Tibetan Plateau Cultural Kaleidoscope

Posted：2023.04.04

Tibetan and Himalayan Cultural Asset Mapping Project with Special Focus on Subsistence Activities (THCAMP) (HOSHI Izumi, IWATA Keisuke, EBIHARA Shiho, HIRATA Masahiro, BESSHO Yusuke, YAMAGUCHI Takayoshi)

https://thcamp.aa-ken.jp/

“Tibetan Plateau Cultural Kaleidoscope” is an online resource that plots information about pastoralism and agriculture recorded in field research records and literature on a map of the Tibetan Plateau. It is aimed at creating new research by visualizing scattered data, such as ethnographic, travelogue, and historical materials, together with geospatial information.

This project was featured in a topical article on the IRC website, as quoted below.

The IRC project “Tibetan and Himalayan Cultural Asset Mapping Project with Special Focus on Subsistence Activities (THCAMP),” started in 2022, has been collecting information related to pastoralism and agriculture in the Tibetan and Himalayan regions. As an outcome, we launched “Tibetan Plateau Cultural Kaleidoscope” in March 2023.

This resource shows a map of the Tibetan Plateau with information about pastoralism and agriculture plotted at each location. Information was gathered from a wide variety of sources: past field research records, travel and residence notes, geographies, dictionaries, historical documents, literary works, and so on. This information has been recorded in a variety of media and languages, making it difficult to access. The purpose of this project is to aggregate such information by mapping it to each location on the map and share it widely.

We translated the documents in English, Tibetan, and Chinese into Japanese. It will be displayed along with the original text. You can select the categories of “毛・皮 (Fur & Skin),” “糞 (Dung),” “乳 (Milk),” “屠畜・解体 (Slaughter),” “食肉加工 (Meat Processing),” and “食文化 (Food Culture)”. Keyword search is also supported.

(Written Izumi HOSHI and Mayumi ADACHI)