Until the 1990s, Tibetan studies was dominated by historians, religious scholars, and philologists. The occasional anthropologist who attended these seminars usually worked in the ethnically Tibetan borderlands of Nepal and India, or among the refugee communities of South Asia. Representatives of other disciplines, notably demography, sociology, geography, economics, and political science, were conspicuously absent. However, the situation has changed due to three developments: (1) a dramatic expansion of interest in Tibet that has attracted scholars from an increasing array of academic disciplines, (2) the opening of the Tibet Autonomous Region and other Tibetan-inhabited areas of China to foreign researchers, and (3) the maturing in China of the social sciences, in particular scholarship on Tibet.
The first six papers in this issue (Journal of the International Assocaition of Tibetan Studies, Issue 4 - December 2008) focus on fertility, population growth, marriage patterns, migration, and urbanisation.
