Report

Over the past year I have collaborated with Nurit Applbaum on updating a new website-cum-archive of the material consequences of devotional processes that have transformed Swayambhu, a hilltop stupa that is one of the most sacred sites for Buddhists of the Kathmandu valley.  Devotees have sponsored and undertaken transformative projects that range from building a mile and a half long circumambulation path and wall, punctuated by more than sixty new devotional structures, to installing small images within. The physical nature of these processes of devotion and their observable material consequences also provide a means for engaging students in my research without specialized linguistic knowledge, and the continuous nature of these processes and the importance of their spatial interrelationships make the internet an ideal environment in which to record them.  Thus Nurit has been involved in archiving, organizing, and analyzing hundreds of photographs that I have taken of this site as it has changed over the twenty years that I have been recording its transformation.  She was selected as a research partner because of her own deep engagement with Buddhism, but as Newar Buddhism is quite different from the Burmese Theravada Buddhism with which she is most familiar, the first part of our collaboration involved a tutorial on Newar Buddhism, stupa architecture, and the various forms of ritual practice associated with it.  We also worked with Patrick Rashleigh who is helping us develop a new architecture for the site using WordPress, the present Wheaton standard, thereby engaging Nurit in the process of defining and identifying criteria according to which these visual data will be organized.  In her final report, Nurit stated that this “experience has been especially valuable to me as a student of Buddhism and visual anthropology,” and that “[h]aving the opportunity to work with a professor on his research was one of the more gratifying experiences I have had while at Wheaton thus far and I look forward to future collaborations.”