Negotiating the Sacred Threshold; Field Notes and Spatial Responses from a High-Altitude Tibetan Pastoral Settlement

Abstract

In the high-altitude pastoral regions of the Tibetan cultural area, tourism is no longer only an economic activity. It also changes how a settlement is entered, represented, and used. During my winter fieldwork, there were not many tourists in the village, but tourist-oriented buildings, signs, and routes were still clearly present. This thesis focuses on the liminal spaces between a village, a prayer/gathering building, and a sacred lake, and asks how architectural thinking at these thresholds can support negotiation between ritual practices, everyday pastoral life, and tourism-related spatial pressures. The research uses a design-led ethnographic approach, combining participatory mapping, walking interviews, field observation, and shared storytelling. It pays particular attention to paths, gathering grounds, edges, and transitional spaces where different uses, meanings, and pressures overlap. In the field, the study finds that these transitional spaces are shaped not only by a single element, but by the overlapping presence of sacred markers, movement routes, shared grounds, informal rules, and tourism-oriented infrastructure. During winter fieldwork, direct tourist presence in the village was limited, yet tourist-oriented buildings, signs, and routes remained clearly legible and continued to shape how the settlement was read and used. The thesis develops a Narrative Atlas to visualize these relations through maps, routes, conversations, and spatial drawings, and translates them into a set of different nodes for further spatial response. By shifting architectural attention from sacred sites alone to liminal spaces around them, the thesis proposes a node-based and seasonal approach to working with culturally sensitive pastoral settlements. Rather than offering a fixed architectural object, it develops a light, reversible, and spatially differentiated way of negotiating between ritual practice, everyday use, and tourism-related pressure. In this way, the thesis suggests a transferable architectural framework for reading and responding to threshold conditions in places where sacred meaning, local life, and external pressures overlap.