Hello,
The following event may be of interest to you:
Sthaneshwar Timalsina: Blood at the Heart of the Mandala: Religion, Politics and Traditional Culture in Nepal
Monday, March 25, 2002
Recent events in Nepal—the assassination of its ruler by his nephew and the violence of the Maoist insurgency—suggest that the traditional mandala-culture is rapidly being deconstructed.
From around the 8th century C.E., the sociopolitical and cultural structures of Nepal have been rooted in the ideology and practice of Tantra. Tantra (which literally means "to interweave") is a metaphysical and ritual system that weaves ideologies of kingship to the construction of space and sociocultural identity through the metaphor of the mandala, a geometric symbol that portrays the flow of divine power into the world.
By imagining their kingdom as a Tantric mandala, Nepalese kings have aligned themselves with divine power, transforming their temporal territory into the universal territory of a Godhead. Never a static construction, the mandala—as a template for society—incorporates and is informed by a multiplicity of cultural practices and dialects. In this way, the mandala links centers to peripheries and allows for the appropriation of power through a multiplicity of media—including dance, art, shamanism, and ritual sacrifice.
This 1,200-year-old system of the mandala culture is changing both through the forces of modernism and the recent
"People's War," orchestrated since 1996 by the Maobadi movement.
Timalsina, a native of the Kathmandu valley, will use
slides, personal experience, and 20 years of scholarship to illustrate the current struggle at the heart of Nepal's classical mandala culture.
Timalsina, internationally recognized as one of the premier young scholars of South Asia, is currently teaching Sanskrit at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published more than dozen works in Sanskrit, English, Hindi, and Nepali, and his dissertation on the topic of creation and perception in Vedanta was filed recently at Martin Luther University, Halle, Germany. He is committed to advising the academic community and the greater public of the current political situation in Nepal.
Time: 6:00 pm
Location: Olin 102
Sponsor: Religion Program; Freedom Foundation
Contact: Jeffrey Lidke.
E-mail: lidke@bard.edu
Phone: 845-758-6822
If you would like to see more events please visit the following URL:
http://inside.bard.edu/religion/events/
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