Stephen Morey

The Eastern Himalayan region (EH) is the epicenter of cultural and linguistic diversity in mainland Asia. Despite its importance, comparatively little is known about its many peoples and languages. This situation is starting to change as more scholars are conducting ethnographic and descriptive-linguistic research in this region. The International Consortium for Eastern Himalayan Ethnolinguistic Prehistory (ICEHEP) was founded to bring together anthropologists and linguists conducting basic empirical research in the EH, to share data and develop approaches to the reconstruction of regional prehistory: how did cultural-linguistic diversity in the EH evolve, and what are its implications for our understanding of the cultural-linguistic history of broader Asia? The proposed workshop will considerably expand our disciplinary focus by bringing in paradigm-shifting anthropologists such as James Scott and Roger Blench, historical linguist and population geneticist George van Driem, the world’s leading scholars of comparative Sino-Tibetan linguistics Scott DeLancey and David Bradley, and native speaker ethnolinguists Yankee Modi and Karma Tshering and PhD students currently engaged in primary fieldwork along the Indo-Myanmar borderlands. This workshop will lay the theoretical and empirical foundations of ethnolinguistic research in the EH region, from interdisciplinary, intercultural, and intergenerational perspectives, in the shape of a field-defining volume of papers.