Sacred Landscape of the Himalaya

The present Proceedings of the conference "Sacred Landscape of the Tibetan Himalaya" organised in Heidelberg (25.-27.5.1998) represent an important and long overdue interdisciplinary step in the research on spatio-material, socio-political and religious manifestations within Tibetan societies in the Himalaya regions. The conference, financed by the DFG and directed in its architectural and religious aspects by GUTSCHOW and MICHAELS, is a spin-off of the socio-anthropological projects financed by the FWF within the Committee for Socioanthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, at that period under the title "From Landscape to Polity in Tibet". The main researcher within this programme, CHARLES RAMBLE, meanwhile University of Oxford, was fully integrated into the planning and actual conduct of the conference. The volume`s contributions are by first-class representatives of their disciplines, furnished with the necessary map, pictorial, etc., documentation, and carefully edited. For succinct summaries of the contributions cf. pp.3-6 of the preface. By means, of the architectural analyses presented the socio-anthropological data and historical as well as religious documents of these Himalaya regions are interpreted with a view to the ways of how spiritual and social ideas are articulated in visible form. Inversely, what is visible is interpreted in relationship to the respective incorporated ideas and perceptions of space. In spite of the different professional starting points in the contributions, the effort as a whole provides generally valid parameters as, e.g., surveyed by MICHAELS in his introduction. The present volume achieves to unveil a deeper layer of social orders that includes the natural environment. On the example of these Himalaya regions a system of order is extrapolated that is of import for humanity as such, can well serve as a model for post-modern attempts at creating social order, and may claim therefore to be also of actual importance in a trans-regional sense.