Based on a nine-month ethnographic fieldwork in the Greater Himalayan regions, this dissertation asks how and why do Buddhist communities in the Himalayas communicate and use media technologies. Taking a deep dive into the existing modern communication scholarship rooted within Western academic traditions and drawing from the local onto-epistemic practices of the Buddhist communities in the Himalayas, this dissertation compares and contrasts the Western and Buddhist underpinnings of communication. Drawing from the historical Buddha’s teachings and deploying second-century CE Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna’s deconstructive dialectics, I argue that communication is neither limited to being an act of exchanging information/ideas/messages, nor is it a ritual. Rather, communication can be understood as a conduit for living in-sync with the ever-changing world. Hence, the title of this dissertation and its core argument—we exist in communication. Centring the Buddhist concepts of change, interdependence, and impermanence, this dissertation extends the decolonial and the Epistemologies of the South critiques. Drawing from the quotidian lived experiences of Buddhist and quasi-Buddhist Himalayan communities, such as Ladakhi, Bhot, Lepcha, and Bontim peoples, this dissertation is also an invitation towards theorizing communication, both human and more-than-human, as a conduit striving for harmony rather than being rooted in the intractable conflict between the autonomous and discrete ‘self’ and ‘other.’ Additionally, this dissertation also makes a methodological intervention within ethnographic research. Complicating ethnographic fieldwork that is traditionally dependent on the researcher traveling to the native lands, this dissertation demonstrates that knowledge is produced when the researcher and the researched co-travel in the terrains both familiar and strange. My fieldwork looked at the traditional traveling practices among the Buddhist Himalayan communities and theorized that knowledge-production ensues in the journey collectively taken up by the human and non-human actors along with the material objects, socio-cultural practices, technologies, and ideas. Centering Buddhist onto-epistemic frameworks that foreground change as an inevitable reality of the world, I argue for a conceptual intervention in the field of communication studies, in which the analytical focus moves away from modern, Promethean desires of deploying communication as a tool for harnessing and controlling change towards a specific, predetermined goal of achieving modernity and development. Through this dissertation, I argue that communication should be considered as a conduit towards living in-sync with change and that it is only through communication that one exists in this ever-changing world.
Sreedhar Nemmani (Thu,) studied this question.