The Mustang Archives

Download or read book The Mustang Archives written by Agnieszka Helman-Wazny and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The proposed book explores locally-produced documents from Mustang, Nepal, mostly dated to the year within the last two centuries. The archives are from five communities: Tshognam, Geling, Lubrak, and Jharkot. The documents were preserved in wooden or metal boxes, baskets or bags as a loose assemblage of folded sheets of paper. Some of the collections are from private households, whereas others are the communal property of villages, in which case they could be opened and photographed only in the presence of community representatives. The documents are of several different kinds, including contracts, petitions, edicts, letters, dispute resolutions, tax records and community regulations. Besides being an important source of information for the reconstruction of Mustang's social history, are an extremely valuable source of knowledge about local paper- and book-production. It is not only their content but their material that provides information essential to tracing a past history, clarifying, among other things, the economic factors that shaped their production.