This PhD Thesis from Dr. Elles Lohuis focuses on the daily life experience in small Tibetan Buddhist monasteries for women in the remote parts of the Northern Himalayas of India. Supported by the Jamyang Foundation, an NGO founded by Venerable Prof. Dr. Karma Lekshe Tsomo, in Dharamsala, India in 1987 these monasteries are the first of its kind to provide monastic and secular education for Tibetan Buddhist women in the Indian Himalayas. This study discusses the global support, the process and the impact of this global support on the daily lives of the nuns in the monasteries in the time frame from 2006-2013. By applying a combination of engaged scholarship methods, photography and spending long periods of time with the nuns, an important part of this study was undertaken in collaboration with the nuns. The vast amount of data collected explores the daily lives of the nuns as well as the necessary context, content and process of change through time. Analysis of the data is done though an integrated, inclusive frame of theories which includes Appadurais concept of scapes and work of the imagination 1996, Baumans concept of liquidity and individualization in 2000, De Certeaus theory on the duality of place and space in 1984 and Bourdieus concepts of field and capital in 1977.

Global Place, Lived Space: Everyday Life in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery for Nuns in Northen India, Elles Lohuis, Drifting Sands Press, Paperback, 2013, 204 pages, $35.50

Elles Lohuis is a historical fiction author based in The Netherlands. A voracious reader and ever inquisitive explorer of far-away lands and foreign cultures, she holds an MA in History, an MA in Business, and a PhD in Social Sciences. After working for nearly thirty years in international business, education and research, she left her academic position and private coaching practice behind to write all those novels smoldering inside of her. Elles writes novels that enthrall, engage, and enrich you, to sweep away to distant places and times gone by, opening a window to a world and its people that nowadays seems wondrous, foreign, and fascinating�but was once typically ours. At the moment, Elles is back on base to complete her first historical fiction series Nordun�s Way, a Tibetan epic about a young woman blazing her own trail through the turbulent times of thirteenth-century Tibet with its royal clans, Mongolian invaders, smugglers and SilkRoad traders.