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Academics

Intangible Heritage and Visual Repatriation: an ethnography of three exhibitions in Nepal

University Room: Omid & Gisel Kordestani Rooftop Conference Center (Q-801)
Tuesday, April 26, 2022 - 18:00 to 19:30

In this talk Bruce McCoy Owens 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. He will consider these issues as he engaged with them in the process of planning and mounting three exhibitions of photographs of the annual chariot festival of R膩to Matsyendran膩th in the Kathmandu Valley in the fall of 2016. These exhibitions required that he negotiate the diverse interests of those represented as well as the interests of others who encountered these representations. Among the issues he will consider 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.

Bruce McCoy Owens first came to Nepal in 1977 as a recent college graduate, intending to go on to graduate school after my travels in Asia to study anthropology, specializing in Latin America. That visit, which included his first glimpse of this festival, radically altered that trajectory.聽 He has been studying the festival of Bu峁僩adya岣 (and the festivals of related Loke艣varas of the valley) intermittently ever since his doctoral field research from 1982-1984, which culminated in a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has since devoted his attention to sacred sites of devotional practice in the Kathmandu Valley and the transformations they have undergone, particularly since the jana 膩ndolan of 1990-91. He has primarily focused on Swayambhu and Newa monastic compounds, known as 产补丑补岣 and 产补丑墨, in the latter case hoping to update the survey conducted by the late Father John Locke, published in 1985. This project has since been undertaken on a much larger scale and scope by the Nepal Heritage Documentation Project at University of Heidelberg, with which I have been delighted to collaborate. The common theme that links these various projects is understanding the diverse perspectives that various stakeholders bring to these arenas of devotion, and the contestations and transformations through which these perspectives are expressed.

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