Himalayan Ritual Texts and Artefacts in Context:

The Van Manen Collection

with Prof. Berthe Jansen

🗓 Tuesday, December 3rd , 2024 ⏰ 7pm UK time

Online via Zoom

When examining a collection that contains both ritual texts and ritual objects collected by one single collector, how do we determine the ways in which they interconnect? Can we re-contextualize such collections, even when they were collected almost a hundred years ago?
How should museums, universities and other institutions deal with such collections?

The Van Manen collection, held in the Leiden University Library, contains a large number of Tibetan and Himalayan texts. After the self-made scholar Johan Van Manen (1877-1943) passed away in India a large part of his personal collection also came to be housed at Leiden University. Later, the artefacts he collected were housed in the Ethnographic Museum in Leiden where they remain to this day. In recent years this collection has come to be more or less forgotten.

In this talk, Berthe will present the outline of her 5-year ERC-starting grant project VAN MANEN, which aims to answer questions of provenance research but also of context research regarding ritual texts and artefacts. The working hypothesis is that Van Manen deliberately collected all necessary implements (texts and objects) needed to perform various Buddhist and Bon rituals, in addition to gathering oral information on them from his field assistants.

The study of rituals texts, artefacts, his Himalayan assistants’ autobiographies, Van Manen’s unpublished work, and other ephemera in unison thus hold the potential key to answer above questions and provide a framework to examine other similar collections.

She will further elaborate on what a collaborative study of this multi-media collection as a whole and in its entirety could offer the fields of Buddhist studies, Himalayan studies, colonial history, art history, linguistics, and museum studies.

About the speaker

Berthe Jansen is Assistant Professor of Tibetan Studies at Leiden University. She is a scholar of Buddhist Studies, specializing in Tibetan social and religious history. She lived in India for five years and graduated from the Lotsawa Rinchen Zangpo Translator Programme in Dharmashala in 2005. Thereafter she obtained a BA in Indology at Leiden, an MPhil in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at Oxford, and a PhD degree in Buddhist Studies back in Leiden.

Jansen had a Dutch government grant (NWO) to research the relationship between Buddhism and law in pre-modern Tibet (2016-2022). She is currently the PI of the ERC-funded project: Locating Literature, Lived Religion, and Lives in the Himalayas: The Van Manen Collection (2023-2028). Her monograph The Monastery Rules: Tibetan Monastic Organization in Pre-modern Tibet came out in 2018 with University of California Press. In 2023, her first Buddhism-inspired children’s book “Don’t kill the bugs” came out with Bala Publications. She has worked as an interpreter and translator of Buddhist Tibetan since 2004.