Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia: The Chile and the Bears Are My Uncles: Buddhist Interspecies Relations in and Beyond West Sikkim

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For the fourth event in our series Buddhism and Posthumanism: Questioning the Place of Humans in Multispecies Environments, Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia will present his talk, “The Chile and the Bears Are My Uncles: Buddhist Interspecies Relations in and Beyond West Sikkim.”

The red, round chiles known as Akubari in the Bhutia language and Dalle khorsani in Nepali in the eastern Himalayas have recently become popular commodities across India. In places where it is grown in Buddhist communities in west Sikkim, Akubari is part of the multispecies networks of relations, as evidenced by its name, which translates as “Uncle Blazing.” Akubari is a grown from the land and seen as a family member that provides nourishment, sustenance, healing, and flavour for human and nonhuman co-residents in the region. What happens when these kin become commercially produced and commodified? How does this change the relations forged and supported by kin? Dorjee Bhutia draws on ethnographic research from west Sikkim, local medical and folklore traditions, textual research into Buddhist and indigenous ritual texts and colonial sources, and market research to consider these questions.

Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia is a Visiting Scholar in the Asian Studies Program at the University of California Riverside.

This event is co-sponsored by the Religion in the Public Sphere initiative of the Department for the Study of Religion in the University of Toronto. The  series is organized by Rory Lindsay, Assistant Professor, and Frances Garrett, Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto.

Lectures in the series on Zoom begin at 3:00 pm Eastern Time; registration is required.

For preparation, please read this article: https://www.humansandnature.org/at-the-center-of-all-things-is-interdependence

Registration

You may register at any time to join a lecture. Your registration is valid for the whole series, and you may attend as many lectures as you like. You will automatically receive reminders for the lectures. Register here.

This event will also be live-streamed to our YouTube channel.