Dr Gillian Tan

Dr Gillian G Tan’s research combines long-term ethnographic fieldwork among nomads of eastern Tibet with theoretical developments in phenomenology and the anthropology of nature. Her work elucidates the multiple ways in which people understand, and live in, their worlds. Her doctoral research explored different perceptions and articulations of change in a Tibetan community among various actors: nomads, the international development industry, the Chinese government and an incarnate lama. Her current research, An Ecology of Religion: re-examining relationships among people, environment and religiosity on the Tibetan plateau, suggests an alternative understanding to human-nonhuman-environment relations and proposes that these interactions adapt to changes based on a system of logic influenced by religious beliefs.

Gillian completed her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from St John’s College, Santa Fe and the University of Chicago. She has been a Fondation Fyssen postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, Collège de France, where she worked under the direction of Philippe Descola. Gillian has received various Australian and international awards and scholarships, presented at national and international conferences, and published articles and book chapters. Her monograph will soon be published with the University of Washington Press. She is also an international director for a Tibetan non-governmental organization that trains young Tibetans in filmmaking and produces documentaries of contemporary Tibetan life.