Year of Award

2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Name

Anthropology (Cultural Heritage and Applied Anthropology Option)

Department or School/College

Department of Anthropology

Committee Chair

Gregory Campbell

Commitee Members

Anna Prentiss, Randy Skelton, Gilbert Quintero, Jennifer Thomsen

Keywords

Affective Responses, Cultural Heritage, Therapeutic Landscapes, Tibetan Buddhism

Publisher

University of Montana

Abstract

Medical anthropology researchers have just begun exploring therapeutic landscapes as the benefits of location are just now being understood in the field as potentially promoting a sense of healing and wellbeing. Some cultural heritage sites are translocated sites that are important to disseminate traditional cultural knowledge. While some of these cultural heritage landscapes become formal cultural resources, others also add a level of therapeutic quality to their existence. The Garden of 1,000 Buddhas was such a location. Discerning how these sites develop and are mitigated through affective responses, messaging symbols and personal beliefs was an important part of the process. How these were linked to the social and symbolic environments of the therapeutic landscape was not well known. For this reason, it became important to explore the central questions: How do affective responses, personal beliefs, and messaging symbols at the Garden of 1,000 Buddhas impact visitors’ social and symbolic environments? Are affective responses, personal beliefs, and messaging symbols integral in therapeutic landscape development? To fully explore this question, three subquestions should be explored which will then provide adequate responses to the central question. These three subquestions will be as follows: 1) How do affective responses emerging from interacting with a cultural heritage site influence the visitors’ health and wellbeing outcomes from visiting the Garden of 1,000 Buddhas?, 2) How are visitors’ personal health and wellbeing beliefs formative in the construction of a therapeutic landscape where no official health and wellbeing attributes are articulated by the Garden of 1,000 Buddhas site management?; 3) How does visitor placement of health and wellbeing messaging symbols throughout the Garden of 1,000 Buddhas impact the social environment of the therapeutic landscape at the Garden of 1,000 Buddhas? Answering these questions will demonstrate how they are related and the impact they have on the social and symbolic environments. The answers to these questions will also facilitate an understanding of how therapeutic landscapes develop and their relationship with cultural heritage sites.

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