“Why should we expect to be able to say anything generically about women in Tibet?” (p. 24), editors Janet Gyatso and Hanna Havnevik query in their introduction. Indeed, the depth and variety of the eight chapters in this book call attention to women's contributions to Tibetan culture, both past and present, without essentializing them as a coherent, self-identified category of person. Women in Tibet resists the prevalent mistake of conflating Tibetan culture with the Buddhist religion—only half of the volume focuses on women and religion, while the other half covers areas such as politics, medicine, and the performing arts. The volume contains research on Tibetan women from different socioeconomic backgrounds in the People's Republic of China as well as in exile. The downside of the enormous diversity of topics covered in Women in Tibet is that the volume is unlikely to be relevant in its entirety for courses other than...

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