Julia Hirsch

This dissertation examines how Tibetan Buddhist whole-body relics and their reliquaries are created, maintained, and mobilized in diasporic communities across India, Nepal, and Bhutan. It argues that these relics mediate crises of identity and belonging, enabling displaced Tibetan communities to preserve continuity while reconfiguring relationships to place, lineage, and tradition. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork, textual and art-historical analysis, and oral histories, this project offers the first interdisciplinary account of how Tibetans have adapted this relic tradition in exile. It intervenes in material religion, ritual studies, and diaspora studies by demonstrating how sacred objects are continually remade through devotional labor. Situating relics within lived experiences of displacement reveals how Tibetan Buddhists reimagine life and death in the wake of rupture and change. Through collaboration with local oral history initiatives, this research also documents endangered forms of embodied knowledge, directly supporting Tibetan efforts to preserve their cultural and material heritage.