When examining a collection that consists of both ritual
texts and ritual objects collected by one single collector, how
do we determine the ways in which they interconnect? Can
such a collection be seen a representative of the religious
and cultural landscape of a certain region during a certain
period?
The Van Manen collection contains a large number of Tibetan and Himalayan texts and objects. After Johan Van Manen (1877-1943) passed away in India a large part of his personal collection were housed at
Leiden University. The artefacts he collected, however, are kept in the Ethnographic Museum in Leidenwhere they remain to this day.
This lecture outlines my 5-year ERC-project VAN MANEN, which aims to answer questions of provenance research but also of context research regarding ritual texts and artefacts. It involves a study of rare rituals texts, artefacts, Van Manen’s Himalayan assistants’ autobiographies, his unpublished work, and other ephemera, which may hold the potential to answer above questions and provide a framework to examine other similar collections.
Berthe Jansen is assistant professor of Tibetan Studies at Leiden University. She is the author of The Monastery Rules: Monastic Organization in Pre-Modern Tibet (2018) and the children’s book Don’t Kill the Bugs (2023). She has been working (on and off) as an interpreter and translator of Buddhist Tibetan since 2004. Jansen is the recipient of an ERC starting grant for a 5-year project on the Tibetan and Himalayan materials in the Van Manen collection. The talk was entitled Locating Literature, Lived Religion, and Lives in the Himalayas: The Van Manen Collection. She spoke with students and participants at RYI on 19th July 2023.
12 сен 2024
