Info: The Tamang are an indigenous people from Nepal found also in the Northeast Himalayan regions from Sikkim to Bhutan. Origin stories are varied from describing them with the Tibetan words 'Ta' (horse) and ' Mag' (warrior/people), who were part of cavalry from the Tibetan empire migrating, to people who escaped from the Tibetan empire from the ancient Zhang Zhung civilisation, to hill peoples surrounding Kathmandu Valley who then adopted customs from their northern neighbors. Historically marginalized and oppressed, the Tamangs gained momentum to push for indigenous cultural rights with the advent of democracy in Nepal after 1990 but have recently been severely set back due to the 2015 earthquakes which damaged most their homeland. A community that is still in recovery, this talk looks at the different roads of Tamang cultural heritage in reclaiming pasts and building its futures both in physical reconstruction and transferring traditions.

Bio: Dr. Mukta Singh Lama (Tamang), PhD is an  anthropologist and teaches at the Central Department of Anthropology at Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu. He served as research director for research project on social inclusion and ethnographic studies undertaken by the Department from 2011 to 2014. He also  worked with International Labour Organization as an expert on indigenous   issues in Nepal during 2010-2011 and served as  consultant on research and evaluation studies with various international and national development organizations including UN system and the World Bank. He started his career as grassroots community development worker and has gained more than 25 years of experience on social development.  He has also worked as international trainer on participatory and rights-based development approaches.  His major areas of work  include indigenous people’s issues, history and identity, participatory approaches, human rights and social inclusion. He has several scholarly publications to his credit dealing with social, cultural, political and  developmental issues. He received his doctoral degree at Cornell University with a dissertation entitled ‘Himalayan Indigeneity: Histories, Memory, and Identity among Tamang in Nepal’ and is currently a Research Fellow at the New School for Social Research at New York.  He has also served as Visiting Fellow at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Goldsmiths' College of University of London.