Le Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London (Royaume-Uni) annonce un appel à communication pour le colloque suivant :
Whose Buddha? Communities, Ethics and Buddhist Material Heritage
qui se tiendra à Londres les 16-18 June 2027
Argumentaire du colloque (en anglais) :
Over the past decade, debates around the colonial entanglement of museum collections, ownership of cultural heritage, and restitution have become increasingly mainstream and polarising in the public domain. This scrutiny has created urgency for the museum and heritage sector to address these issues, leading to heightened focus on provenance research, restitution (mostly to nation-states), and working with communities. Published accounts and case studies tend to focus on successful outcomes such as returns or co-curated exhibitions, but a “black-box” approach leaves the methods, methodologies, negotiations, tensions and failures of such initiatives largely invisible.
This interdisciplinary conference, organised by the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Art and Conservation and the UK Association for Buddhist Studies (UKABS), focuses on Buddhist material heritage in its broader sense as a lens for these debates. That includes images, relics, manuscripts, ritual objects, architecture, sacred sites, and intangible practices. We invite contributions that focus on the process rather than the outputs and examine the ethical, religious, legal, political and practical dimensions of how Buddhist heritage is collected, studied, cared for, displayed, contested and returned. Contributions that embrace Buddhist practice/lived religion and material culture more generally are also welcome. The conference is open to all relevant disciplines, and we particularly encourage proposals that engage thoughtfully with communities, regions, traditions and topics that have been historically underrepresented or under-studied in Buddhist studies and heritage scholarship.
La date limite pour envoyer sa proposition de communication est le 14 décembre 2026.
Pour de plus amples informations, voir la page de l’annonce : https://courtauld.ac.uk/research/the-research-forum/calls-for-papers/call-for-papers-whose-buddha-communities-ethics-and-buddhist-material-heritage/