The Culture of the Book in Tibet.

• Author: Kollmar-Paulenz, Karenina
• Position: Book review

The Culture of the Book in Tibet. By KURTIS R. SCHAEFFER. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2009. Pp. xiii + 244.

Every scholar of Tibetan Studies is aware of the immense importance the book holds in the Tibetan cultural world. There has been, however, up to now not a single monograph that deals exclusively with the Tibetan book and its different aspects, be they material and economic, social, cultural, or political. The monograph under review promises to close this knowledge gap. By drawing on more than one hundred fifty Tibetan sources of diverse literary genre, from the historical chronicle to autobiographical accounts and reference lists to the Buddhist canons, Kurtis Schaeffer concentrates on the book in Tibetan cultural regions, spanning a period of more than six hundred years. His study of the "culture of the book" aims to bring together the area of the "book" with that of "culture," thus exploring Tibetan culture in a single material, and at the same time highly symbolic, object, the book. In the author's own words, "the study of the culture of the book in Tibet is the study of discourse about books in the region's history, that discourse's attendant practices, and the communities and institutions formed by that discourse and in which it is debated and contested" (p. 1 7).

The monograph developed out of separate essays, and this origin is sometimes still noticeable in the book, but mostly not to its disadvantage. The book is divided into six chapters that explore different facets of the culture of the book in Tibet. It ends with an epilogue that brings all the different strands together in a Tibetan tale, a rather unorthodox way of building a synthesis.

The first chapter concentrates on the book in its material aspects. It talks about the "facts" of book-making in Tibet, about paper and ink, block carving, printing houses, and copying businesses. This is a rather unexplored area in Tibetan Studies, as little research has been done about book-making in the Tibetan world. The material aspects provoke the author to pose further questions that directly lead to important aspects of Tibetan cultural life in the pre-modern era, like the relation between orality and textuality, a topic the author repeatedly addresses.

In the next chapter Schaeffer explores the editing and printing processes of Tibetan books, drawing attention to the actors involved, from the scribes and woodblock cutters to the officials in charge of the printing...