Naxi Manuscripts Collection

The Naxi use a unique pictographic writing system that is similar to the ancient Egyptian and Mayan writing systems. It is the only living pictographic language in the world today, featuring 185 manuscripts, a 39 1/2-foot funerary scroll and an annotated catalog of the entire collection: Annotated catalog of Naxi pictographic manuscripts.

The present volume offers a dozen studies of manuscripts of the Tibetan Bon and Naxi Dongba traditions across time and space. While some of the contributions focus on particular features of manuscripts from either tradition, others explicitly bridge the two by considering common codicological and material aspects of selected examples or common themes in the content of the texts. This is the first primarily object-based study to deal with the cultural history and technology of books from the two traditions. It discusses collections of Bon and Naxi manuscripts, the concepts and history of both traditions, the science and technology of book studies as it relates to these collections, the relationship between text and image, writing materials, and the historical and archaeological context of the manuscripts' places of origin. The authors are specialists in different fields including philology, anthropology, art history, codicology and archaeometry. The contributions shed light on trade routes, materials and technologies as well as on reading practices and ritual usage of Bon and Naxi manuscripts.

Collection of pictographic manuscripts, used in performing religious rituals by the Naxi community. Contains 598 ceremonial manuscripts and 4 funereal scrolls written in a pictographic script. Often, during the religious rituals, the edges of the books are burned, resulting in damage to the manuscript. Only 21 of the manuscripts are dated, the earliest being from 1826 and the latest from 1910.

This book is a study of European-language translations of Naxi ritual manuscripts, the ritual literature of a small ethnic group living in southwest China’s Yunnan Province. The author discusses the translations into European languages (in English, French and German) from the late nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century, revealing a history of fragmentary yet interconnected translation efforts in the West. By exploring this network, he shows how translation can be understood as a metonymic “recreation” of textual worlds. As Naxi manuscripts are semi-oral texts representing an oral-formulaic tradition, their translation involves a metonymic relay of partial incorporations from manuscript/image to reading/spoken language. Therefore, the book engages in a series of textual excavations to uncover the previously occluded contemporaneous readings that would have led to the translations we can consult today, particularly in an attempt to understand how the Naxi literature came to be part of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Scholars in the field of ethnic minority literature in China and translation studies will find this book beneficial, and it will make new contributions to comparative literature between the East and West.

This collective volume offers an insight into the Bon and Naxi manuscript cultures and their possible interconnections. This is the first primarily object-based study to deal with Bon and Naxi cultural history, book technology, collections of Bon and Naxi manuscripts, the relationship between text and image, writing materials, and the historical and archaeological context of the manuscripts' places of origin.

Omhandler bl.a. Nationalmuseets Naxi-håndskrifter B.4404-4405 - B.5459.