Foto Friday: back to Nepal 12 September 2008 8:43 am
Posted by Tracy in : breakfast,eggs,nepal,people,pictures,potatoes,restaurants,tea,travel , View CommentsI know, you thought I’d forgotten all about the Nepal picture project, and to be honest, for a while there, I thought I’d forgotten all about it, too. But New York’s American Museum of Natural History is food for Tracy nostalgia, and last week Peter and I had a visit from an out-of-town friend who provided me with all the excuse I needed to revisit the dinosaurs of my childhood. Hot diggety have those ever been updated! (Bear with me; I’ll bring this ramble back around to Nepal soon.) Not so very updated but still impressive were all the dioramas, which, as Abi (the aforementioned out-of-town friend) pointed out, are sort of a dying art form but which look very different once you think about all the work someone has to do to create and maintain them. I’d never thought about it that way before, but it made me consider those darkened halls of stuffed and mounted animals in a whole new (if dim) light. The displays of world peoples, however, were still just weird — even weirder now that I’ve seen more of the parts of the world that they purport to represent.
Which brings me to the Hall of Asian Peoples, where I could not find a single reference to Nepal. Lots about India, China, and even Tibet, to the point where I wondered when the displays had been created, and whether Nepal was on some kind of anthropological blacklist then. Next time I go back I’ll try to take notes on the exhibits and try to figure out where they fit on the Tibet vs. China timeline as I know it — they certainly seemed to represent a culture which I’ve learned think of as extremely endangered and better preserved on the Nepali side of the Himalayas. But I digress. The whole “no Nepal in the Hall of Asian Peoples” phenomenon was so weird that it made me want to get back to my long-neglected picture-posting project. So here I go. (more…)
