Professor Martin Mills

Biography

Prof. Martin A. Mills is Chair in Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland and Director of the Scottish Centre for Himalayan Research. He has previously lectured and researched at the universities of Edinburgh, St.Andrews and Sussex. He is a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and member of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth, as well as member of the International Association for Tibetan Studies and the International Association of Ladakh Studies. 

Research Overview

Prof Mills has carried out extensive fieldwork in Tibet, Ladakh, China, Northern India and Scotland. His initial research on religious authority and the creation of knowledge in Tibetan religious and governance institutions is explored in Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism: The Foundations of Authority in Gelukpa Monasticism (Routledge 2003). This was followed by research on the historical development of Tibetan conceptions of legitimate governance and expanded to examine the role of economic exchange patterns in state knowledge construction (Mills 2015, 2020).

Following on from policy research on climate change between 2018-2021 (see below), Mills has explored the foundational economic dynamics of anthropogenic climate change and the vital question of why humankind appears locked into certain patterns of collective behaviour. Based on the pioneering but unfinished work of economist Karl Polanyi (1944), Mills has examined the historical consequences of the exportof commodity-form economics into non-commodity asset categories: land, labour, persons (Mills 2010, 2013) and, most critically for our present circumstances, knowledge. The recent transformation of the world through digital telecommunications and, most recently, artificial intelligence, have been attended by vast economic uncertainties, largely as a product of the absence of reliable theory on knowledge and information economies.

Policy Work

Since 2007, Prof Mills has acted as Member, Research and Briefings Officer and finally Secretary (2014-2021) for the Scottish Parliament's Cross-Party Group on Tibet, as well as member of the Cross-Party Groups on China. He has acted as primary investigator and author on key parliamentary briefing papers on Tibetan and Himalayan affairs. In 2019, he organised the Holyrood parliamentary inquiry into climate change in the Third Pole Region, a major regional assessment into the causes, processes and consequences of the climatic warming of the Tibetan Plateau and its surrounding mountain ranges on the water cycles and human carrying capacity of Asia.

Read the report here or watch the Royal Geographical Society presentation here.  

From 2004 onwards, Mills has been an active senator and, later, staff governor at the University of Aberdeen, work persistently vexed by the question of university financing in the modern context. These problems are not unique to the university sector - applying equally to journalistic organisations, scientific publishers, encyclopedias, to name but a few - and the problem of economically modelling public knowledge institutions in general remains a central focus of Mills’ theoretical and policy work.

Visit Prof. Mills’ personal website for more.

Current Research

Ritual and State in Tibetan History

Since 2003, Mills has engaged in extensive research on the indigenous constitutional history of Tibet. This has involved three main areas of research: the study of the political history of the Ganden Podrang, the Dalai Lama's government at Lhasa from 1642 to 1959, and in exile since 1959; the philological study of medieval and modern manuscripts as they relate to Tibetan understandings of legitimate governance, in particular its own mythology of divine Buddhist kingship; and the ethnographic and historical study of the Ganden Podrang's ceremonial practices of statecraft.

At the heart of these issues is a theoretical concern with four issues:

• The importance of ceremony and ceremonial understandings of statecraft - rather than mere belief - as the basis for the daily functioning and sovereignty of religious states.
• The formation of mythological and constitutional and narratives as the basis for indigenous solidarities and political consciousness, both in the past and the modern day;
• The study of indigenous relations with the land and landscape as an central aspect of ceremonial sovereignty.
• The place of conflict and warfare in religious states such as historical Tibet.

Collaborations

As Director of the Scottish Centre for Himalayan Research, Dr Mills is Secretary of the Scottish Parliament's Cross-Party Group on Tibet, and a member of the Cross-Party Group on China and the Westminster All-Parliamentary Group on Tibet. In his advisory role for these groups, he has authored and co-authored parliamentary briefing papers on public protest, human rights, religious regulation, political sovereignty and international law and environmental change on the Tibetan Plateau (see Publications). He is also Chairman of the Aberdeen Chinese Studies Group.

In doing so, Dr Mills has maintained a wide variety of fruitful collaborations, including amongst others:

• The Scottish Parliament at Hollyrood, Edinburgh.
• The International Association fot Tibet Studies.
• The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD, Nepal)
• The Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, one of the world's principal sources on indigenous Tibetan historical and religious manuscripts.
• The Edinburgh Buddhist Studies Network.
• The Tibet Society, London.
• The International Campaign for Tibet.
• The Office of Tibet, London.
• The Tibet Policy Institute.
• The Confucius Institute, Scotland.

Teaching Responsibilities

Research Supervision Areas

• Political anthropology and the anthropology of the state
• Medical Anthropology
• Tibetan and Himalayan systems of governance.

• Buddhist monasticism and ritual
• Religion and the state
• Modern religious movements and insurgencies

Postgraduate Taught

• SL5010 Principles of Research Design
• SL5006 Research Skills

Undergraduate

• AT2005 Political Anthropology (groups, nations and movements)
• AT4525 The Constitutional Imagination (anthropology of the state)
• AT3540 Medical Anthropology