(Research Intern, June 2025 – September 2025 )

BIOGRAPHY:

Elea Caligaris is concurrently pursuing a master’s degree in Asian Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris,  under the supervision of Nicolas Sihlé (CNRS/EHESS), and a degree in Tibetology at INALCO, focusing on Tibetan language, philosophy and civilisation. Before undertaking further PhD research, she is currently writing
a thesis in social anthropology on Buddhist longevity rituals, called tenzhuk, addressed in exile to the Dalai Lama and other religious masters of Tibetan Buddhism. She holds a dual bachelor’s degree in Law and Political Science from Université Lyon III and completed a cycle of Model United Nations, from which she was granted the best judge award within the International Criminal Court committee in Geneva (GIMUN).

In 2025, she undertook a research internship at CSH in New Delhi under the supervision of Corinne Lefèvre (CNRS/CSH) and conducted three months of ethnographic fieldwork alone in northern Indian Himalayas, funded by a field grant from the Centre d’Études Sud-Asiatiques et Himalayennes (CESAH). Initially centred on Dharamsala, she subsequently extended the research to Ladakh and remained two months in a Buddhist monastery to broaden her analysis to the clerical and regional configurations within which these rituals are embedded. This focus on liturgical structure and ritual collective organisation under monastic authority added both an emic theoretical lens and Tibeto-Ladakhi comparative perspective, complementing the data gathered in Dharamsala on lay religious experience and exile sociality.

Through a constituted corpus of interviews and empirical data, Buddhist philosophical concepts and Tibetan cosmologies, her scientific research analyses popular engagements with these longevity rituals, seen as an embodied form of political action and demonstration of collective presence revolving around the figure of the Dalai Lama. Her work tackles religious economy, regional configuration, and broader stakes related to the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation, as the question of succession is, per se, concomitant with current tenzhuk, for a leader’s longevity echoes that of the political and religious orders established under his leadership. Thus, the posterity of a Tibetan nation in exile was apprehended by actors through tenzhuk as a form of political metonymy, as the Dalai Lama’s lifespan collides with an eschatological debate around national continuity.

Elea Caligaris sought to extend the reach of her scientific research beyond scholarly writing by using the camera as a complementary tool for ethnographic data gathering. The first film she produced, Terrain, was presented at the Visual Anthropology of Religion seminar at EPHE/EHESS and in a film programme of the Tibetan Studies Department at INALCO.

CV_Elea Caligaris