Dr. Huatse Gyal is an anthropologist, writer, and filmmaker. He received his B.A. in Anthropology from Reed College, and MA and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before coming to Rice, Dr. Gyal was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies at Sichuan University in southwest China. Dr. Gyal's work falls into three interrelated areas. First, Dr. Gyal explores the interdependent relationships between land, language, and community, focusing on state environmentalism and climate change, as well as an interdisciplinary approach to Indigenous environmental and political movements in a global context.
Second, Dr. Gyal focuses on environmental and political anthropology. Drawing on Tibetan genres of land-based Indigenous storywork, such as origin stories, sacred place narratives, traditional songs and folktales, epic stories, stories of nonhuman actors, ritual texts, as well as long-term ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Tibet, his current research analytically centers Indigenous Tibetan pastoralists’ ways of theorizing and relating to their ancestral lands now jeopardized by climate change, large-scale rangeland fencing, and mass relocation policies. Several academic publications have emerged out of this project, including a co-edited volume in Nomadic Peoples on mass relocation of Tibetan nomads, peer reviewed articles in Critical Asian Studies and Ateliers d'anthropologie, as well as a number of widely-read online academic essays both in English and his mother-tongue Tibetan.
Dr. Gyal recently co-edited a new volume on the politics of translation and translation theories in the larger context of Tibetan Studies (2024). He is currently working on a book project, entitled, “Restoring Indigenous Relations of Land: Rangeland Fencing, Resettlement, and the Resilience of Tibetan Pastoralists.”
Third, Dr. Gyal is a visual anthropologist. He has been collaborating with a network of Indigenous community artists, writers, filmmakers, and environmentalists in eastern Tibet, whose work strives to construct alternative narratives of Tibetan pastoralists’ relationality with their ancestral land through documentary films, paintings, children's books, and community-led land-restoration projects. In 2023, Dr.Gyal released his first feature-length documentary film titled "Khata: Poison or Purity?" This film was screened at a dozen academic institutions, including Columbia University, University of Colorado Boulder, Northwestern University, Dartmouth College, UBC, WashU, and the Association for Asian Studies Film Expo. It was also featured in the Columbia Daily Spectator and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.
Dr. Gyal co-runs Rice Anthropology’s Ethnographic Design Co. Lab with Professor Cymene Howe.
Course taught and teaching at Rice University
Anthro357/557: Conservation, Indigeneity, and Displacement Fall, 2023
Anthro 201: Introduction to Social/Cultural Anthropology, Spring 2024
Anthro 431/631: Global Indigenous Politics, Fall 2024
Future courses to be taught
Global Indigenous Environmentalism
Environmental Anthropology
Anthropology of Property
Visual Anthropology
Ethnographic Films