François Lagirarde
EFEO
After four years of existence, the EFEO project for the digitization and study of the Northern Thai chronicles (tamnan) can offer a provisional assessment. This project has surveyed forty monastic libraries, opened thousands of manuscripts and eventually identified a large corpus of texts while observing its current conservation and trying to understand its history. Through this experience, can we then ask questions about the nature of the Northern Thai manuscript culture and about the historical relationship between the "book" as an object, its production, its use and its contents? Will this combination of fieldwork and modern readings allow us to observe the correspondence between society and religious literature, culture rituals and ideology?
(Presented in the 2012 Chulalongkorn-EFEO International Conference on Buddhist Studies : Imagination, Narrative, and Localization, 6-7 January 2012, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, organized by Faculty of Arts and Institute of Thai Studies, Chulalongkorn University In conjunction with The Buddhist Studies Group, EFEO)