The thesis of this work is that the study of XXth century Himalayan art is not only a subject worthy of serious historical research in its own right, but may also help to shed more light on the history of Tibetan and Himalayan art in general. It is divided into a foreword and five chapters. The Foreword (pp. I-XIV) justifies the choice of the subject, discusses the problem of copying and explains the methods followed in the research. Chapter One (pp. 1-46) is a comprehensive account of the relationship between Newars and Tibetans at cultural, artistic, social and economic levels from the VIIth century A. D. to the present day. Chapter Two (pp. 47-105) introduces and provides brief accounts of the lives of thirteen leading Newar and Ladakhi Sculptors. The biographical data include details of the artists chief or more representative works, with their dates, size, materials, techniques and locations. Chapter Three (pp. 106-196) is concerned with the study of statuary metals and alloys. It defines the use of and discusses the term "bronze" (3 pages), reviews early brass, copper and bronze statuary from northern India in the light of the available metallurgical analyses (10 pages) and deals with recent metallurgical analysis of Tibetan and Himalayan metal images (6 pages), with particular reference to the Cleveland Buddha (6 pages). After summing up the technological implications of the data taken into consideration (3 pages), it describes the metals and alloys used in great detail, with the location of the mines, methods of extraction, trade, use in statuary, and Tibetan terminology: copper (H pages); zinc (9 pages); brass (7 pages); tin (2 pages); bronze (13 pages); silver (4 pages); gold (9 pages); iron (3 pages); and mercury (3 pages). Tibetan literary sources as well as Western information gathered in situ are used extensively. Chapter Pour (pp. 199-237) describes the modelling techniques (6 pages), investment and removal of the wax (3 pages), a timed casting (4 pages), and the removal from the mould and cleaning of the cast (4 pages). Nine pages are devoted to gilding and five to the problem of forgeries and conclusions. Chapter Five (pp. 238-279) is concerned with the sources used by the artists and discusses their iconography (11 pages), iconometry (10 pages), and problems of style (12 pages).

This thesis looks at Tibetan material culture in Scottish museums, collected between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines how collectors used Tibetan objects to construct both Tibet in the western imagination and to further personal, organisational and imperial desires and expectations. Through an analysis of the highly provenanced material available in Scottish museums, collectors will be grouped in three categories: missionaries, military personnel and colonial collectors. These are not only divided by occupation, but also by ideological frames of reference. The historical moments in which these different collector groups encountered Tibetan material culture will provide a framework for an examination of the ways that collectors accessed, collected, interpreted, used and displayed objects. Within the framework of post-colonial theory, this thesis seeks new ways of understanding assumptive concepts and terminology that has become embedded in western analysis of Tibetan material culture. These include Tibetan Buddhism as a 'religion', 'Tibetan art', 'Tibetan Buddhist art' and the position of Tibetan 'art' versus 'ethnography' in western hierarchies of value. These theoretical concerns are scrutinised through an anthropological methodology, based on the concept of 'object biography', to create an interdisciplinary model for examining objects and texts. Using this model, I will demonstrate that collectors, whilst giving Tibetan material culture a variety of social roles, invested these categories with a range of values. Yet despite this heterogeneity, the mosaic of knowledge produced about Tibet by these varying encounters, established and then cemented British understandings of Tibetan material culture in specific ways, constructed to assist in the British imperial domination of British-Tibetan relations. I will argue that on entering the museum, these richly textured object biographies were 'flattened out', and the information embedded within them that gave traction to interpretations of British-Tibetan encounters was hidden from view, requiring this study to make visible once more the heterogeneity, richness and significance of Tibetan material culture in Scottish museums.

Thangkas are Tibetan paintings which can be explained in many different points of view. Their meaning is different for Buddhist practitioners, painters, collecters, arts historians or researchers. This thesis should introduce the variaty of perspectives. The composition of the painting is given by the patron, artist or follows the Buddhist sacred scripts. Preparing the base, drawing, using colour pigments, outlining and doing final details belong to the process done by the master himself or partially by his students or monk or layman helpers. For impowering the thangka for the Buddhist praxis is necessary to do a sacrification ceremony by an educated monk. It is a religious and also social event connected with the painting. Thangkas are then used for the visualisation of figures of the Tibetan pantheon, mostly peaceful and wrathful deities. They are used in the monasteries, temples, home shrines or altars, are part of Buddhist ceremonies and festivals shown to the audience hung on the terraces or carried by the monks. Their vivid topics and colours encharme not only monks and lamas but also laymen. The expression differs according to local schools influenced by artists of Kashimiri, Bengali, Nepalese or Chinese origin. Tibetan painting style was probably created in the second half of 15th century...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1995. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [364]-389).

Contemporary Tibetan art has been internationally exhibited since the year 2000, and it continues to receive increasing recognition among international galleries and collectors. This thesis focuses on three major contributing factors that have affected the rising success of the contemporary Tibetan artists. The factors include ways in which popular stereotypes have influenced Western museum exhibitions of Tibetan art; dealers have marketed the artworks; and artists have created works that are both conceptually and aesthetically appealing to an international audience. Drawing from exhibition catalogs, interviews and art historical scholarship, this thesis looks at how the history of these factors has affected the beginning of the contemporary Tibetan art movement.

This dissertation examines literary debates initiated by Tibetan writers and critics in the 1980s and 1990s within the context of a rapidly modernizing society. My broader project is to illustrate how intellectuals position themselves in the field of literary production regarding questions of innovation, the function of literature, periodization, linguistic idiom, and the relevance of Indic kāvya theory, which dominated Tibetan belles-lettres for nearly seven hundred years. What discursive strategies do critics use to stake their literary claims? From what conceptual structures do they draw? How do they effect or resist, and ultimately shape literary change? This dissertation presents a cultural history centered on the concept of discursive formations, while also drawing on theoretical insights in sociology and literary criticism. After demonstrating how translation, publishing and educational activities of monastically trained scholars since the 1940s lay groundwork for the advent of a "New Tibetan Literature," I examine the subsequent development of modem Tibetan literary criticism, focusing on topics of sustained debate. While the bulk of my findings are based on a broad survey of Tibetan-medium literary criticism in the PRC, my selection of significant texts for close reading was informed by seventeen months of fieldwork in Qinghai and Gansu Provinces, and the Tibet Autonomous Region. My research illustrates how Tibetan literary and other journals provide a proxy public forum for intellectuals to negotiate Tibetan literature and culture. Key debates in the 1980s, during which kāvya principles continued to prevail, regarded the criteria for defining Tibetan literature, periodization and the emergence of free verse. By the mid- 1990s, however, free verse was commonplace and western literary theory more available A growing number of critics altogether rejected the kāvya model, suggesting instead that Tibet's literary roots lay in pre-Buddhist writings. An alternate response lay in the nascent formation of a modernist literary movement.

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In their comment on our publications on pervasive remagnetization of Jurassic-Paleogene carbonate rocks of the Tibetan Himalaya (Huang et al., 2017, Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 122, doi: 10.1002/2016JB013662 and 122, doi: 10.1002/2017JB013987), Yi et al. (2017) questioned our fold tests applied to their published paleomagenetic results from the Paleogene Zongpu and latest Cretaceous Zongshan carbonate rocks (Patzelt et al., 1996, Tectonophysics, 259(4), 259-284; Yi et al., 2011, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 309(1), 153-165). They argued that authigenic magnetite pseudomorphic after pyrite, which is the dominant magnetic carrier within these carbonate rocks as indicated by our thorough rock magnetic and petrographic investigations, was formed during early diagenesis and that the primary natural remanent magnetization (NRM) is retained by these carbonate rocks. However, their statement for the invalidity of our fold tests is based on unrealistic assumptions that these carbonate rocks carry primary NRM and that the upper Zongpu Formation was deposited on a 10 degrees primary dip. Their argument for immediate oxidization of pyrite to authigenic magnetite after carbonate deposition onto the continental passive margin ignores that sulfate-reducing conditions were prevailing during early diagenesis, it is also inconsistent with the timing of the secondary remanence acquisition in remagnetized carbonate rocks elsewhere. As previously demonstrated, and agreed upon by Yi et al. (2017), the Zongpu and Zongshan carbonate rocks in Gamba are remagnetized; here we argue that the timing of remagnetization cannot be demonstrated to shortly postdate sedimentation. These data should therefore not be used for tectonic reconstructions.

No description available.

No description available.