2016-07-21_eJournal_01-2016.indd


2016.1

EDITORIAL NOTE

Diamantis Panagiotopoulos and Rudolf Wagner .04

ARTICLES

Susanne Marten-Finnis
Art as Refuge: Jewish Publishers as Cultural Brokers
in Early 1920s Russian Berlin .09

Themed Section: Global Encounters, Local Places: Connected 
Histories of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and the Himalayas

Tina Harris, Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa, Jayeeta Sharma, and Marcus Viehbeck
Global Encounters, Local Places: Connected Histories of Darjeeling,
Kalimpong, and the Himalayas—An Introduction .43

Jayeeta Sharma
A Space That Has Been Laboured on: Mobile Lives and Transcultural
Circulation around Darjeeling and the Eastern Himalayas .54

Emma Martin
Translating Tibet in the Borderlands: Networks, Dictionaries, and
Knowledge Production in Himalayan Hill Stations .86

Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia
Local Agency in Global Movements: Negotiating Forms of Buddhist 
Cosmopolitanism in the Young Men’s Buddhist Associations of 
Darjeeling and Kalimpong .121

Samuel Thévoz
On the Threshold of the “Land of Marvels:” Alexandra David-Neel 
in Sikkim and the Making of Global Buddhism .149



2 Contributors

Transcultural Studies, No 1, 2016

Editors:
Monica Juneja, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
Joachim Kurtz, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
Rudolf G. Wagner, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg

Managing Editor:
Andrea Hacker

Editorial Board:
Christiane Brosius, Antje Fluechter, Madeleine Herren, Birgit Kellner, Axel 
Michaels, Barbara Mittler, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos, Vladimir Tikhonov, 
and Roland Wenzlhuemer.

Transcultural Studies is edited at the Heidelberg Center for Transcultural 
Studies (HCTS) and published by Heidelberg University Publishing. The 
journal is freely available at http://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/ (open access).

ISSN: 2191-6411

CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE:

Susanne Marten-Finnis received her PhD in applied linguistics from the 
University of Tübingen and is currently professor of applied linguistics at the 
University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom. Her latest book, Der Feuervogel 
als Kunstzeitschrift: Žar ptica; Russische Bildwelten in Berlin 1921–26, 
follows the rise of the art journal Zhar ptitsa (The Firebird) in post-1917 Berlin.

Tina Harris is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of 
Amsterdam. Her book, Geographical Diversions: Tibetan Trade, Global 
Transactions, was published in 2013 by the University of Georgia Press. 
Her research interests include borderland studies, critical human geography, 
infrastructure, and material culture.

Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa is an assistant professor of religious studies at 
Grinnell College in Iowa, the United States. She is the author of The Social Life 
of Tibetan Biography: Textuality, Community, and Authority in the Lineage of 
Tokden Shakya Shri (Lanham: Lexington, 2014).



3Transcultural Studies 2016.1

Jayeeta Sharma is an associate professor of history at the University of 
Toronto. She is the author of Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of 
India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). She is on the editorial board of 
Global Food History and the editorial collective of Radical History Review, 
and is editor of the Empires in Perspective book series at Routledge. She 
is the founder of the collaborative Eastern Himalayan Research Network, 
whose activities include the Project Sherpa digital archive and a Digital 
Darjeeling portal.

Markus Viehbeck is an assistant professor of Buddhist Studies at the 
University of Heidelberg (Germany). As part of the Cluster of Excellence 
“Asia and Europe in a Global Context,” he investigates Tibet’s relations with 
other cultural contexts, with a particular focus on the eastern Himalayas. He 
is the author of Polemics in Indo-Tibetan Scholasticism: A late 19th-Century 
Debate between 'Ju Mi pham and Dpa' ris Rab gsal, Wiener Studien zur 
Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde 86 (Wien: Arbeitskreis für tibetische und 
buddhistische Studien, 2014).

Emma Martin is Lecturer in Museology at the University of Manchester and 
Head of Ethnology at the National Museums in Liverpool, UK. She received 
her doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of 
London in 2014 for her thesis “Charles Bell’s collection of ‘curios:’ Negotiating 
Tibetan material culture on the Anglo-Tibetan borderlands, 1900–1945.”

Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia is currently a lecturer in the Department of Religious 
Studies at Grinnell College. He received his PhD in Buddhist Studies from 
the University of Delhi, and his current book project focuses on the modern 
history of Buddhism in Sikkim in a global context.

Samuel Thévoz received a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Lausanne 
and leads a three-year stand-alone project as an advanced researcher supported 
by the Swiss National Science Foundation. He is the author of Un horizon infini: 
Explorateurs et voyageurs français au Tibet, 1846–1912 (Paris: University 
Press of Paris-Sorbonne, 2010). He recently edited Marie de Ujfalvy-Bourdon, 
Voyage d’une Parisienne dans l’Himalaya, Paris: Transboréal, 2014.