Intangible Heritage and Visual Repatriation: an ethnography of three exhibitions in Nepal: Guest Lecture
Prof. Bruce McCoy Owens, Wheaton College, Massachussets, Anthropology Department
The talk will take place in the frame of Prof. Brosius´course “Collecting, mapping, archiving, exhibiting: practices of knowledge production” and is initiated by the Nepal Heritage Documatation Project (NHDP).
The talk will consider the various opportunities and challenges that are presented by displaying photographs that depict intangible heritage to those whose heritage is portrayed within them. Prof. Owens will explore these issues as he engaged with them in the process of planning and mounting three exhibitions of photographs of the annual chariot festival of Rāto Matsyendranāth in the Kathmandu Valley in the fall of 2016. These exhibitions required that he negotiated the diverse interests of those represented as well as the interests of others he encountered in these representations. Among the issues considered are the tensions between aesthetic value and documentary accuracy; divergent aesthetic principles among viewers and subjects; privileging the past and honoring the present; practicing visual elicitation while in the process of visual repatriation; and the role of ethnographic photography in an age of photographic ubiquity and pervasive social mediatization.
About the speaker:
Bruce McCoy Owens is associate professor of Anthropology at the Wheaton College, Massachussets, and coordinator of the Wheaton/Royal Thimphu College Partnership Program. He presented his photographs about the celebrations of the Rāto Matsyendranāthko Rath Jātrā at Photo Kathmandu 2016. Adresse Karl Jaspers Centre 400.02.12 Voßstraße 2, Geb. 44 69115 Heidelberg Homepage Veranstaltung http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/newsevents/events/event-view/cal/event/view-list%7Cpage_id-2289/tx_cal_phpicalendar/2019/05/23/-971d5bdfb7.html Veranstalter Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS) Homepage Veranstalter www.hcts.uni-hd.de Kontakt Ina Buchholz, Visual and Media Anthropology |