Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
2025, Among Tibetan Materialites: Materials and Material Cultures of Tibet and the Himalayas
Among Tibetan Materialities makes an intervention into Tibetan studies by critically engaging with material culture. It opens up new sources, methodologies and frameworks for studying, thinking and writing about material culture, materials and materiality in Tibet and the Himalayas. It highlights novel ways that Tibetan and Himalayan worlds can be made relevant beyond their local contexts. Spanning historical and contemporary contexts this collection of ongoing research disrupts current approaches to Tibetan and Himalayan materiality by considering socially constructed materiality and the materials constituting things, from their conception and production to their end of life and afterlife.
2007
Recent archaeological discoveries and scientific research especially focussed on western Tibet and the western Himalayas have resulted in a remarkable redefinition of the historical and cultural processes of the entire Indo-Tibetan civilisation. The present volume reflects these sometimes startling new insights for the first time, covering the wide time range from the Zhang zhung period up to the 20th century, spanning secular, religious and economic history, as well as art and archaeology.
Yeshe: A Journal of Tibetan Literature, Arts and Humanities, 2024
Ten: basis, foundation. Ku: an honorific body. Ku + ten= statue??? Before 1951, Tibet had an estimated 6,000 religious institutions plus thousands of private homes, housing millions of objects that are termed in English statues, sometimes under the rubric "Buddhist images." They have played an essential role in Tibetan life for centuries. Unsurprisingly, the Tibetan language contains a plethora of terms, at least twenty-six that could be translated as "statue," for these objects. And the breadth of the terminology only hints at the complexity of Tibetan theories of materiality at play, some inherited from Indian Buddhism, others entirely indigenous. Scholars of Buddhist studies have attempted to adopt a variety of theoretical frames, from Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Piercean semiotics, and Marxism to name a few, to translate the terms and ideas of Tibetan materiality. However, each of these frames explains away as much as they reveal to their intended audiences. I use the example of the Jowo Śākyamuni of the Rasa Trulnang Tsuklakhang to think with Tibetan materiality about the relationship between not just Tibetan and English, but the cultural contexts and purposes of the act of comparison and translation.
ASIAN HIGHLANDS PERSPECTIVES, 2023
'Jam dbyangs skyabs. 2023. Tibetan Artifacts: Prayer Wheels, Worn Religious Items, Tibetan Tents, and Personal Ornaments in 2022. Asian Highlands Perspectives 63:98-149. Personal experiences and histories of local older Tibetan religious practitioners illustrate the religious and cultural practices of Stag lung Mtha' ba, Khang sar Township, Gcig sgril (Jiuzhi) County, Mgo log (Goulou) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Mtsho sngon (Qinghai) Province, PR China. Highlighting the significant roles that religious items, personal ornaments, Tibetan tents, and the memories of their use play in local lives, the article provides insights into the importance of the community's religion and traditions. Interviews with local elders about their life experiences, religious items, and personal ornaments enrich our understanding of how symbols of faith connect individuals to their cultural heritage and history, offering a deeper appreciation of the significance of these items, including their symbolism and function. By showcasing the importance of personal experiences and histories in understanding the significance of religious practices and objects in a specific Tibetan community, this paper contributes to the literature on Tibetan religion and culture, offering a unique perspective on the diverse and rich traditions locally maintained and practiced and highlighting the importance of cultural heritage and history in shaping local identity and values.
Space and Culture, India, 2014
This paper is about the Tibetan people in two settlements, mainly in Nepal and India. Tibetan ref-ugees started crossing the Himalayan range in April 1959, in the wake of the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile and landed mostly in Nepal and India. Tibetans around the world do not know their fu-ture nor do they appear unduly worried. Most of them appear resilient and hopeful to see a ‘free Tibet’ a dream closer to their hearts, someday in the future. In this paper, we delve at their deep association between their philosophy of life based on the principles of ‘karma’ and their everyday economic avocation of weaving ‘carpets’. We find that these people weave their lives around kar-ma and the carpets. Karma embodies their philosophical and spiritual outlook while carpets, mats and paintings symbolise their day-to-day struggles, enterprises to cope, survive, thrive and flour-ish. The ‘karma carpet’ symbolises their journey into the future. The Tibetans although a refugee group do not have th...
Revue d"Etudes Tibétaines 57, 2021
This article discusses the Tibetan term dkor, a concept that appears to have become increasingly complex as it developed over the last millennium up until this day. The most basic connotation of the word dkor is "wealth" or "possession", something rather concrete indeed. In contradistinction with what is often called the "commodification of religion", that is to say, "the process of transforming goods, services, ideas, and [...] religion into something that can be bought and sold", 1 I argue in this article that, as time passed, a gradual shift from the material to the immaterial has taken place. In other words, a shift from something that can be bought and sold to something that is intangible yet is thought to have an (invisible) effect on this life and the next.
2007
Gerke, B. 2007. "Engaging the subtle body: Re-approaching bla rituals among Himalayan Tibetan societies," in Soundings in Tibetan Medicine. Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. PIATS 2003: Tibetan Studies: Proceedings of the 10th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Oxford 2003. Edited by M. Schrempf, pp. 191-212. Leiden, Boston: Brill.
The Medieval History Journal 21(2), 2018
This article charts various permutations of a little known ethnogenealogical tradition found in Classical Tibetan literature, which plots the shared ancestry of Tibetan, Chinese, Mongol, and, in some cases, other Asian populations. A contextualisation of the ethnonym ‘Tibetan’ (Bod-pa) is offered first, followed by a brief overview of other extant origin narratives of this ethnic group. The article then turns to discussions of the selected myth’s renditions, which began being written in the 14th c. at the very latest, and seem to have been particularly current on the eastern stretches of the Tibetan Plateau. This survey illustrates that depending on the historical period, geographic location, authorial strategy, and religious affiliation, the narrative was adapted to fit specific social and literary contexts and goals. Accordingly, the list of incorporated ethnic groups varies from source to source, as do their internal hierarchical ranking and specific interpretive twists. All in all, the article paints a picture of a fluid and malleable account in which different narrators and communities actively enlisted, adapted, and instrumentalised specific visions of the ethnic group’s deep past.
ASIAN ART at Asianart.com. On-line journal, Santa Fe (USA)/Kathmandu (NEPAL). The Arts of Tibetan Painting: Edited by Amy Heller | 2012, 2012
As far as is currently known, the earliest Tibetan manuscript illuminations dating from before the thirteenth C have only survived in the form of images on single folios. As Paul Harrison (2007: 231) has pointed out, hitherto scholarly interest has often been confined either to the illustrations in the manuscripts as isolated images or to the folios solely as bearer of texts. The finds at Dolpo and Amy Heller's documentation (Heller 2009; cf. also Pritzker 2009) of them have substantially enlarged our knowledge of early Tibetan miniature painting. Although the Dolpo region today belongs to Nepal, it had close political and cultural ties with the West Tibetan kingdoms from the seventh C onwards (Heller 2009: 17ff.)[ ] (Fig. 1). On the basis of the illustrations the processes of cultural transfer will be examined and the integration of models to make a wholly new artistic entity, creating an entirely new type of manuscript in comparison to those produced in India and Nepal.[ ] The following study will focus on the relationship between text and image, transgressing as it were the 'traditional' borders between genres. The close connection between manuscripts and mural paintings will be illustrated with concrete examples. In addition, this study will examine both how architectural elements were transformed to represent a typical sacred space and the way in which the importance of donors was emphasized in a previously unknown form. ___________ The Arts of Tibetan Painting: Edited by Amy Heller (2012) The Arts of Tibetan Painting: Recent Research on Manuscripts, Murals and Thangkas of Tibet, the Himalayas and Mongolia (11th-19th century) is Asianart.com's first venture in online publication of a complete volume, comprising 13 articles which stem from the 12th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies (Vancouver 2010). This volume presents recent major discoveries and analyses by distinguished scholars of Tibetan and Mongolian art, history, and language.
Transcultural Encounters in the Himalayan Borderlands: Kalimpong as a ‘Contact Zone’ , 2018
On 18 June 1912, Charles Bell, Political Officer of Sikkim, paid his final visit to the thirteenth Dalai Lama at Bhutan House in Kalimpong. The significant gifts presented that day were the culmination of a series of object exchanges between the two men during the lama’s exile in British India. These gifting moments were not only characterized by the mobility of the objects in question, but by the connoisseurial and empirical knowledge regularly offered with them. Using the concept of “object lessons,” this paper traces out how Bell was taught things with Tibetan objects. Furthermore, these exchanges are not only placed within the context of the Dalai Lama’s exile in Darjeeling and Kalimpong between 1910 and 1912, but they highlight the potential to make alternate readings of histories and encounters if one closely follows things.
Manuscripts and Archives: Comparative Views on Record-Keeping, 2018
While Tibetan literary production generally evokes images of cloth-bound loose-leaf longbooks filling the shelves of monasteries, the culture also has a well-developed, though less widely known, archival tradition. The documents that make up these archives differ from books with respect to terminology, form, script, content and storage. Archival literature has received relatively little scholarly attention, but it nevertheless constitutes a vitally important source for our understanding of domains such as law, taxation and social history. Archives from Central Tibet tell us about the relations between authorities-mainly the government, the church and the aristocracy-and the peasantry; but it is mainly thanks to archival collections from culturally Tibetan areas in countries adjacent to China (notably India and Nepal) that we can obtain a privileged insight into the lives of local communities in past centuries.
Himalaya: The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 2016
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Philosophy & Religious Studies at ODU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ODU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact digitalcommons@odu.edu. Repository Citation Gayley, Holly and Willock, Nicole, "Introduction: Theorizing the Secular in Tibetan Cultural Worlds" (2016). Philosophy Faculty Publications. 33. http://digitalcommons.odu.edu/philosophy_fac_pubs/33
Piats 2003: Tibetan Studies: Proceedings of the Tenth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Oxford, 2003. Brill’s Tibetan Studies Library, vol. 10/8. In: Journal of the American Oriental Society 129 (3), no. 3 (2009): 503-5.
2022
This paper aims to contribute to the debate of the ‘social’ and ‘religious’ as finely intertwined domains in both cosmological understandings and actual practice, within which we can find certain resonances and actual similarities between imperial Tibet and present-day East Tibet. The work does not examine the concepts of the ‘social’ and the ‘religious’ theoretically but rather tries to point out to the multiple intrinsic ‘social’ dimensions inherently embedded in what is commonly etically conceptualised as ‘religion.’ The case I study is the burial practices of social elites. These practices clearly manifest high or the highest social status and supremacy of political power. Hence they reveal notions of social arrangements and stratification, and yet Western academic audiences usually view them primarily as religious ritual. In this paper, I suggest reconsider these notions and practices and thus revealed perceptions of kingship and rulership, social power and identity, ancestry and progeny, prosperity and territorial integrity as prevalently ‘social’ and ‘political’ elements. Within these elements arise traditions of ancestor cults that derive from and also govern local social order and organisation in terms of both kinship and social hierarchy, in contrast to the transcendentalism of the universal doctrine of Buddhism. They pertain to treasures (gter) and perceived forces of vitality and prosperity, above all bla and g.yang. The article draws attention to significant cultural continuities of divine noble ancestry and kingship, territorial divinities (yul lha, gzhi bdag, etc.), funerary treatments, and specific treasure practices. In: Hazod, Guntram, Christian Jahoda, and Mathias Fermer (eds.). 2022. The Social and the Religious in the Making of Tibetan Socieites. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 221-282.
Art of Merit: Studies in Buddhist Art and its Conservation, 2014
International Journal of Asian Studies, 2022
This is an introduction essay to the IJAS special issue "Materialism and Materiality in Asia," which is devoted to the intersections between Marxist historical materialism and the more recent new materialisms in different Asian contexts. The two materialisms correspond to two pressing social problems we are facing: the social inequality and alienations created by capitalism on the one hand and the environmental crises happening under the Anthropocene on the other. Bringing the two strains of thought together, we hope to explore ways to reconnect with the material world, and to develop theorizations that are more responsible to humans and non-humans.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2011
10 Dawa Norbu 1988. For the influence and endurance of this definition see Chinese state documents such as the one published by Rgyal khab mi rigs las don Au yon lhan khang gi srid jus shib 'jug khang gis rtsom sgrig byas pa (1979) and Bawa Phuntsok Wangyal's (2009) reflection On Marxist Theory of Nationality, mar khe si ring lugs kyi mi rigs lta ba'i skor at http://www.sangdhor.com/pics_ c.asp? id =618,
Himalaya 36:1, 2016
Introduction to a special issue on ‘The Secular in Tibetan Cultural Worlds’ for Himalaya 36:1 (2016), which originated in a panel on The Secular in Tibet and Mongolia at the Thirteenth Seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies held in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia in 2013. To contextualize the contributions to this issue, spanning diverse temporal and geographic contexts, this Introduction raises theoretical concerns and discusses contested terminology regarding ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ in Tibetan discourse. The authors situate local articulations of the secular within broader academic discussions of the varieties of Asian secularisms and offer a key intervention to complicate the secularization thesis and prevailing views of Tibet as a predominantly religious culture.
2016
The artworks and career phases of the Lhasa contemporary artist Gadé illustrate the complex entanglement of religion and the secular in modern Lhasa, while illuminating broader trends in contemporary Tibetan art as a cultural formation of local mediation of modernity’s strong influences. While the past is vital to Gadé, he is driven to “locate traditional Tibetan art in a contemporary context” where it can also be “detached from religion,” raising questions about representations of Tibet and the cultural future. He takes a secular approach to the role of artists in society that, along with his cohorts in the emergent contemporary Tibetan art movement since the 1980s, overturns Tibetan (Buddhist) artistic conventions in favor of personal expression. In Gadé’s paintings and multimedia works from the 1990s to 2012, a collectively-recognized visual language derived from the symbols, styles, compositions, and materials of traditional Buddhist art is juxtaposed with the equally familiar i...
Orientalistische Literaturzeitung
MRS Proceedings, 2007
Ancient and historic products of past technologies exist in the form of material culture and archaeological finds, available for materials analysis. Technical studies and analytical work, coupled with the study of historical texts and archival documents, can help in reconstructing past technologies. But the act of making an object is, by its very nature, also an intangible part of human heritage. Production of material culture may be accompanied by specific rituals, social behaviors and relationships, music, knowledge gained from oral histories, meanings, intents, beliefs, and reasoning processes. For ancient objects, gaining access to these intangible aspects of cultural heritage may be extremely difficult, if not impossible. However, there are many societies where traditional crafts are produced within a context where the intangible aspects can still be recorded. Yet, these opportunities are disappearing at an alarming rate as development and globalization rapidly overtake more and more traditional communities. Documenting intangible data about craft processes can promote fuller understanding of the objects themselves, and aid long-term preservation of both the objects and the processes used to make them. Examples here are drawn from fieldwork conducted in 2007 at a Bonpo monastery (Serling) and nearby villages in the Amdo region of the eastern Tibetan culture area (in Sichuan Province, China). Bonpo practices, which pre-date the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet, incorporate a variety of ritual crafts that are strongly rooted in a complex web of intangible relationships, behaviors, meanings, purposes, and beliefs. This paper focuses on votive clay objects (tsha-tshas) and barley-dough offering sculptures (tormas). Processes encompassing intangible aspects that are explored include the decision to make an object, when to make it and in what form, selection of raw materials, methods for processing the raw materials, fabrication procedures, selection of who will be involved in fabrication steps, where to place the finished object, and whether it will be preserved for the long term or considered to be only a temporary object. Results are placed in the context of larger theoretical issues regarding documentation and preservation of intangible elements of cultural heritage as part of a study of materials and technological processes.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.