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.

Comment citer

Martin, Emma: Recovering Barmiok Lama, Tibetan material knowledge and a Himalayan ‘scene of collecting’, in Martin, Emma, Brox, Trine et Lange, Diana (éd.): Among Tibetan Materialities: Materials and Material Cultures of Tibet and the Himalayas, Heidelberg: Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, 2025, p. 177–206. https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.1522.c23984

Licence (Chapitre)

Creative Commons License

Ce travail est disponible sous licence Creative Commons Attribution - Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 4.0 International.

Identifiants (Livre)

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

Publié

10/28/2025

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Auteurs

Emma Martin

Recovering Barmiok Lama, Tibetan material knowledge and a Himalayan ‘scene of collecting’

This chapter considers what it means to recover Tibetan material knowledge from the imperial archive. It pays attention to the ‘scene of collecting’ (O’Hanlon 2000), namely the location of colonial collecting and those present in that ‘scene’. The relative absence of the scene in colonial collecting histories means that they still largely privilege the decisions, knowledge and movements of the colonial collector and their supporting institutions. To counter this and enable others present in the scene to come to the fore, this chapter stays in a Himalayan scene of collecting to recover the material knowledge and connoisseurship of a Tibetan Buddhist lama from Sikkim, Barmiok Jedrung Karma Palden Chögyal (1871–1942). Of particular interest are the values and meanings that the lama ascribed to numerous Tibetan Buddhist objects offered to him for his opinion by the colonial administrator, Charles Alfred Bell (1870–1945) in 1912–13. Bell later included his notes of their conversations as object descriptions in his ‘List of Curios’. I read this document for the scene of collecting, listening closely for Barmiok Lama’s voice and use of terminology in order to recover his appraisal of the Tibetan material world and the layers of Tibetan material knowledge he relied upon.

Keywords material knowledge; scene of collecting; colonial collecting; Tibetan Buddhism; Buddhist statues

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.