Her recent books include Archaeology and Buddhism in South Asia (2018), Buddhism and Gandhara: An Archaeology of Museum Collections (ed. Her research interests include Maritime History and Archaeology of the Indian Ocean, the History of Archaeology in South and Southeast Asia and the Archaeology of Religion in Asia. She is former Chairperson of the National Monuments Authority, Ministry of Culture in New Delhi, India, and former Professor in the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. Himanshu Prabha Ray is Honorary Professor of the Distant Worlds Programme, Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. Reevaluating how traditional valuation of monuments and cultural landscapes could help aid sustainability and long-term preservation of the heritage, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers and Southeast Asian history, heritage studies, archaeology, cultural studies, tourism studies and political history as well. This is especially relevant in South and Southeast Asian contexts, where debates over heritage often have local, regional and national political implications and consequences. It argues that material objects and monuments are not static embodiments of culture but are, rather, a medium through which identity, power and society are produced and reproduced. Shifting away from a largely Eurocentric concept associated with architecture and monumental archaeology, this book reassesses how local and regional heritage needs to be balanced with the global and transnational. It seeks to understand how interpretations of “monuments” as “texts” are affected at the local level of experience, even as institutions such as UNESCO work to globalise and fix constructs of stable and universal heritage. It interrogates the past which materialises through multi-layered narratives on monuments and other objects that sustain cultural diversity. This volume cross-examines the stability of heritage as a concept.
0 kommentar(er)
