Intangible Heritage and Visual Repatriation: an ethnography of three exhibitions in Nepal

Bruce McCoy Owens first came to Nepal in 1977 as a recent college graduate, intending to go on to graduate school after my travels in Asia to study anthropology, specializing in Latin America. That visit, which included his first glimpse of this festival, radically altered that trajectory.  He has been studying the festival of Buṃgadyaḥ (and the festivals of related Lokeśvaras of the valley) intermittently ever since his doctoral field research from 1982-1984, which culminated in a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has since devoted his attention to sacred sites of devotional practice in the Kathmandu Valley and the transformations they have undergone, particularly since the jana āndolan of 1990-91. He has primarily focused on Swayambhu and Newa monastic compounds, known as bahaḥ and bahī, in the latter case hoping to update the survey conducted by the late Father John Locke, published in 1985. This project has since been undertaken on a much larger scale and scope by the Nepal Heritage Documentation Project at University of Heidelberg, with which I have been delighted to collaborate. The common theme that links these various projects is understanding the diverse perspectives that various stakeholders bring to these arenas of devotion, and the contestations and transformations through which these perspectives are expressed.