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.

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Wulff, Mareike: Communicating Visual Literacy through Drawing: Illustrations of National Dress, Buddhist Monastic and Ritual Attire in Bhutan, 收入 Martin, Emma, Brox, Trine 和 Lange, Diana (编): Among Tibetan Materialities: Materials and Material Cultures of Tibet and the Himalayas, Heidelberg: Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, 2025, 页 239–264. https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.1522.c23986

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

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10/28/2025

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Mareike Wulff

Communicating Visual Literacy through Drawing

Illustrations of National Dress, Buddhist Monastic and Ritual Attire in Bhutan

This chapter proposes that ethnographic drawings in the form of technical illustrations can serve an important communicative function in material culture studies. Using examples of illustrations of clothing that I produced as part of an ethnographic study of a community Buddhist festival in Bhutan, it demonstrates the productive potential of using technical illustrations as a counterpart to text. The chapter is framed around the concept of visual literacy, defined as the human capacity acquired through socialization in specific cultural contexts to make sense of or ‘read’ the visual environment by seeing and interpreting it. I show how technical illustrations not only have the potential to reproduce emic visual literacy, but can also be designed to break down the layers of visual knowledge and meaning contained in items of material culture and communicate them to visually non-literate readers.

Keywords Bhutan, Tibet, Himalaya, Tibetan Buddhism, Vajrayana Buddhism, Material Culture, Ethnographic Drawing, Illustration, Visual Literacy, Attire, Dress, Monastic Robes, National Dress, Ritual Attire, Digital Humanities, Visual Anthropology, Ethnography, Intangible Cultural Heritage, Visual Studies, Masked Performance, Visual Culture, Himalayan Art, Ethnographic Method, Ethnographic Practice

Mareike Wulff works as a social and cultural anthropologist specialising in Bhutan and the Himalayas. Her research revolves aroung ritual, memory and material culture studies. She currently holds a postdoctoral position at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. For her interdisciplinary research project she documents the endangered languages and cultural practices of two indigenous minority groups in Bhutan, the Lhop and Monpa, with a focus on their ethnobotanical knowledge.