More about vampires: dreams in the structure of Tibetan ritual narratives

Lecture by Prof. Charles Ramble, Professor (Directeur d'études) of Tibetan History and Philology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE, Sorbonne), Paris.

Tibetan ritual narratives exhibit a number of characteristics that have been noted in certain types of oral literature, whether recorded viva voce or preserved in literary form, both from adjacent regions and also from other parts of the world. At a prosodic level these include indistinct or impoverished syntax, resulting in the dislocation of lines from one another—the feature known as parataxis—as well as the obscuration of tense and mood, and a blurring of the identities (and number) of agents. At the level of plot structure, the narrative tends to be marked by discrete episodes, beginning in medias res and generally in non-chronological order, that form a whole only by virtue of tenuous associations. This paper suggests that these features may be due not, as is often supposed, to scribal incompetence or the clumsy transmission of an oral tradition to a literary medium; it proposes instead that they may be inspired by, and plausibly reproduce, what one author has described as “the ur-form of all fiction”: dreams.

Prof. Charles Ramble is currently Professor (Directeur d'études) of Tibetan History and Philology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE, Sorbonne), Paris. He is a renowned anthropologist and Tibetologist specializing in the studies of social history and civil religion in Tibetan and Himalaya areas. He has published five books and more than 60 papers, and edited seven volumes related to his fields of interest: pilgrimage, the Bön religion, Himalayan civil religion and social history. He was formerly Lecturer in Tibetan and Himalaya Studies at University of Oxford and acted as president of the IATS (International Association for Tibetan Studies) from 2006 to 2013. 

Registration: h.m.van.der.minne@iias.nl