Mark Turin was trained in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, took a First Class degree in 1995, and thereafter spent a year cataloguing Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf's ethnographic films. Then he joined the Himalayan Languages Project at Leiden University, the Netherlands, to write a grammar of Thangmi, a hitherto undescribed Tibeto-Burman language spoken in eastern Nepal. His doctoral dissertation, which will be published in 2007, offers an analysis of the grammar of the Thangmi language supported by glossed texts and a comprehensive lexicon of the two main dialects.

Mark first travelled to Nepal in 1991 to work as a volunteer teacher in a village school in the Mustang district. Since then he has spent over seven years in the Himalayas, conducting anthropological and linguistic research and teaching. He has attained a high level of fluency in Nepali and speaks conversational Thakali and Thangmi. When in Europe, he teaches linguistic anthropology and the Nepali language, and has worked as a translator and interpreter between English, Dutch and Nepali. He has been a a visiting scholar at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY and has advised the World Bank on linguistic policy in Nepal. Turin is also directing the first modern linguistic survey of Sikkim in collaboration with the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology in Gangtok. At present he is fieldwork coordinator for the Chintang and Puma Documentation Project, and is based in Nepal. Click here for a full list of his publications, both academic and journalistic.

 

Mark Turin