Abraham Zablocki '88, better known as Tom during his days as an undergrad, credits Amherst with instilling a sense of self-confidence in him that enabled him to buy a one-way ticket to India less than a year after graduation. Zablocki's travels were a logical follow-up to his anthropology thesis on India, which he wrote with the aid of Professor of Anthropology Alan Babb.

"When I graduated, I didn't want to rush out and get a job, I wanted by see the world," said Zablocki. "My knowledge was based on my books and classes, and I wanted to be in the field and wanted to find out what my thesis had to do with India. I had written 150 pages about India and religion, never having been to India."

Frequent flyer

Zablocki worked until March of the year after his graduation, then headed for India, not realizing at the time it would be the beginning of a distinguished career in anthropology that would bring him back to Amherst 13 years later as a Professor of Anthropology at Hampshire College. "I put on a backpack and traveled for a year around India and Nepal," he said. "Looking back and thinking about where my 'claims of authority' come from, it started with that year I spent adventuring and traveling. That year, and writing my thesis senior year, was when the groundwork was laid, although I didn't realize it at the time."

Zablocki attributes his adventurous spirit partly to the example set by his mother, who lived on a hippie commune, and partly to his experience at the College.

"I trusted my own abilities enough that it never occurred to me that taking time off before graduate school could disrupt my chances for professional success," said Zablocki. "Amherst inculcated in me the feeling that I could spend time just exploring, and once I knew what I wanted to do, I was sure I would be able to do it."

Zablocki spent much of his time in India hiking in the mountains, sometimes alone and sometimes with friends, often taking routes that were off of the beaten path and gaining enough experience to later work as a trekking guide in Nepal.

Hoping to take his understanding of the culture to a deeper level, Zablocki began studying Nepali and eventually decided he wanted to live in Katmandu, Nepal. While describing his year traveling from place to place as a wonderful experience, Zablocki felt it had been somewhat superficial. "I made the decision to stay in one place [when I went back the second time] to get to know the place and some people more deeply," he said.

When Zablocki returned to the U.S., he brought back Indian jewelry and sold it on street corners in New York to make enough money to support himself and allow for his return to Nepal. "It amused my friends to no end ... there I was with an Amherst degree selling jewelry on the corner of 42nd and 5th in Manhattan, but that was fine. I just wanted to make enough to go back," he said.

Zablocki returned to Katmandu in 1990 and spent 15 months studying Nepali at Tribhuvan National University, located in the ancient town of Kirtipur, about five kilometers from Katmandu. He began to take an interest in the neighborhood where he lived, Boudanath.

"Classes I had taken at Amherst about Tibetan culture made a big impression on me," Zablocki said. "Then I was living in a place where these exiles had settled ... I became particularly intrigued by the culture of Tibetan exiles." As a result, Zablocki began to study the Tibetan language.

After finishing his studies at Tribhuvan University, Zablocki returned to the U.S. a second time, again bringing jewelry from the region to sell in New York. At that point, he began to look at anthropology as a possible career. "I realized that I was doing anthropology on my own, and it made sense to do it with guidance," he said.

"I had gone originally to south Asia to learn about the reality of the culture, but I had gotten to the point where what I most wanted to do was read about the culture," he continued. "I needed to go back and immerse myself in the history to understand the daily experiences I was having there, and I needed to engage in the work of others who had been having the same types of experiences."

Zablocki returned to the U.S. to begin study at Cornell University, one of the leading schools in south Asian studies in the U.S. and one of the only universities in the country where Zablocki found he could study Nepali and Tibetan. "Cornell has a major center for Nepali studies, and there was also a Tibetan monastery nearby," he said. "I would study Tibetan at the monastery in the morning and go to Cornell for classes and graduate work later in the day."

When Zablocki returned to south Asia for a third time in 1992, he had graduate school applications with him. "I figured I might as well do what it takes to make a career," he said.

Four years in Tibet

When Zablocki made his fourth visit in 1996, he spent four years in various regions including Nepal, India, Taiwan and Tibet, doing research for his dissertation and teaching for Antioch College's study abroad program in India. "I wanted to go to remote villages and find authentic culture ... I wanted to study religion and society in Tibetan culture, and I wanted to go to where authentic culture persisted."

Realizing that the neighborhood, Boudanath, where he lived had been influenced by the outsiders who also lived there, Zablocki went high into the Himalayas in search of authentic Tibetan culture. "At some point I realized that even in the most remote places, places it took 10 days to walk to from a remote airstrip, the authentic culture I was looking for didn't exist," he said.

Zablocki describes being asked by a man in this remote village to translate a letter from his American stepmother. The man's father had emigrated to America and remarried an American woman. "It sort of blew apart my whole notion that somewhere there were remote mountain valleys where people were living as they had always lived," said Zablocki.

According to Zablocki, anthropologists recognized that there was a fascination with Tibet in the west in the early 1990s, but they viewed it as an aberration that would quickly end. "I started to think that Tibetans were changing as a result of the relationships they had with others, so I made this the focus of my study."

Zablocki spent three years doing research on the transnational transformation of Tibetan religion, politics and culture and the ways in which non-Tibetan agents-people and states-come to feel they have a stake in Tibetan affairs, and how this stake is influencing the process of transition in Tibetan society. He became particularly interested in the role of non-Tibetan women who have been ordained as nuns in the Tibetan tradition. These women had realized how patriarchal the Tibetan tradition had remained and attempted to resist the patriarchy for themselves and for Tibetan women. Zablocki believes these women have seen some success. "For the first time, Tibetans of all varieties recognize and value providing nuns in the Tibetan religion with a solid education. Historically, women practitioners who were well educated were not the norm, but this is changing," he said.

Zablocki is also interested in non-Tibetans who are attracted to the more conservative elements of Tibet. "There is a fascination with the special powers we have historically imagined to reside in Tibet and Tibetans," he said. "Tibetans in exile confront a situation where they might want to adapt their traditions to their encounters with modernity, and yet they find non-Tibetans longing for a timeless Tibet."

Back in the valley

Zablocki was hired this fall as a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Hampshire College and is working on a Ph.D. from Cornell University. He is finishing his dissertation entitled "The Global Mandala: the Transnational Transformation of Tibetan Religion, Politics and Culture" and is currently teaching Anthropology of Religion and Transnational Tibet, a course which deals with the processes by which mythic fantasies of Tibet have been constructed.

"I came back because I was offered a job, but I am thrilled at the prospect of being back in a place I love. I had a fabulous time at Amherst and have wonderful feelings about it ... I am really grateful for that education and am really glad I chose to go there," he said. "There is a little sense of déjà vu. I chose to live in Northampton so there could be a little distance."

Zablocki is particularly excited about being back in the atmosphere of a liberal arts college. "Even though the dynamic in Hampshire College classes is different, the fact that students want to engage ideas in class and the college encourages me to do so, is such a thrill, rather than being asked to stand up and lecture."

Zablocki has fond memories of his own liberal arts experience. "I remember that Austin Sarat took a room full of 200 people and turned it into a seminar, it was really just a thrill," he said. "Amherst trained my in an inquiry that in now at the center of my own teaching."

Zablocki has returned to the College to become reacquainted with his professors. "The most surprising change I found was in the faculty dining hall, which used to be called East and was part of the student dining hall. It was weird to walk into a room where I had so many meals, and it's now for faculty … and I am faculty," he said. "What hasn't changed is looking at the faces hurry across campus, I recognized the same sense of worried intensity. There's a sense that we're a talented bunch and the standards we have to work up to are high."