Urmila Nair
Biographic Data
| ID | 183470 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Urmila Nair |
| GIVEN NAMES | Urmila |
| FAMILY NAME | Nair |
| SIGNATURE | NAIR U |
| AFFILIATIONS | Université Sorbonne Nouvelle |
| ORCID | 0009-0003-5409-8840 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 7 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Delomization, or the esoteric Nechung kang so , the Dalai Lama, and exilic imaginings of a Tibetan community
I propose the concept of delomization , the process whereby a sign comes to be understood as a symbol. I term such signs delomes . With rhematization and dicentization, delomization completes the triplet that linguistic anthropologists derive from Charles Sanders Peirce's third trichotomy. The triplet serves in analyzing how social actors' reflexive understandings of signs may shape social orders and cultural worlds . Delomization serves to expla…
What War Does to Yemeni Migration
This special issue, composed of two volumes, seeks to demonstrate the significance of studying Yemen through a focus on migration and, thus, international relations. While Europeans and North Americans have long viewed Yemen as foreign and remote, cut off from the “modern” world and capitalist globalization until the 1960s, the country itself has been no stranger to emigration and immigration. Historically, the inhabitants of South Arabia, and pa…
The Precision of Ambiguity
This article analyzes the Nechung Oracle's Pronouncements (bka' lung), proffered during the trance ritual (spyan' dren), performed at present at the monastery in exile, in Dharamsala. I analyze the trance ritual as a text that is poetically structured via dense laminations of indexical icons, these laminations figurating aspects of the macrocosm. (For example, the Oracle's peculiar voice iconizes and indexes the god's presence within the trance's…
Cryptotypes, ou L'anthropologie de l'inévident
Les contributions à ce dossier thématique s’intéressent aux usages du langage et des signes dans des situations de communication en contextes ethnographiques. Il s’agit de quatre études empiriques dans lesquelles l’« inévident » (Whorf 1956 : 104) se dissimule de diverses manières au cœur même de ces usages. La manifestation de telles significations inévidentes apparaît en effet dans des enquêtes de terrains (Urmila Nair, Camille Riverti), dans d…
Beyond the Secret ( gsang ba )
This article focuses on the Nechung kang-so ( bskang gso ), a ritual performed at Nechung monastery in exile, and deemed secret ( gsang ba ) by the monks. In my interactions with the monks, this secret presented itself as an unremitting series of contradictions and conundrums. I attempt here to portray and understand them. I posit that the secret invoked an implicit “cultural concept” (Silverstein 2004), namely, the kang-so ’s transmissibility. F…
Can the Native Know Language? Viewing Linguistic Anthropology through Signs of Difference
We now recognize that the “realities” of meaningful social practices emerge from people’s situated experience of indexical semiotic processes that constitute them.We ought, perhaps, to resign ourselves to enjoying the fact that it’s indexicality all the way down,that in any sociocultural phenomenon nothing is manifest beyond this indexicalityexcept semanticoreferential language and its further developmentsMichael Silverstein (1998: 128, emphases …
Some preliminary questions regarding the mdos rituals
This article traces a widespread misunderstanding in Western Tibetological literature that mdos are synonymous with ‘thread-crosses’ (nam mkha’) used in various rituals. In fact, the term mdos has a much broader implication. The article explores the nature, function and origin of the mdos to show that mdos rituals have in general the function of removing spiritual and material obstacles
Tracks and Traces of Mont Blanc’s Itineraries
Since the opening of the high glacial mountain to tourism, entry into this environment has been mediated by the tracks left on the snowy mantle. These tracks form a guideline that reflect the practice of wayfaring, understood as the entry into an uncertain pathway, which requires adaptation to conditions encountered and experienced. This research seeks an understanding of the pathfinding at play in recreational wayfaring in the high mountains – t…
Recommendations to the European Commission implementing a priority list of additives that should have more stringent reporting requirements
The European Commission’s Tobacco Products Directive 2014/40/EU (TPD)1 came into force in 2014 and lays out rules governing the manufacture, presentation and sale of tobacco and related products, including cigarettes, roll-your-own tobacco, cigars, cigarillos, smokeless tobacco, electronic cigarettes and herbal products for smoking. It strengthens the rules regarding the reporting on ingredients contained in tobacco products and regulates permiss…
Incense
The burning of candles and incense is common in religious ceremonies worldwide. Analysis of incense smoke has shown the presence of particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, aldehydes and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are hazardous to health. Long-term exposure to smoke formed during combustion can cause airway dysfunction, allergic reactions and dermatological effects and is a risk factor implicated in the development of other seri…
Can the Native Know Language? Viewing Linguistic Anthropology through Signs of Difference
We now recognize that the “realities” of meaningful social practices emerge from people’s situated experience of indexical semiotic processes that constitute them.We ought, perhaps, to resign ourselves to enjoying the fact that it’s indexicality all the way down,that in any sociocultural phenomenon nothing is manifest beyond this indexicalityexcept semanticoreferential language and its further developmentsMichael Silverstein (1998: 128, emphases …
The Precision of Ambiguity
This article analyzes the Nechung Oracle's Pronouncements (bka' lung), proffered during the trance ritual (spyan' dren), performed at present at the monastery in exile, in Dharamsala. I analyze the trance ritual as a text that is poetically structured via dense laminations of indexical icons, these laminations figurating aspects of the macrocosm. (For example, the Oracle's peculiar voice iconizes and indexes the god's presence within the trance's…
Cryptotypes, ou L'anthropologie de l'inévident
Les contributions à ce dossier thématique s’intéressent aux usages du langage et des signes dans des situations de communication en contextes ethnographiques. Il s’agit de quatre études empiriques dans lesquelles l’« inévident » (Whorf 1956 : 104) se dissimule de diverses manières au cœur même de ces usages. La manifestation de telles significations inévidentes apparaît en effet dans des enquêtes de terrains (Urmila Nair, Camille Riverti), dans d…
Beyond the Secret ( gsang ba )
This article focuses on the Nechung kang-so ( bskang gso ), a ritual performed at Nechung monastery in exile, and deemed secret ( gsang ba ) by the monks. In my interactions with the monks, this secret presented itself as an unremitting series of contradictions and conundrums. I attempt here to portray and understand them. I posit that the secret invoked an implicit “cultural concept” (Silverstein 2004), namely, the kang-so ’s transmissibility. F…
Tracks and Traces of Mont Blanc’s Itineraries
Since the opening of the high glacial mountain to tourism, entry into this environment has been mediated by the tracks left on the snowy mantle. These tracks form a guideline that reflect the practice of wayfaring, understood as the entry into an uncertain pathway, which requires adaptation to conditions encountered and experienced. This research seeks an understanding of the pathfinding at play in recreational wayfaring in the high mountains – t…
Incense
The burning of candles and incense is common in religious ceremonies worldwide. Analysis of incense smoke has shown the presence of particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, aldehydes and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are hazardous to health. Long-term exposure to smoke formed during combustion can cause airway dysfunction, allergic reactions and dermatological effects and is a risk factor implicated in the development of other seri…
Recommendations to the European Commission implementing a priority list of additives that should have more stringent reporting requirements
The European Commission’s Tobacco Products Directive 2014/40/EU (TPD)1 came into force in 2014 and lays out rules governing the manufacture, presentation and sale of tobacco and related products, including cigarettes, roll-your-own tobacco, cigars, cigarillos, smokeless tobacco, electronic cigarettes and herbal products for smoking. It strengthens the rules regarding the reporting on ingredients contained in tobacco products and regulates permiss…
Tracks and Traces of Mont Blanc’s Itineraries
Since the opening of the high glacial mountain to tourism, entry into this environment has been mediated by the tracks left on the snowy mantle. These tracks form a guideline that reflect the practice of wayfaring, understood as the entry into an uncertain pathway, which requires adaptation to conditions encountered and experienced. This research seeks an understanding of the pathfinding at play in recreational wayfaring in the high mountains – t…
Some preliminary questions regarding the mdos rituals
This article traces a widespread misunderstanding in Western Tibetological literature that mdos are synonymous with ‘thread-crosses’ (nam mkha’) used in various rituals. In fact, the term mdos has a much broader implication. The article explores the nature, function and origin of the mdos to show that mdos rituals have in general the function of removing spiritual and material obstacles
Can the Native Know Language? Viewing Linguistic Anthropology through Signs of Difference
We now recognize that the “realities” of meaningful social practices emerge from people’s situated experience of indexical semiotic processes that constitute them.We ought, perhaps, to resign ourselves to enjoying the fact that it’s indexicality all the way down,that in any sociocultural phenomenon nothing is manifest beyond this indexicalityexcept semanticoreferential language and its further developmentsMichael Silverstein (1998: 128, emphases …
Beyond the Secret ( gsang ba )
This article focuses on the Nechung kang-so ( bskang gso ), a ritual performed at Nechung monastery in exile, and deemed secret ( gsang ba ) by the monks. In my interactions with the monks, this secret presented itself as an unremitting series of contradictions and conundrums. I attempt here to portray and understand them. I posit that the secret invoked an implicit “cultural concept” (Silverstein 2004), namely, the kang-so ’s transmissibility. F…
What War Does to Yemeni Migration
This special issue, composed of two volumes, seeks to demonstrate the significance of studying Yemen through a focus on migration and, thus, international relations. While Europeans and North Americans have long viewed Yemen as foreign and remote, cut off from the “modern” world and capitalist globalization until the 1960s, the country itself has been no stranger to emigration and immigration. Historically, the inhabitants of South Arabia, and pa…
The Precision of Ambiguity
This article analyzes the Nechung Oracle's Pronouncements (bka' lung), proffered during the trance ritual (spyan' dren), performed at present at the monastery in exile, in Dharamsala. I analyze the trance ritual as a text that is poetically structured via dense laminations of indexical icons, these laminations figurating aspects of the macrocosm. (For example, the Oracle's peculiar voice iconizes and indexes the god's presence within the trance's…
Cryptotypes, ou L'anthropologie de l'inévident
Les contributions à ce dossier thématique s’intéressent aux usages du langage et des signes dans des situations de communication en contextes ethnographiques. Il s’agit de quatre études empiriques dans lesquelles l’« inévident » (Whorf 1956 : 104) se dissimule de diverses manières au cœur même de ces usages. La manifestation de telles significations inévidentes apparaît en effet dans des enquêtes de terrains (Urmila Nair, Camille Riverti), dans d…
Delomization, or the esoteric Nechung kang so , the Dalai Lama, and exilic imaginings of a Tibetan community
I propose the concept of delomization , the process whereby a sign comes to be understood as a symbol. I term such signs delomes . With rhematization and dicentization, delomization completes the triplet that linguistic anthropologists derive from Charles Sanders Peirce's third trichotomy. The triplet serves in analyzing how social actors' reflexive understandings of signs may shape social orders and cultural worlds . Delomization serves to expla…
Indian and Buddhist Studies (4 works) · Chinese history and philosophy (3 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (2 works) · Biology (2 works) · Environmental health (2 works) · Geography (2 works) · History (2 works) · Linguistics (2 works) · Medicine (2 works) · Philosophy (2 works)