Editorial Female Specialists between Autonomy and Ambivalence

his special issue is based upon an international symposium on autonomous religious women held during 2013.1 It offers a new, comparative perspective on women as visionaries, healers and agents of social transformation in Tibet, the Himalayas and Mongolia. The contributions form a collection of ethnographi-cally based case studies of autonomous female specialists from across this wide, but rarely compared region, which is culturally coherent in respect to the sharing of both shamanic and Buddhist traditions, and yet historically, politically and socially diverse. Notably, most of these case studies share certain dramatic and fundamentally disruptive socio-political changes that had previously created a vacuum of religious and secular education and practices. These were followed by revivals or recoveries of religion and education— whether this concerns Tibet after the Cultural Revolution beginning in the 1980s, post-socialist Mongolia and democratisation in Bhutan starting in the 1990s, or post-Maoist democratisation and outmigration of Nepalese male labourers in the new millennium. These times of revivals made space for innovation and new opportunities, which several female specialists have seized in different ways, allowing them to become more autonomous. The case studies also allow comparison of different religious and ritual specialists, from female shamanic to meditative Buddhist practitioners, along with two female professionals in Tibetan literature and medicine. Concerning the religious practitioners, however, boundaries between their specialisations are blurred, meanings differ locally, and their roles—at times in need of recognition by a higher (male) authority—can change within one 1 As editors of this special issue and organisers of the international symposiu