary work, one should pick up, among the many Tibetan religious lineages, one that is sufficiently documented through a well-preserved literature; that kept a strong sense of its identity over many centuries; and that played an important role in many aspects of the Tibetan life, so that its study will cast light on many unknown aspects of the Tibetan history. So we have chosen one branch of the “Ancient Order” (rNying ma) of Tibetan Buddhism: the Jangter (Byang gter) or “Northern Treasures”, which perfectly satisfies these three requirements. The Nyingmapas trace their origins to the first diffusion of Buddhism in the 8th century. But most of their doctrines, practices and liturgies belong to the category of "hidden treasures" (gter ma), the fruit of a subsequent and continuous process of revelation of which the "Northern Treasures" are a typical, albeit singular case. It is in 1366 that Rigdzin Gödem (1337-1408) is said to have extracted from a cave in Central Tibet one of the most famous sets of such "Treasure-texts" (15 large volumes), the initial core of the "Northern Treasures", to which get amalgamated further "discoveries" by his later reincarnations, but also those of other mystics. A very large part of the textual legacy of the Northern Treasures, hitherto inaccessible has been published in 2015 in the form of a 63-volume compilation, a complete copy of which was recently purchased by the Instituts d'Asie of the Collège de France. This is what makes our project both possible and necessary: we must exploit this treasure finally available. Vol. 62 of this collection contains a large History of the Treasures of the North (905 p.) which will serve as a framework for our project, which will consist of a critical translation of this chronicle, supplemented and amended by the materials available elsewhere (about 4000 p. of historiographical documents in this compilation, not counting the innumerable precious elements that are scattered in the ritual texts) The team of specialized researchers submitting the present project has set itself the main objective of producing four volumes that broadly respect the overall architecture of this History, while adding to it chapters that it lacks on aspects of the history of the Northern Treasures that have not been retained because of the taste of Tibetan historians for linear narratives in the form of genealogies. The four years over which this program is to be spread should be sufficient to bring these four volumes, if not to a directly publishable state, at least to a form requiring only editing work for publication in the following years.

DiasCo-Tib proposes to analyse various patterns of linguistic, spatial and social convergence at a “diasporic moment,” i.e. a critical juncture of reactivation and reconfiguration of a diaspora, as it is unfolding. The research will be based on the case of Tibetan refugees, who are currently undergoing such a “diasporic moment” with the anticipated demise of their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama (b. 1935). Recent and fast-growing on-migratory trends, from South Asia towards Europe and North America, already lead to a large-scale spatial reconfiguration, with France becoming a major hub in the multipolar Tibetan diasporic network. The project’s central hypothesis is that in the context of a diasporic moment, increased spatial dispersion, paradoxically, triggers enhanced processes of social convergence. In order to produce a comprehensive analysis of diasporic convergence processes, DiasCo-Tib will mobilise an interdisciplinary team to study concomitant social phenomena and evaluate their degree of interrelatedness in the domains of language(s) and linguistic practices; social and economic translocal networks; forms of collective representation (in political, civic or artistic spheres); changing gender roles; and religious practices. Multi-sited research will account for the circulation of norms and social practices, taking into account local and cross-border forms of integration and differentiation as well as ongoing shifts in Tibetan refugees’ inscriptions in host societies. Along expected convergences, lines of segmentation will be observed and analysed as they crystallise to reconfigure the common yet plural linguistic and social practices of the Tibetan diaspora. The chosen case study will thus shed light on multi-dimensional processes of diasporisation as they are experienced and enacted by individuals and communities in their everyday lives and particular biographical trajectories.

Urban National Parks in Emerging Countries (UNPEC) : Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Nairobi, Cape Town The issue of national parks is generally considered from a “conservation vs. development” perspective. There is an abundant literature on this topic, which mostly emphasizes the need for participative management to include local people in developing and implementing conservation policy, thus reconciling efficiency and equity. When considering protected areas found in the megalopolises of developing countries, however, some of our usual conclusions must be set aside, even at the risk of political incorrectness. When expanding slums, multiplying upper-class residences, and other competing land uses blur the boundaries of national parks they abut-and sometimes subsume-is it still possible to advocate joint management and participation? Some of local dwellers often have no interest in park conservation – in particular as they usually enjoy but limited access to and benefits from it, and remain largely estranged from the “environmental knowledge” which could otherwise motivate support for biodiversity conservation. In the urban South, a similar paradigm shift is needed with regard to policies on housing for the poor. Rather than justifying slum clearance and resettlement, most scholars instead advocate in situ rehabilitation. This approach weakens, however, when confronted with slums that have set up within or beside national parks: rehabilitation in those specific places can undermine the very natural systems such protected areas exist to preserve. These issues are all the more complex given the international context in which they are located: emerging countries (to varying degrees). “Emergence”, in socio-cultural terms, means nothing if not the juxtaposition of increasingly contrasted groups with diverging representation patterns. More rich people, but as many poor as before: broadly speaking, this is the situation in Brazil, India, South Africa and even Kenya. Well-off people adopt dominant ideas from the West, considering urban parks as a recreation areas or as places devoted to the good cause of biodiversity conservation, or as privileged places for themselves to live nearby. On the contrary, some slum dwellers tend to see the protected area as a stock of land to be potentially built on. For the herdsmen of Nairobi and farmers of Mumbai, the park remains a means of livelihood, where agriculture, grazing or collecting firewood are possible. Lastly, the process of “emergence” in these five countries highlights new issues at stake: these parks are called “national” but, since they are located in a local dimension within urban agglomerations, they face the challenge of designing and implementing management strategies at all of these multiple scales. Parks can contribute to the global image of the city and reach the status of iconic logos (Cape Town, Rio) whereas until now, they may have been considered as a local source of income (Nairobi) or neglected by urban decision makers (Mumbai). Environmental objectives can be a rallying factor for local (Rio) even national (Cape Town) integration - at least in a narrative form – but they can also work as tools of spatial and social segmentation (Mumbai).

While calligraphy has long been central in Chinese culture—where it is synonymous with national identity, in a powerful combination of orthodoxy and orthography —, this project voices a marginalised epigraphic tradition in medieval China, including its modern reception, which still await to be integrated in the history of calligraphy. Our alternative history of Chinese calligraphy integrates both the medieval context corresponding to the moment of formulation of the classical standard and the early modern critical apparatus, which was the first to challenge this standard, to propose a diachronic definition of calligraphic style, in a contextual approach to graphic variation. The first aim of this project is to contextualize the epigraphy of Daoist poet Zheng Daozhao (455-516 CE; 4 sites; c. 40 inscriptions) and Buddhist calligrapher Seng’An Daoyi (fl. 562-580 CE; 12 sites; c. 120 inscriptions), who were ignored by the classical tradition of calligraphy established in the 7th century, when formulating an aesthetic discourse aimed at the cohesion of the literati elite. Even within the critique of the classical tradition in the 18th century, these engraved monumental texts on bare, unpolished cliffs, have only been discussed in formal terms and under the shape of rubbings, that is, divorced from their physical and socio-religious context. The last thirty years of field archaeology have provided supplementary evidence to build upon, to contextualise the two figures. This project selected these case studies for their subversive potential in the redefinition of calligraphy, beyond the aesthetic values serving the agenda of the literati elite, and towards an understanding of the strategic choices negotiated by individuals and their local communities between material constraints, the vernacular use of writing and medieval religions. The object of enquiry (and the contextualization required) is twofold: the epigraphic inscription itself, replaced in its original context, and the reception of this same inscription through rubbings in ink on paper. Indeed, it is essential to acknowledge that the way we approach epigraphy and calligraphy is filtered by early modern approaches and the second life of inscriptions through rubbings. The second aim of this project is thus to investigate the reception of medieval epigraphy through rubbings, and to determine how these works have impacted both the history of calligraphy and modern calligraphic production. The decontextualization operated by rubbings on epigraphy simultaneously creates opportunities for the inscription to be integrated in different corpora and, in this second life, to construct the intellectual networks who reformulated the history of calligraphy and reconsidered the very notion of calligraphic style or variation. We will analyze the quality and format of rubbings—in particular albums—as well as their circulation, sometimes retraceable through the seals and colophons present on the mounting or binding. The data (c. 1500 photographs of the site, c. 1000 ancient and modern rubbings) was collected by the PI in mountainous sites today being radically altered in a rapid process of heritagization, where a double expertise in the fields of archaeology/art history and calligraphic practice as welll as rubbing techniques was necessary. The photographic survey data and scans of the collected rubbings, yet unpublished, will be stored in the open access repository Nakala and will be interrelated with the “Database of Medieval Chinese Texts” of Ghent University (DMCT; database-of-medieval-chinese-texts.be) and the georeferenced “Buddhist Stone Sutras in China” by the Academy of Sciences/University of Heidelberg (Stonesutras.org). Such collaborative interpretation of epigraphic data addresses the management of digital corpora on a global scale.