Abstract
This study examines mani stone piles in Eastern Tibet as material forms emerging through dwelling, movement, and situated acts of making. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s dwelling perspective and long-term visual ethnography conducted between 2016 and 2025, it shows how mani piles are produced through the embodied selection, carrying, and stacking of stones at passes, riverbanks, and crossroads. Rather than treating these piles primarily as fixed religious symbols or products of prior design intention, we argue that their forms arise from the practical coordination of bodily skill, available materials, topography, ritual habit, and movement through the landscape. It further shows that these practices are being reshaped by tourism and digital image circulation, which increasingly privilege standardised and image-oriented forms over locally responsive processes of making. The study offers an ethnographic account of this transformation and its implications for debates on dwelling, making, and mediated visibility.
Keywords
mani stone piles; dwelling perspective; visual ethnography; material practice
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1991
Citation
Xu, D., Sun, H., Peng, Z., Pan, D., and Su, J. (2026) Dwelling, making, and digital mediation: Mani stone piles in Eastern Tibet, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1991
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Dwelling, making, and digital mediation: Mani stone piles in Eastern Tibet
This study examines mani stone piles in Eastern Tibet as material forms emerging through dwelling, movement, and situated acts of making. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s dwelling perspective and long-term visual ethnography conducted between 2016 and 2025, it shows how mani piles are produced through the embodied selection, carrying, and stacking of stones at passes, riverbanks, and crossroads. Rather than treating these piles primarily as fixed religious symbols or products of prior design intention, we argue that their forms arise from the practical coordination of bodily skill, available materials, topography, ritual habit, and movement through the landscape. It further shows that these practices are being reshaped by tourism and digital image circulation, which increasingly privilege standardised and image-oriented forms over locally responsive processes of making. The study offers an ethnographic account of this transformation and its implications for debates on dwelling, making, and mediated visibility.