Re-creation In The Telling Of The Legend Of Gri Gum And Lo Ngam

The academic community has long been calling for a comprehensive textual study of the tale of Gri gum btsan po. The doctoral dissertation here presented, a comparative examination of ten ancient and modern Tibetan sources, is a partial effort in that direction. The investigation was based on the paradigm of postmodernist approaches to the discipline of history; situated in the realm of cultural and comparative studies, and undertaken within the scope of historiographical representation. Gri gum’s story was selected for its condition of a long-living narrative—ranging from protohistoric settings to present-time Tibet, and likely to have circulated orally during a significant period—, and an ideologically disputed one, thus having potentially preserved authoritative discourses reflecting social, cultural, religious or political constrains of diverse origins and ages. Correspondingly, the quest was aimed to a) develop a methodology for the study of historical consciousness in historiographical representation and b) identify authorizing compositional profiles. In a first step, the research reveals the great internal diversity of Gri gum’s narrative, as might be expected of such a long-lived, disputed account. In a second phase, revolving around the key ideas of performativity and authority, and with the argument that, on account of them, a story like this shares with ritual a number of features, it identifies a spectrum of authorizing compositional profiles likely to have acted as to infuse trustworthiness into each traditional account of Gri gum’s legend. In the texts, ten of these profiles are described, which reflect a) various cognitive modes of consciousness of reality culturally transmitted, b) modes of social and political authority and c) patterns of more complexly organized inculcation of formal ideologies. The result is offered as a distributional catalog of the forms of historical consciousness preserved through in the age-old narrative of Gri gum and Lo ngam, a catalogue bearing an array of clues that, it is hoped, may encourage further in-depth investigations into a variety of topics of a philological or more directly historical or religious historical significance.