Representations of Green Tibetans connected to Buddhism and indigenous wisdom have been deployed by a variety of actors and persist in popular consciousness. Through interviews, participatory mapping and observation, we explored how these ideas relate to people’s notions about the natural environment in a rural community on the Eastern Tibetan plateau, in Sichuan Province, China. We found people to be orienting themselves towards the environment by means of three interlinked religious notions: (1) local gods and spirits in the landscape, which have become the focus of conservation efforts in the form of ‘sacred natural sites;’ (2) sin and karma related to killing animals and plants; (3) Buddhist moral precepts especially non-violence. We highlight the gaps between externally generated representations and local understandings, but also the dynamic, contested and plural nature of local relationships with the environment, which have been influenced and reshaped by capitalist development and commodification of natural resources, state environmental policies, and Buddhist modernist ideas.

This article challenges two connected notions in the study of Tibetan Buddhism: that Buddhist monasticism is characterized by a pronounced move towards individualism, systematically detaching monks from relational social life; and that Tibetan Buddhist doctrines of karma represent an alternative mode of identity to those constructed within household life. By comparing the ritual practices and inheritance patterns associated with household groups in Ladakh with tantric ritual forms in local Buddhist (Gelukpa) monasteries, it is argued that they demonstrate pronounced structural similarities, centred on the shared symbolic construct of the household/temple as the source of socialized agency. An analysis of the meditative disciplines of Gelukpa monasticism is used to show how such training serves not to renounce kinship and household values, but to transform them into modes of religious authority, essential to the social position of monks (trapa) and incarnate lamas (tulku) in Tibetan Buddhism.Regardless of how long we spend living together, Good friends and relations must some day depart. Our wealth and possessions collected with effort Are left behind at the end of our life. Our mind, but a guest in our body's great house, Must vacate one day and travel beyond -Cast away thoughts that concern but this lifetime -The Sons of the Buddhas all practice this way.

The principal legacy of Evans‐Pritchard's 1937 ethnography Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande has been to associate debates over the rationality of witchcraft with its social categorization as a facet of misfortune and enmity. In combination with Evans‐Pritchard's own scepticism regarding witches, this allowed the rationality debate to isolate witchcraft as a distinctive special case. This logical exceptionalism was at odds with Evans‐Pritchard's own assertion of witchcraft's ordinariness, and is not supported by comparable ethnography from the Ladakh region of the Himalayas or by the unabridged versions of Oracles, both of which point towards an indigenous understanding of witchcraft as one variation on a spectrum of everyday action and craft. Instead, a revised reading of Oracles suggests that even the most basic quotidian representations of personal agency raise larger questions as to anthropology's understanding of how humans ascribe action and personhood, a debate which stands at the heart of its status as a science.

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