On September 16, 2026, Himal Southasian published an article on Mary Shepherd Slusser, one of the first American researchers on Nepal studies. Written by Erin L. Thompson, the article investigates how Slusser bought stolen idols, paintings, and other artefacts in Kathmandu and shipped them to her home country. Slusser also built her scholarly career based on these stolen goods. The article brings out several issues: (1) Slusser’s saviour complex, (2) Nepali people’s negligence and undervaluation of their own culture, and (3) legal loopholes that allowed everything to happen. Some reactions regarding Slusser brings out the fourth problem: the moral failure in not calling out Slusser even after the truth has surfaced.
In this post, you’ll read about…
1. Mary Shepherd Slusser’s Saviour Complex
Mary Slusser first came to Nepal in November 1965 with her husband Harry Robert (“Bob”) Slusser, who worked with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). She lived in Nepal for around six years and in 1982, published Nepal Mandala: A Cultural Study of the Kathmandu Valley in two volumes. She also had a collection of over 500 artefacts, which are now dispersed across at least 8 museums in the U.S.
Slusser enjoyed her stay in Nepal. She likened Nepal to a big museum where one can walk in and but whatever they like. However, she also believed that development in Nepal, supported by USAID, should come at the cost of losing its culture.
USAID’s modernizing projects would bring the hitherto medieval country into the twentieth century, but it would require sacrificing Nepal’s unique culture.
–Erin L. Thompson
According to Slusser, artworks in Nepal were better kept in foreign museums where they could be studied by future generations.
Once artworks “cease to function and indeed are jeopardized in the milieu for which they were intended,” they should be acquired by foreign museums, “where they will be cherished for future generations.” Visitors to these museums would then “learn something about the quality of Nepalese culture they could not have otherwise imagined.”
–Erin L. Thompson
This statement contradicts her previous statement about Nepal. If Nepal was already a museum, why would the heritages of Nepal have to be sent to foreign museums?
Nepal had opened up for foreigners already, allowing them to stay, wander, or research the country. The architecture, sculptures, paintings, woodworks, music, and dances were all for them to explore. Instead of leaving them as they are though, Slusser wanted the country to adopt Western “culture”. And in doing so, not only destroy our culture (and associated history) but also centralize foreign museums as places to study Nepal.
Shifting the blame entirely on to the locals, Slusser maintained that these sacred artworks had been voluntarily:
… “sold by a younger generation in exchange for the wherewithal to buy motorcycles, televisions and other things that increasingly were viewed as of greater value.”
Mary Shepherd Slusser, instead of buying stolen artefacts, could have done the right thing by reporting the thefts to the local authorities. Nepal’s Ancient Monument Preservation Act, 1956 was already in effect, and it did not allow sale of artefacts under one hundred years. She could have helped the authorities catch the thieves and restore the artefacts. However, because of her saviour complex,
she was so convinced that she “did the right thing” by buying these paintings that she published an article in 2003 describing how she took them out of Nepal, where they were “disintegrating from lack of care”, so that they could be housed in the protective environs of a museum.
…
But her “care” sometimes physically damaged these artefacts.
–Erin L. Thompson
But was it just care and saviour complex? Slusser’s career and the funds she received tell a slightly different story. Before she came to Nepal, she had already worked for the CIA.
Slusser’s classified reports were for internal governmental use only. At the time, she thought they were consulted by State Department analysts as they shaped US foreign policy. It was only much later that she realised she had been working in intelligence, “probably for the CIA.”
–Erin L. Thompson
Was her work in Nepal under the CIA payroll? It’s unclear. But the Smithsonian did give her $1000 and printed forms to track her purchases so that they reached the museum. In 1960, Eugene I. Kenz of the Smithsonian was preparing displays to educate the American public about the East. Slusser was enrolled in a task to create a collection just before she came to Nepal. The article by Erin Thompson does not tell clearly if all the items in the collection were stolen, but the Smithsonian does not seem to have cross-verified with Nepalese authorities either. Also, most of the collections were private until Slusser decided to donate them much later in her life.
The Rockefeller connection is another thread that brings in a lot of suspicion on her activities. John D. Rockefeller, the patriarch of one of the most affluent and influential American families, had amassed wealth through petroleum. His descendant, John D. Rockefeller III had established the JDR 3rd Fund. The fund provided grants:
“To promote mutual understanding and respect between the countries of Asia and the United States through cultural exchange in the visual and performing arts.”
In 1969, Porter A McCray, the director of the JDR 3rd Fund visited Kathmandu. He sought ways to preserve Nepal’s “endangered artworks and monuments”. The then US ambassador to Nepal Carol Laise recommended that Slusser should be given the grant from the Fund. Initially, Slusser got a total of $33,0331. Later, as she worked on publishing her articles and books, she received an additional $41,000. In 1982, she produces her two-volume book, Nepal Mandala: A Cultural Study of the Kathmandu Valley.
Slusser’s connections with the Smithsonian and Rockefellers suggest a bigger institutional hand in her activities in Nepal and her scholarly career.
2. Nepalese Negligence
It would be wrong to blame Mary Slusser alone. Erin Thompson highlights a few residents of the Kathmandu Valley who sold stolen items to Slusser regularly. One of them was a Shakya.
One of those who came to bargain while sitting cross-legged on Slusser’s floor among his wares was a man whose family name was Shakya. Until 1959, he had been a Tibet trader. For many centuries, merchants from the Shakyas and other Newar Buddhist clans in the Kathmandu Valley had made the month-long journey into Tibet, leading caravans that carried Indian textiles and rice to trade for wool and gold dust. Some of this gold ended up adorning sacred artworks when the Tibet traders built shrines with the fortunes they earned.
–Erin L. Thompson
The other was a “Tambakar” or Tamrakar.
Although the painting wasn’t as old as she had hoped, Slusser still liked it enough to hang it in her bedroom when she returned to the United States. But she seems to have told her sources that she was once again looking for an older painting. Between late August and late September 1967, they sold her five of them.
The first four, all dated to the late 14th or the early 15th century, came from a seller whose family name she recorded as “Tambakar.” (This was probably a mishearing of “Tamrakar.”) He first offered her a large painting of a nude female figure with glowing red skin, a garland of human heads swinging around her body as she dances. After Slusser bought it, “Tambakar” returned over the next few days with another three paintings that showed pairs of deities embracing each other in the midst of acrobatic copulation.
–Erin L. Thompson
These accounts show that Slusser enabled a black market in which the locals sold their precious artefacts for a small amount of money. The lack of respect towards their own heritage and their eagerness to sell anything is painful and disheartening. Unfortunately, disrespect and negligence towards history and culture in Nepal continues even today as seen in an earlier article published here. Such an attitude also served Slusser’s saviour complex.
3. Legal Loopholes and Complexities
Mary Shepherd Slusser’s actions were also enabled by legal loopholes and diplomatic protocols. While Nepal’s law did not allow selling of items over 100 years, due to a lack of laboratory tests, older artefacts could easily be called newer.
The country’s Ancient Monument Preservation Act, passed in 1956, banned the export of artefacts if they were more than a hundred years old. Slusser only had to bring the pieces she purchased for the Smithsonian to Nepal’s Department of Archaeology to have them cleared for export as modern handicrafts.
–Erin L. Thompson
When Slusser happened to possess an extremely ancient and rare object, she noted:
I don’t think even the King could O.K. its export. … I know I can only get it out of Nepal thru APO (Army Post Office).
The Army Post Office service was primarily an American military service also available to government staffs in distant countries. The postal service provided complete discretion. Moreover, because anything sent through it was treated as a diplomatic bag, Nepal could not check the contents. Slusser utilized the legal and diplomatic loophole to the fullest. Furthermore, the note is an evidence that Slusser knew about the laws and procedures of Nepal, and that she had to work around them. She sent the stolen items to her sister, Dorothy G Payer Shepherd, a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Now that the artefacts are in a foreign country, Nepal has to go through a great deal of trouble to bring them back home. According to Thompson:
Foreign museums and collectors that hold such works generally resist repatriation claims. They argue that these pieces must have been voluntarily sold by their original owners and thus that they are justified in keeping them. Nepal has successfully reclaimed dozens of stolen sculptures in recent years, with each case requiring enormous amounts of research to overturn this assumption. Researchers have had to track down old police reports, interview community members who can testify about the artefacts’ disappearances, and find enough additional evidence to prove that the pieces were stolen rather than sold.
Since the burden of proof falls on the nation claiming repatriation, and the process of repatriation is lengthy and troublesome, Nepal has made only a few successes. These successes help us look forward with hope even though failures are common. The power of the internet in identification of lost ancient artefacts and repatriation (which instigated investigation into Slusser’s work) is also a silver lining.
4. Moral Failures
After the article was published and shared on social media, I saw a few comments which did not care if Slusser stole many of the artefacts she wrote about. They believed that her contribution to the study of Nepali culture was still invaluable.
Surfing the web, I came across this article: Is cancel culture coming to Himalayan Studies? Remarks on a recent critique of the life and work of Mary Shepherd Slusser by Charles Ramble. It is a criticism of a 2023 article by Emiline Smith and Erin L Thompson (the same author of the recent Himal Southasian article) titled ‘A case study of academic facilitation of the global illicit trade in cultural objects: Mary Slusser in Nepal’ and published in the International Journal of Cultural Property2. Ramble particularly attacks “the authors’ advocacy of a prohibition on the publication of unprovenanced artefacts”.
Ramble argues that Smith and Thompson’s emphasis on Slusser’s early childhood to depict her adult tendencies is weak (which I agree), but also says:
“…evidence of Mary Slusser’s particular degeneracy is rather thin – or at least unremarkable, since such activities, and far worse, are spread over such a large surface of offenders – it has had to be manufactured by selecting passages of her writings and recollections and educating the reader in how these should be understood by right-thinking citizens.”
This is something I absolutely disagree with. Slusser’s notes (as seen above) have clearly shown that she actively sought working around the established laws and norms. She enabled thieves instead of turning them over to local authorities and wrongly assumed that she was taking care of those items by sending them to the museums. Ramble’s argument that Slusser’s “degeneracy is rather thin” is classic whataboutism. However insignificant it may seem, it is clear that Slusser promoted criminal activities and violated laws. Furthermore, she built a career based on the stolen artefacts, which is morally wrong as well. And if there are many such cases, this case will show way for even more investigations.
Ramble’s stress that Smith and Thompson demean Slusser is a moral failure itself. If bringing into light the character of someone whose career was based on crime disrespectful, what exactly is respectful?
5. Conclusion
Mary Shepherd Slusser may have contributed to writing articles and books on culture of Nepal, but it is not respectful to Nepal if it is based on theft and deceit. Nepal has lost not only the artefacts but also generations of ceremonies and worshipping. Traditions have stopped entirely. The role of a well-known “scholar” in enabling such a loss is disheartening and erodes whatever little trust the Nepali people place on foreign researchers.
On the other hand, the investigation on Slusser’s shady work was also done by foreigners and Thompson is helping directly in repatriation attempts. So, it might be wrong to put everyone in the same basket. Nepalese like Alisha Sijapati (mentioned in the original article) are also looking for the lost monuments through the internet and extensive research.
The loss of Nepal’s cultural heritage is immense. It’s distressing that our own people sold artefacts for some money. But the situation is changing. We are becoming more aware of the value of our culture. We are also working to find out the stolen artefacts and bring them back to their rightful places. Unlike what Slusser said, they don’t belong to foreign museums; they belong to the Gods and people of Nepal from whom they were stolen and taken away stealthily.
Footnotes
- This is a really absurd number. Since the Thompson’s article does not show hard evidence, I have doubts.
- Apparently, three years ago, Thompson had written with Smith an article on a peer-reviewed journal before Himal Southasian published the current article in discussion. Since I didn’t have a full access to the article by Smith and Thompson, I had no other choice but to follow Ramble’s arguments.
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