Collecting Impermanence in Perpetuity: Buddhist Ancestors Residing in Museums in the Afterlife of Capital
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article presents a transdisciplinary analysis of a museological case study on the commissioned acquisition of a Tibetan Hayagriva sand mandala for the permanent collection of the Denver Art Museum. Drawing upon theoretical, religious, art historical, and curatorial publications, Buddhist concepts of impermanence are read alongside Western museological logics providing a complex narrative which underscores not only how collecting impermanence in perpetuity is paradoxically entangled, but also how cycles of capitalism continue to operate in the afterlife. I argue that this thereby conditions a life of what I call “unrested labour” for agential non-human cultural beings or deities such as Hayagriva who are invited through ceremony to occupy the Tibetan sand mandala as a home (mandalas are traditionally meant to be a temporary home or palace for the deities during the duration of the ceremony). I exemplify how both the communities related to Tibetan deities housed in sand mandalas and the spirits that reside in them, perform labour when exhibited or collected by museums. I propose instead focusing on sentient-being-centered approaches that guide the terms and culturally informed protocols of the return, care, and living arrangements for agential beings in museum collections. This entails prioritizing and maintaining relationships that can potentially shift from the commodification of accumulated values extracted from collections to ethical values centering people and beings over objectification.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".