A01=Clare E. Harris
anthropologist
anthropology
art
asia
asian
Author_Clare E. Harris
british
Category=AB
Category=AGA
Category=GLZ
Category=JBCC
Category=NHF
china
chinese
contemporary
cultural relics
culture
dalai lama
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnographic
ethnography
exile
great britain
imperial
imperialism
imperialist
india
international relations
lhasa
memory
museum
nation
nationalism
nationalist
photographers
photography
political
politics
representation
tibet
transnational
visual
Product details
- ISBN 9780226317472
- Weight: 822g
- Dimensions: 19 x 26mm
- Publication Date: 30 Oct 2012
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 Illustrated with many previously unpublished images, this book addresses the pressing question of who has the right to represent Tibet in museums and beyond.
Clare E. Harris is a reader in visual anthropology at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, curator for Asian collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. She is the author of In the Image of Tibet: Tibetan Painting after 1959.
