Overview

For millions of people around the world, Tibet is a domain of undisturbed tradition, the Dalai Lama a spiritual guide. By contrast, the Tibet Museum opened in Lhasa by the Chinese in 1999 was designed to reclassify Tibetan objects as cultural relics and the Dalai Lama as obsolete. Suggesting that both these views are suspect, Clare E. Harris argues in The Museum on the Roof of the World that for the past one hundred and fifty years, British and Chinese collectors and curators have tried to convert Tibet itself into a museum, an image some Tibetans have begun to contest. This book is a powerful account of the museums created by, for, or on behalf of Tibetans and the nationalist agendas that have played out in them. Harris begins with the British public's first encounter with Tibetan culture in 1854. She then examines the role of imperial collectors and photographers in representations of the region and visits competing museums of Tibet in India and Lhasa. Drawing on fieldwork in Tibetan communities, she also documents the activities of contemporary Tibetan artists as they try to displace the utopian visions of their country prevalent in the West, as well as the negative assessments of their heritage common in China. Illustrated with many previously unpublished images, this book addresses the pressing question of who has the right to represent Tibet in museums and beyond.

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9780226213170

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A highly readable discussion of the ways in which political power has shaped perceptions of Tibet and its material culture, and how contemporary Tibetans are appropriating the 'soft power' of art as a political tool.... Highly recommened. (Choice)

In The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet , Clare Harris treats us to a beautifully written, carefully documented, and pleasantly devious sally into the troubled currents and feedbacks linking Tibetans, British imperialists, Chinese communists, and, in the post-Mao, post-modern art world, Tibetans again, through the sharing and appropriation of images. Harris is a canny and subtle interpreter of this visual culture, its intended messages and inadvertent innuendos. Full of brilliant and illustrative stories uncovered by thorough archival work and intimate knowledge of the relevant sources and collections, The Museum on the Roof of the World explores the various techniques instrumentalized by the imperial powers of Great Britain and China to control their colonies, as well as others' knowledge of them, by the dislocation and appropriation of artifacts, and the effective transformation of the colonized society into a museum. In this mature work of scholarship, whose imagistic riches should open one's eyes to fresh perspectives in the interpretation of contemporary culture, Clare Harris achieves that rare contribution in which the reader discovers new learning while reveling in the delights of a page-turner. --Association for Asian Studies Announcement for the E. Gene Smith Book Prize

""A highly readable discussion of the ways in which political power has shaped perceptions of Tibet and its material culture, and how contemporary Tibetans are appropriating the 'soft power' of art as a political tool.... Highly recommened."" (Choice)""

Author Information

Clare E. Harris is a reader in visual anthropology at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, curator for Asian collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. She is the author of In the Image of Tibet: Tibetan Painting after 1959.

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