Trans-Himalayan Research Expedition

Trans-Himalayan Research Expedition: Dolpo Mission 2026

Mission Statement

We are a group of researchers primarily from the University of Hawai'i Mānoa participating in a research and community health trip this upcoming July 2026 in the Himalayan region of Dolpo, Nepal. Kindly scroll to the bottom of the page to read our

Donate to our Kickstarter:

Our Team

Dedication. Expertise. Passion.

Rachel See

Lead Researcher

Rachel See has extensive research ties in the Dolpo region of Nepal, as she earned a BA in Tibetan Buddhist Philology from Rangjung Yeshe Institute, the Buddhist Studies Center of Kathmandu University. During her years in Nepal, she worked with and learned from Tibetan Buddhists living in diaspora near the Boudhanath Stupa, in particular those community members from Dolpo. She is currently an MA student in the Department of Religions and Ancient Civilizations at the University of Hawaiʼi Mānoa. Her MA research has brought her to Dolpo fully funded for the past two years, and this year, she is bringing our team to meet our community engagement objectives, including mapping important monasteries, facilitating health clinics, agricultural projects, anthropology of tourism, and wildlife assessments.

Her academic interests include the symbolic construction of place; pilgrimage, the chthonic realm, and geomancy. Her current research is on the embedded sacredness of the Himalayan Buddhist landscape, specifically Nyingma and Bon communities in the trans-Himalayan area of Nepal. Her language specializations are Colloquial and Classical Tibetan, Nepali, and Sanskrit

Tsering Songmo Lama

Guide, Translator, Amchi

Tsering Sangmo Lama is a native of Dho Tarap in Dolpo, a remote Himalayan region of Nepal where Sowa Rigpa remains a primary source of healthcare. Her upbringing in this high-altitude, underserved region has shaped her commitment to strengthening community-based health
systems and preserving Indigenous medical knowledge.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology, Anthropology, and Economics from Tribhuvan University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Sowa Rigpa Medicine and Surgery from Sowa Rigpa International College (affiliated to Lumbini Buddhist University). She previously served as a lecturer and administrator at Sowa Rigpa International College, contributing to academic development and training in traditional medicine. She currently works as a coordinator with the Dolpo Amchi Rinpoche Trust Foundation, cultural heritage preservation, supporting health, education, and community initiatives in the Himalayan region of Dolpo. For the Dolpo Project 2026 in collaboration with the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Tsering will serve as a key local coordinator and cultural liaison. She will guide and support the research team in navigating the region, facilitate communication and interpretation between local communities and international researchers, and coordinate field activities to ensure respectful and effective engagement.

In addition to her coordination role, Tsering will contribute to community outreach by delivering public health awareness sessions and providing basic care through Sowa Rigpa herbal practices. Her work is especially informed by her interest in addressing health challenges such as Hepatitis B in remote Himalayan populations, where access to biomedical healthcare and health education remains limited.

Tsering’s role bridges academic research and community knowledge, ensuring that the project remains culturally grounded, ethically engaged, and responsive to local needs. Her long-term vision is to contribute to the integration of Indigenous health systems into global health discourse, while supporting sustainable health and education initiatives.

Nikhil Stewart

Photographer and Digital Resources Manager

Nikhil Stewart obtained his bachelors in Religious Traditions and Political Science from the University of Hawai’i Mānoa in 2025 and will be entering the Masters of Arts program at the University of Chicago Divinity School in fall 2026. His most recent research project was an ethnographic study in the Kathmandu Valley seeking to understand the relationship between social media and Tibetan Buddhist monastic life. His research interests broadly consist of Sanskrit studies, Buddhist studies, history of political thought, semiotics, and ethnography. This summer he will be in charge of all digital resource management and photography/videography. These include photographing monasteries, artifacts, art frescos, daily video vlogs, along with file management.

Mary Bannister,

Anthropologist

Mary Bannister, MA is a PhD student in the Anthropology department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her research interests include anthropology of adventure, more-than-human ethnography, and Indigenous, anti-colonial, and feminist relations to land. A long-distance hiker, Mary has walked more than 3,000 miles on five continents, and has written about hiking as an embodied research methodology for environmental anthropology. She has field research experience in India, Kenya, Jordan, and the United States. During four previous extended trips to Nepal and the Indian Himalaya, Mary cultivated a love for mountains and an interest in the ways people move through them. This summer, Mary will conduct exploratory dissertation research about emerging trekking tourism in Dolpo. She aims to understand how people in Dolpo are creating ethical community-based eco-tourism futures. She will also assist with trip management and logistics.

Aryeh tenBroek

Botanist, Linguist

Aryeh tenBroek is an undergraduate student in the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Tropical Agriculture and the Environment. In addition to his studies in agricultural and environmental science, Aryeh has been exploring lifelong interests in language, religion, and philosophy at UHM; helping to develop the university’s Classical Tibetan language program and participating in its first Nepal-Himalaya research and study abroad trip in summer of 2025. This summer he will be returning to Nepal to research the use of the ancient language of Zhangzhung by Bon religious communities in the Dolpo region, as part of a project at the intersection of linguistic anthropology and religious studies. Aryeh will also be leading an initiative to introduce new food crops to the village of Dho Tarap in Dolpo, in hopes of strengthening food security in rural Himalayan communities.

Charles Cole

Geographer and Environmentalist

Charles Cole is an undergraduate student studying Geography and Environment at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where his work focuses on the relationships between ecological systems, cultural practices, and conservation governance. He previously earned his Associate’s degree from Orange Coast College, home to the nation’s largest student-run aquarium, where he was inducted into the Eta Eta Omicron Scholastic Honor Society. Charles is broadly interested in understanding how complex systems function, particularly how human communities are embedded within ecological processes rather than separate from them. His field experience includes a month of ecological research in Scotland, where he conducted intertidal biodiversity surveys and monitored marine mammals across multiple coastal regions in collaboration with the University of St Andrews and the Scottish Oceans Institute. He also leads an independent conservation initiative documenting and mapping segments of the California Coastal Trail, highlighting environmental pressures and advocating for equitable public access to natural landscapes. This summer, Charles will conduct field research in Upper and Lower Dolpo as part of the Nepal Himalaya Student-Led Research Collective. His project examines human–snow leopard coexistence, focusing on how pastoral livelihoods, Indigenous ecological knowledge, and conservation initiatives interact across shared landscapes.

Project Overview

We are a team of researchers from the University of Hawaii conducting a community-based participatory research project in the trans-Himalayan region of Nepal. As a team, we each will work on individualized projects; however, our collective objectives cluster around environmental anthropology and human-land entanglements. Though academic methodologies tend to sequester health, environment, non-human animals, and religion into disparate spheres and disciplines, we take an interdisciplinary approach grounded in experiential learning and cross-cultural collaboration. Our research happens in partnership with our community experts - namely Dolpo Amchi Namgyal Rinpoche and his daughter, Tsering Sangmo Lama and the Dolpo Amchie Rinpoche Trust Foundation. Our vision and various projects come from Namgyal Rinpoche’s tireless commitment to his community through cultural perpetuation, environmentalism, and wellness. Additionally, our upcoming 2026 trip to Dolpo is only made possible through our collaborative partners: the Uberoi Foundation for Religious Studies and the Department of Religion at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Uberoi Foundation has generously provided financial support for previous years, but as our mission has grown, so have our financial needs, which is why we are now expanding into non-profit service work. For additional information on our research team from Hawaii, including each participant's qualifications and area of expertise, please refer to the personal bio handout.

Project Region: Dolpo Region of Nepal

In the trans-Himalayan region of Nepal, local communities seek religious guidance as well as healthcare in the personnage of the amchi (Tibetan doctor). Amchi practice a form of medicine called Sowa Rigpa that combines elements of Ayurveda, TCM, and Buddhism, and indigenous spirit-medium techniques. Sowa Rigpa is one of the ten Buddhist sciences, and unlike Western science with its tendency to bifurcate the world into “science” and “religion”, Sowa Rigpa is grounded in the basic Buddhist teachings of interdependence, in which all things are empty of an inherent essence and rise through mutually coextensive systems of cause and effect. This view of interdependence informs how trans-Himalayan communities approach health, as wellness is mediated through community ties that extend beyond human kin into the more-than-human world. Our goal of understanding the nuanced ways in which traditional religiously informed rituals embed human persons into the larger biotic community is supplemented by our commitment to a pedagogy that sees true knowledge springing from reciprocal service-based engagement. Knowledge creation is highly political, and the ways in which we approach knowledge production and perpetuation inform not just which stories get told, but shape the politics of information exchange. Rather than extractive practices, we center community goals and local experts, working alongside each other in ways that are mutually beneficial.

Project Background

2026 will be the third phase of a three year project, with 2024 and 2025 trips to Upper and Lower Dolpo focused primarily on delineating kinship and agency systems with non-human others, and pilgrimage practice as an embodied technique for reading the land-as-text. This year we will be returning to continue exploring the broader themes of an Indigenous Tibetan Buddhist land ethic, but through the lens of art, medicine, and environmental practice. Our primary locations include both orthodox and heterodox Buddhist and Bonpo villages in Lower Dolpo, as well as a select number of locations in Upper Dolpo. These include the villages of Pungmo, Ringmo, Doh-Tarap, Saldang, Bijier, and Tinjie. All locations fall inside the Shey-Phuksundho National Park, and are accessible through the trekking routes starting at Juphal. Because Dolpo is still not accessible by road, our research team will be trekking in, traveling first through Lower Dolpo.

Monastery Mapping

Our central focus is mapping the local monasteries. This includes taking GPS coordinates, detailed oral histories, discovering what textual corpses are stored in each, photographing the frescoes and architecture, and assessing the structural damage and needed repairs. Monasteries are viewed as more than religious buildings by Tibetan Buddhists, they are cultural centers for religious, spiritual, and physical healing that are geomantically charged and strategically placed to mediate harsh environmental energies. Tibetan Buddhists use a variety of dialectics to explain the teaching of interdependence. One such paradigmatic cultural notion is the non-difference of inner and outer appearances. In this sense, just as we have energy centers and blood vessels in our bodies, the land is identified as a body, with the monasteries and stupas occupying specific energetic points, while the rivers and fields constitute the subtle and gross elements of the biotic body (loka or jikten). The health of the biotic body and the health of the human inhabitants are intimately linked. We intend to use what we learn in mapping the monasteries to create a digital register of sacred spaces, particularly one that can be accessed by international funding sources for the purposes of monastery restoration. Most of the monasteries are approaching 700 years old, with exquisite frescoes adorning their interior walls. In some cases, simple renovations such as new monastery roofs could preserve these important cultural treasures.

Health Clinics

As we walk from village to village on our monastery mapping pilgrimage, our guide and translator, Tsering Sangmo will be providing health services to local elders. Although antibiotics are now widely available, traditional plant medicines and behavioral practices prescribed by Sowa Rigpa doctors would better suit the local populations. Healthcare is difficult to access, as travel across the rugged mountain passes to health posts is not possible for the elderly and infirm. Many local people also lack traditional cultural knowledge of how to maintain healthy bodies and minds. Tsering will be able to administer medical care, as well as provide basic health consultations as we travel.

Agricultural Project

Additionally, the climate in the trans-Himalayan region has shifted; therefore, locations that could only grow barely before are now able to support a larger variety of vegetable crops. Seeds are difficult to bring to Dolpo, and many seeds imported from India are not perennially viable, which has contributed to widespread famine and economic devastation in other trans-Himalayan regions like Zanskar. We will be hiring mules to bring in viable, organic, heirloom seeds from Kathmandu and distributing them to the population of Doh-Tarap. The typical local diet in Dolpo is barely flour (called tsampa), potatoes, butter, and noodles imported from China. The sudden influx of highly processed food, and the hundreds of miles fresh vegetables have to travel from the market at Dunai has created a food desert where local populations are increasingly forced to rely on low-quality, nutrient-poor foods to survive. By providing them heirloom seeds free of charge, we hope to empower this and future generations to grow sustainable, healthy vegetable crops.

Supplemental Academic Surveys

The above three primary mission objectives provide the service learning aspect of our research expedition. In addition to these, we have three academic projects run by M. Bannister, A, tenBroek, and C. Cole. The topics include a survey of Zhang Zhung textual resources at Samling Monastery, a survey of small-scale locally managed tourism practices, and the WWF (World Wildlife Foundations) role in mitigating human-wildlife conflict. By bringing attention to these various dimensions of life in Dolpo, we hope to counteract the erasure that so often happens to Indigenous communities caught between large nation-states and the globalizing forces fueled by cash economy imperatives. We highlight Indigenous systems of knowledge creation, agency, autonomy, and ingenuity, while bringing tangible resources into the community to support their development goals.