Project description
Exploring Himalayan texts of the Van Manen Collection
Johan van Manen was a Dutch Tibetologist who left a significant collection of Tibetan and Himalayan texts and artefacts after his passing in 1943. The Leiden University Library received over 1 500 texts, while the Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden houses the Himalayan artefacts. Funded by the European Research Council, the VAN MANEN project will study the valuable but often overlooked texts and artefacts – unique among Tibetan literature texts gathered between 1920 and 1940. The project will offer a new perspective on the Van Manen collection by analysing the collection’s rare manuscripts, material objects, undocumented marginal writings and noteworthy Tibetan language autobiographies commissioned by Van Manen, allowing an unprecedented in-depth exploration of ordinary Himalayan people's autobiographies.
Objective
This project offers an ambitious study of an important, yet mostly forgotten, collection of Himalayan texts and artifacts collected between 1920 and 1940. It will, for the first time, provide a view of the Van Manen collection through a study of its rare manuscripts, the material objects, undocumented marginal writings, and the unique Tibetan language autobiographies by ordinary Himalayan people commissioned by Van Manen.
This collection, held in the Leiden University Library, contains a large number of Tibetan and Himalayan texts, collected by Johan van Manen who lived in India. After his death in 1943 a large part of his personal collection became housed at the university, totaling more than 1500 mostly Tibetan texts. He also collected Himalayan artifacts, now stored separately from the texts, in Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden. The texts and artifacts reflect the collector's interest in the lived religion and the lives of Himalayan people.
The project's goal is the examination of the van Manen Collection as a whole using historical, ethnographic and philological methods, and by employing Digital Humanities methods through which the origins of the texts and artifacts can be traced, mapped, and be made available, linking them to other editions in online databases as well as to local Tibetan archives.
The main aim is to get an understanding of the proliferation, usage, and presence of religious and ritual literature and artifacts in the greater Darjeeling area in the first half of the 20th century and, by extension, their religious milieus 1). Many of the texts are unica in Tibetan literature - and as they are mostly unstudied, they merit a thorough examination 2). The broader question is how to 'read', and engage with, a multi- media collection curated by one single collector, and how to understand the 'collection formation' process 3). The project results will contribute to the analysis of multi-media collections of non-Western literature and material culture 4).
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
2311 EZ Leiden
Netherlands