MCLC: conversing with Claire Harris

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Dechen K <dechenkhando at gmail.com>
Subject: conversing with Claire Harris
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Conversing with Clare Harris, Author of The Museum on the Roof of the
World
BY Dechen Pemba & Clare Harris

(Q) Could you introduce us to your newest book, The Museum on the Roof of
the World? Where did the idea for the book come from?

(A) It goes back to 1998 when I started a new job at Oxford University
teaching in the anthropology department and working for the first time as
a curator in the Pitt Rivers Museum <http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/>. At that
point, I was initiated into the way that museums work behind the scenes
and had the extraordinary opportunity of seeing material from a part of
the world I had a longstanding interest in — Tibet and the Himalayas — in
one of the world’s most important museums of anthropology and archaeology.

Until 1998, I had mainly been learning about Tibet, Tibetan Buddhism and
Tibetan culture in India and the Himalayas. Much of what I’d learned had
come from talking to people and physically being in those places. Arriving
in Oxford gave me a new experience of encountering Tibet, and ideas about
Tibet, through a set of objects. For my first book about Tibetan visual
culture after 1959, I had spent a lot of time interviewing Tibetan artists
and had looked at their artwork in the places that they were made for, but
in Oxford I was seeing museum objects completely disconnected from the
people who had made or originally used them. . . .

Read the complete interview with Clare Harris by Dechen Pemba on Cerise
Press:

http://www.cerisepress.com/05/13/conversing-with-clare-harris-author-of-the
-museum-on-the-roof-of-the-world/view-all