The Museum on the Roof of the World
eBook - ePub

The Museum on the Roof of the World

Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Museum on the Roof of the World

Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet

About this book

For millions of people around the world, Tibet is a domain of undisturbed tradition, the Dalai Lama a spiritual guide. By contrast, the Tibet Museum opened in Lhasa by the Chinese in 1999 was designed to reclassify Tibetan objects as cultural relics and the Dalai Lama as obsolete. Suggesting that both these views are suspect, Clare E. Harris argues in The Museum on the Roof of the World that for the past one hundred and fifty years, British and Chinese collectors and curators have tried to convert Tibet itself into a museum, an image some Tibetans have begun to contest. This book is a powerful account of the museums created by, for, or on behalf of Tibetans and the nationalist agendas that have played out in them.
 
Harris begins with the British public's first encounter with Tibetan culture in 1854. She then examines the role of imperial collectors and photographers in representations of the region and visits competing museums of Tibet in India and Lhasa. Drawing on fieldwork in Tibetan communities, she also documents the activities of contemporary Tibetan artists as they try to displace the utopian visions of their country prevalent in the West, as well as the negative assessments of their heritage common in China. Illustrated with many previously unpublished images, this book addresses the pressing question of who has the right to represent Tibet in museums and beyond.

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Yes, you can access The Museum on the Roof of the World by Clare E. Harris in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Art & Art General. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Copyright
  3. Title Page
  4. Series Page
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. List of Illustrations
  8. Introduction
  9. 1. The Tibet Museum in the West
  10. 2. The Younghusband Mission and Tibetan Art
  11. 3. Picturing Tibet for the Imperial Archive
  12. 4. Photography and the Politics of Memory
  13. 5. The Tibet Museum in Exile
  14. 6. The Tibet Museum in Lhasa
  15. 7. The Invention of Tibetan Contemporary Art
  16. 8. The Buddha Goes Global
  17. Acknowledgments
  18. A Note on Languages
  19. Notes
  20. References
  21. Index