Scope and Content
The collection documents Linda LaMacchia's travels in India and fieldwork in the Kinnaur district in the state of Himachal Pradesh in Northwest India from 1985 to 2017. For fifteen months in 1995 and 1996, LaMacchia conducted doctoral research for a degree in South Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. During this period she recorded the life stories, songs, and local religious practices of Buddhist nuns, or jomos, in the Kinnaur district. Following the completion of her dissertation, and later her book The Songs and Lives of the Jomo (Nuns) of Kinnaur, Northwest India based on this research, LaMacchia continued her work with the jomos and lamas of the Kinnaur district, taking repeated trips to India between 1998 and 2017 to continue collecting songs and life stories.
The collection contains life stories of jomos belonging to three Buddhist sects: Drukpa Kagyu, Gelug, and Nyingma. LaMacchia also collected songs performed by the jomos, including Tibetan language songs (mgurma) and Kinnauri language songs (githang). The collection includes photographs and video footage of jomos, lamas, Buddhist religious rituals, and the Himalayan Mountains of the Kinnaur district. LaMacchia's journals with extensive field notes documenting her fifteen months of dissertation work are also retained in the collection. The majority of materials were transcribed in Tibetan or Hindi and translated into English by LaMacchia. Materials in Kinnauri, which has no written language, were transcribed into Hindi by Ramesh Chandra Negi and then translated into English by LaMacchia. The collection includes many drafts and iterations of translations in various languages. Collection material and folder headings may contain variable spellings and other discrepancies as names and phrases went through multiple rounds of translation and were transliterated by LaMacchia from Devanagari or Tibetan scripts to the Latin alphabet.