Himalayan New York: Stories for Migration, Language, Belonging and Change

Please join us for a panel discussion with:

Nawang Tsering Gurung, Independent Researcher and Community Activist

Dan Kaufman, Founder and Co-Director, Endangered Language Alliance; Assistant Professor of Linguistics,

Queens College – CUNY

Kesang Tseten, Filmmaker, Shunyata Fillms

Sienna Craig, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology

Dartmouth College

Over the past two decades, the presence of people from greater Himalayan region in New York City, particularly in the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, has expanded exponentially, from several hundred people in the 1980s to thousands of individuals from specific ethnic communities today. As these new immigrants from Nepal, Bhutan, and North India, as well as diasporic Tibetans from India and culturally Tibetan regions in China, have settled into New York, their senses of identity have begun to transform. How are they finding a sense of community, navigating transnational and intergenerational cultural dynamics, and responding to the fluid relationship between ‘home’ and being ‘over here’ in New York? What does language have to do with this? This presentation will address these questions by describing Voices of the Himalaya, a collaborative research project that uses the medium of video interviews and short documentary film to explore the lived experiences of Himalayan New Yorkers.

About the Speakers:

Sienna Craig received her BA in religious studies (Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude) from Brown University in 1995. Sienna first visited Nepal in 1993, through a college semester abroad program; she made her first foray to Mustang at this time. Upon completion of her BA, Sienna was granted a Fulbright Fellowship to return to Nepal and continue the ethnographic research and writing she had begun while studying abroad. Sienna began studies toward her Ph.D. in anthropology at Cornell University in 1999; she earned her MA in 2002 and completed her doctorate in 2006. She began a tenure-track appointment at Dartmouth College that same year. Sienna Craig is currently an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. At Dartmouth, Sienna teaches courses on Health and Illness, Global Health, Asian Medical Systems, Tibet and the Himalaya, and other segments of the department’s cultural anthropology curriculum. She enjoys working with students and collaborating with colleagues across the Arts and Sciences and at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. Sienna is currently the co-editor of Himalaya, the journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies. She is also the Chair of the Medical Advisory Board for One Heart World-Wide. She has published widely in both academic and popular venues, and enjoys writing in a range of genres – from scholarly articles to poetry, creative non-fiction and journalism to children’s literature.

Kesang Tseten’s documentaries have won several awards in film festivals in Nepal and been screened in international film festivals such as the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam, Leipzig International Documentary Festival, Yamagata, Thessaloniki, Krakow, Viennale, the Margaret Mead Film Festival. We Homes Chaps, On the road with the red god: Machhendranath, We Corner People, Who will be a Gurkha and his trilogy of films on Nepali migrant workers in the Gulf have won wide recognition. Tseten has been recipient of grants from Busan, IDFA and the Sundance Institute for his films. He wrote the original screenplay for the feature Mukundo, which was Nepal’s entry to the academy awards, and KARMA. Before filmmaking Tseten wrote and edited and was associate editor of Himal Magazine in its early years. He is a graduate of Dr Graham’s School in India and Amherst College and Columbia University in the US.