Symposium: "Exploring Himalayan Textual Heritage: Symposium in memoriam René Nebesky-Wojkowitz (1923–1959) and his text collections at the Weltmuseum Wien"
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Thursday and Friday 14-15 November 2019; Weltmuseum Wien
Registration:
Kindly register your participation by 11 November 2019 with an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Abstract:
This two-day symposium is organised in memory of the Czech-Austrian ethnographer and Tibetologist René Nebesky-Wojkowitz, honouring the 60th anniversary of his untimely and unexpected death, by focusing on different aspects of his long forgotten text collection housed at the ethnographic museum in Vienna, the Weltmuseum Wien.
In 1949 René Nebesky-Wojkowitz received his doctoral degree in Tibetan and Mongolian languages at the Oriental Institute at the University of Vienna and became qualified as professor in 1956 at the Department of Ethnology with his seminal book 'Oracles and Demons of Tibet', a milestone in the study of Tibetan religion and iconography.
Three research trips to West Bengal, Sikkim and Nepal in the years between 1950 and 1959 served as the basis of more than 20 publications that he produced in his short but intense academic life. During his ethnographic and philological studies René Nebesky-Wojkowitz acquired a comprehensive collection of manuscripts and block prints. The corpus of his collection comes from different cultural contexts and is of great value for the study of Buddhist iconography, Tibetan medicine and ritual, the grammatical tradition and other topics.
Organisation:
Uwe Niebuhr, Verena Widorn, Pascale Hugon, Markus Viehbeck
Sponsors:
- FWF-Project P 31570-G32 "The Scientific Legacy of René Nebesky-Wojkowitz"
- Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Documentation of Inner and South Asian Cultural History (CIRDIS), University of Vienna
- Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia (IKGA), Austrian Academy of Sciences
- Weltmuseum Wien, Vienna
- Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, University of Vienna