Reanimating Tibetan Heritage: Transforming collections, Empowering communities

A multi-institutional research project focused on Tibetan collections and community collaboration

About the Project

The Reanimating Tibetan Heritage (RTH) project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), through its pilot scheme Early Career Research Fellowships in Cultural and Heritage Institutions.

Context

While working with communities has become increasingly mainstream across the GLAM sector in the UK, there is a need to move beyond the ‘black-box’ approach to community engagement and pivot the focus from the products of consultation or collaboration to the underlying process and methodologies. Using the case study of Tibetan collections (present in British museums due to the legacy of Colonel Francis Younghusband’s military campaign in Tibet in 1903-04), the project focuses on developing a proof-of-concept for working with communities, working at an intersection of theory and museum practice.

Aim

The two-fold premise of the project is to gauge the scope and nature of the Tibetan collections in the UK and build on the project lead’s sustained ethnographic research with the Tibetan diaspora to co-develop ethical recommendations for the care, display, and knowledge production on Tibetan material heritage. Working with conservators and curators from the V&A and multiple external GLAM institutions, this research seeks to improve our understanding of the shared ethical and critical challenges in caring for Tibetan collections and begin addressing its colonial entanglement.

Outcomes

Focused on creating methodology and structure, the fieldwork is designed as research evidence to provide a model for the broader heritage and museum sector on approaching colonial and contested public collections and developing institutional resilience and capacity to address colonial provenance and discourse on decolonisation and restitution. Besides open-access publications, outputs include community co-curated displays in Horniman’s new Natural History Gallery. The co-developed ethical recommendations will be shared between the participating institutions and the wider GLAM sector later.

The Team

Dr Thupten Kelsang

AHRC Early Career Research Fellow / Principal Investigator

I am a museum anthropologist by training, with a DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford. At Oxford, I was awarded the Clarendon Fellowship and have also received multiple academic grants, including Wenner-Gren’s Engaged Research Grant and ... Read more

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, funds internationally outstanding independent researchers across the whole range of the arts and humanities: history, archaeology, digital content, philosophy, languages and literature, design, heritage, area studies, the creative and performing arts, and much more. The quality and range of research supported by AHRC works for the good of UK society and culture and contributes both to UK economic success and to the culture and welfare of societies across the globe. We are pleased to fund this pilot fellowship scheme, supporting early research careers in the heritage, museums, galleries, libraries, and archives sector.

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Header image: Discussion session with Tibetan stakeholders at the Pitt Rivers Museum, organised by Thupten Kelsang.