CENSUS: Dongba Manuscripts General Catalogue
Knowing CENSUS…
Dongba manuscripts corpus consist in several thousands of texts
According to Jackson (1989 “Naxi studies: past, present and future”) among them about 5.118 manuscripts are fostered in some western institution:
- British Library in London
- India Office Library in London
- John Rylands Library in Manchester
- Staatsbibliothek in Berlin
- Library of Congress in Washington D. C.
- Chinese-Japanese Library of Harvard-Yenching Institute in Boston, Massachusetts
Each institution cataloged and classified manuscripts independently to the others’ collections, thus CENSUS means in the making of a GENERAL CENSUS of Dongba manuscripts, creating ONE general catalogue of them, and to make this archive available for scholars and researchers as a publication and as a web resource.
CENSUS thus aims first in making a complete research of already available collections of Dongba manuscripts, with focal attention to western world corpora, implementing and publishing a single catalogue, made as a converged index of multiple and heterogeneus sources; in the meantime CENSUS projects also aims to look for unknown and/or hidden resources as well, to be up-to-dated into the same general catalogue.
Two of the western institutions quoted below – independently of each other – implemented and published their online archives of Dongba manuscripts collection:
- Library of Congess, a selections from the Naxi Manuscript Collection:http://memory.loc.gov/intldl/naxihtml/naxihome.htmlonline collection of 185 manuscripts, a 39½ -foot funerary scroll, an annotated catalog–> 24/06/2009, with stored in, available as images.
- Naxi manuscripts archives of Harvard University Library:https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/25/resources/4415, ex O.A.S.I.S. project (on-line Archival Search Information System) oasis.lib.harvard.edu collection.HOLLIS for Archival Discovery, with a corpus of 468 manuscripts–> 13/01/2023, with manuscripts stored in, available as images
Both corpora are presented as galleries of digital images of manuscripts, which are sorted and indexed by internal classification criteria, with just some meta-data annotation, but without any deeper mark-up, as latinization, translation, commentary, etc…
Being Dongba manuscripts religious texts, written at most as liturgical books or index books, in both case to be consulted and recited during ceremonies performnce, CENSUS project means in a classifications of manuscripts following the Dongba cerimonial taxonomy. Such taxonomy should coincides with needed calibrations with the index for sorting and listing the documents archived in world collections.
In other words, the Naxi – Dongba religious ceremonies taxonomy became the objective criterius which grounds the classification of manuscripts, thus CENSUS will consist in a convergence and unification process of resources
Beside Dongba religion taxonomy index, CENSUS also aims to implement parallel objective taxonomical-indexes, grounded on interesting deduction derived from study litterature dedicated to Dongba tradition and Naxi reigion, expecially Rock, 1952, 1963 and Oppitz & Hsu, 1988.
From the study of such bibliography and manuscripts as well, the author derived others possible criteria for gathering and listing Dongba manuscripts as:
- Depending from which regional nucleus of provenience
- Datation
- Function of manuscript into Dongba tradition (index book, liturgical book, divination book)
- Dongba author/s
- Style group and sub-groups
- Writing systems attested (pictographic, syllabographic, both, Chinese, Tibetan)
This criteria are also common fields that CENSUS shares with DOMENI (implementation of Dongba digital text encoding), thus CENSUS and DOMENI are closely interrelated.
CENSUS also provides a research system based on keywords for Documents Retrieval operations by users.
