Dr. Dawa Lokyitsang

Dawa Lokyitsang is a Tibetan-American cultural anthropologist interested in tracing contemporary political, cultural, and spiritual developments among Indigenous and displaced communities through a critical focus on sovereignty, worldmaking, and collective futurity. While much of her research takes place across South Asia, North America, and Europe and grew out of a critical engagement with Tibetan exile communities, she has consistently applied a broader comparative, feminist, and political-theological perspective. Her research has addressed Indigenous sovereignty and refusal, exile and nationalism, kinship and care, intergenerational history, loss and trauma, religious-political authority, and the translation of indigeneity across colonial contexts.

Building on Weber’s sociology of charismatic authority, Lokyitsang will develop the concept of “charismatic sovereignty” to name the specific form of person-centered messianic power through which the Dalai Lamas have governed since the fifth Dalai Lama’s enthronement. She will then read it through the analytical lens of “refusal,” exemplified by the charismatic act of the fourteenth Dalai Lama’s refusal to accept China’s termination of his government in 1959. By adding this crucial non-Western, non-Abrahamic case study to the field, her project directly advances the mission of CEMES to broaden global perspectives on person-centered messianism.

https://www.iias.asia/profile/dawa-lokyitsang  
https://lhakardiaries.com/author/dlo08/