DrGillian Tan

I am an anthropologist with a field of expertise that covers contemporary social and environmental changes on the Tibetan plateau, human-nonhuman relationships among Tibetan nomadic pastoralists, and theoretical and practical intersections between ecology and religiosity.

I have written extensively on contemporary social and environmental changes on the Tibetan plateau. I have published numerous book chapters as well as a collaborative ethnography with the University of Washington Press (2016) that details the phenomenological experiences of change among one community of nomadic pastoralists in Eastern Tibet. In 2018, I published a second monograph with Springer that details how analysis and comparison of the different epistemologies and norms about the concept of 'change' are vital to critical appraisal of developments – often contested – on the grasslands of Eastern Tibet. 'Change' is presented as a highly complex concept that does not simply denote observable shifts in ideology and practice produced over time; it is additionally described and analysed as the processes of either adaptation or transformation, which produce shifts in social structures and value systems.

My current research focuses on two broad and interconnected themes: 1) human-nonhuman relationships with a particular focus on Tibetan nomadic pastoralists, and 2) theoretical and practical intersections between ecology and religiosity. My publications on human-nonhuman relationships for Tibetan nomads include an article on the ritual of freeing life (tshe thar) among Tibetan nomads, and writings on smoke as experienced and framed by Tibetan nomads and vernacular Tibetan philosophy. I have also published an article on nomad-plant relationships. On the intersections between ecology and religiosity, I have published an article that argues for theoretical intersections between the concepts of 'ecology' and 'religiosity' as one way to transcend the dualism of mind-body within the social sciences. I have co-edited a special issue in Études Mongoles, Sibériennes, Centrasiatiques et Tibétaines on everyday religion among pastoralists of High and Inner Asia. I am presently involved in an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, which will produce an ethnographic and environmental history of waterways in the Third Pole, framed within the specific articulation of climate change.

My Ph.D from the University of Melbourne was awarded in 2009. Following my Ph.D, I was awarded two postdoctoral fellowships: the first, with the support of the Fondation Fyssen, was at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, Paris, where I worked under the direction of Philippe Descola; the second was an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Fellowship at Deakin University, Geelong. In 2015, I was appointed Lecturer in Anthropology at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Geelong. I have contributed to the growing Anthropology major at Deakin University through committed teaching across the various subjects offered and by service as discipline convener in 2016 and from 2018 to 2020.