(Mis-)Representing Cultures and Objects workshop

Registration is now open for the workshop (Mis-)Representing Cultures and Objects at the University of Stirling.

The workshop is one of the concluding elements of an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award entitled Tibetan Collections in Scotland 1890-1930: using material culture to establish a critical historiography of missionary and military intent. The project examined the ways in which, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Tibetan artefacts were collected and displayed in Scottish museums, particularly in the Edinburgh museum (now National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh).

The Principal Investigator was Dr Timothy Fitzgerald (University of Stirling), with Dr Henrietta Lidchi (National Museums Scotland), and Dr Michael Marten (University of Stirling). The bulk of the research was carried by Inbal Livne, who will shortly be awarded her PhD.

The workshop will offer an opportunity to find out more about the CDA project, as well as exploring some of the issues that arose from it, in particular examining ways in which 

(mis-)representations of cultures and objects are connected and influence one another. We therefore welcome Tibet specialists, but also scholars working in a wide variety of disciplinary and geographic fields who can contribute something to the debate as it relates to the museum sector.

Speakers include:

Inbal Livne – Tibetan Collections in Scotland 1890-1930: using material culture to establish a critical historiography of missionary and military intent Timothy Fitzgerald/Henrie Lidchi

Dr Diana Lange – Dundee and the World”: The Collection(s) of Thomas Alexander Wise (1802-1889)

Lydia Hauth – Emic Perspectives: Community Participation in Ethnographic Museums

Emma Martin – The Barmiak Lama came to explain the meaning of those Tibetan curios which were concerned with religion’. How a colonial officer’s lessons in Tibetan materialised.

Rachel Hand – ‘Offending Our Eyes’: The ethnographic collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin

Dr Jennifer Way – Resembling the Collection: Vietnamese Handicraft at the Smithsonian, ca 1962-

Dr Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar Saenz - Dictionaries of minority languages as ‘exhibits’ – From colonialism to the decolonisation of knowledge

Dr Deborah Sutton – The Plastic Idea: the attributes of Hindu Art in the twentieth century

Rebecca Loder-Neuhold – “The only Africa museum in the Mühlviertel…” Mission museums in German speaking countries

For registration details please visit the website.