Book cover of "Among Tibetan Materialities: Materials and Material Cultures of Tibet and the Himalayas". On the image are pots with paint in different colours.

How to Cite

Martin, Emma, Brox, Trine and Lange, Diana (Eds.): Among Tibetan Materialities: Materials and Material Cultures of Tibet and the Himalayas, Heidelberg: Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, 2025. https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.1522

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Identifiers

https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.1522
ISBN 978-3-98887-015-5 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-98887-016-2 (Hardcover)

Published

10/28/2025

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Authors

Emma Martin (Ed.), Trine Brox (Ed.), Diana Lange (Ed.)

Among Tibetan Materialities

Materials and Material Cultures of Tibet and the Himalayas

Among Tibetan Materialities makes an intervention into Tibetan studies by critically engaging with material culture. It opens up new sources, methodologies and frameworks for studying, thinking and writing about material culture, materials and materiality in Tibet and the Himalayas. It highlights novel ways that Tibetan and Himalayan worlds can be made relevant beyond their local contexts. Spanning historical and contemporary contexts this collection of ongoing research disrupts current approaches to Tibetan and Himalayan materiality by considering socially constructed materiality and the materials constituting things, from their conception and production to their end of life and afterlife.

Emma Martin, Ph.D. (2014), SOAS (University of London), is Senior Lecturer of Museology at the University of Manchester. Her research and curation sit at the intersection of colonialism(s), Tibetan studies, museum activism, and material culture studies and moves between contemporary museum practice in Tibetan exile contexts and historical research on Tibetan materiality in British colonial archives.

Trine Brox, Ph.D. (2009), University of Copenhagen, is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Buddhist Studies at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies. She has written extensively about Tibetan worlds and specializes in contemporary Tibetan Buddhism with topics such as aesthetics, materials and materiality, consumption and waste.

Diana Lange, Ph.D. (2008), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, is Professor of History and Cultures of Central Asia at that university and a principal investigator at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg. Her research is focused on the history of knowledge and exploration, material and visual culture studies, cartography, and cultural interactions.

Chapters

Table of Contents
Pages
PDF
Front matter
i-iv
Contents
v-vi
List of Illustrations
vii-xi
Tsering Yangzom Lama
1 Feeling, knowing, interpreting
On Tibetan lives and objects
1-12
Trine Brox, Emma Martin, Diana Lange
2 Introduction
Materials, materiality and material culture
13-40
Mridul Surbhi, Jan M. A. van der Valk
3 Ritualized meshworks in landscape and pharmacy
Harvest and production alongside amchi from Spiti and Kinnaur
41-64
Mark Stevenson
4 Miraculous display
Temporal and collaborative materializations in Tibetan Buddhist butter art
65-91
Trine Brox
5 The afterlives of Tibetan Buddhist material objects
93-112
Agnieszka Helman-Ważny
6 What makes ‘Tibetan paper’ Tibetan?
Understanding the materiality of Tibetan paper
113-146
Diana Lange, Oliver Hahn
7 Materials and materiality as keys to understanding a map of Mount Kailash
147-175
Emma Martin
8 Recovering Barmiok Lama, Tibetan material knowledge and a Himalayan ‘scene of collecting’
177-206
Stuti Singh, Barbara Gerke
9 Menjor tools and the artisanal epistemology of making Sowa Rigpa medicines in Spiti
207-237
Mareike Wulff
10 Communicating Visual Literacy through Drawing
Illustrations of National Dress, Buddhist Monastic and Ritual Attire in Bhutan
239-264
Katia Thomas
11 Materializing Buddhist care through conservation at a Sikkim museum
265-290
Dendup Chophel
12 The material poetics and politics of the patag
Bhutan’s ceremonial sword as a heroic artefact
291-322
Gokul KS, Sonika Gupta
13 Loga’s gau in Dreaming Lhasa
Film objects as narrative devices in contemporary Tibetan cinema
323-343
Barbara Gerke
14 Postscript
Weaving Materials into Tibetan and Himalayan Studies
345-354
Emma Martin, Trine Brox, Diana Lange
15 Critical Tibetan Studies
A Turn to Materiality
355-365
Backcover

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