Download or read book The Tree of the Toraja written by Philippe Claudel and published by MacLehose Press. This book was released on 2018-07-26 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A middle-aged filmmaker visits Indonesia and becomes entranced by the Toraja custom of interning the bodies of very young deceased children in the trunks of trees. In time, the trunk heals, encasing and protecting the tiny bodies as the tree grows slowly heavenwards. On his return to France, the filmmaker receives news that his dearest friend is dying of cancer, prompting a reflection on the part death occupies in our existence, our inability to confront our mortality and our struggle to conceive of a happy life after a devastating loss. For the Toraja, dying is a central part of being alive. Death is at the forefront of their culture, unlike the western preference for keeping death firmly in the shadows, unacknowledged until it begins to really breathe down your neck and simply cannot be ignored; a taboo subject to be feared and resented. Like the trees of the Toraja, this powerful novel encloses and preserves memories of lost loves and friendships, and contains the promise of rebirth and rebuilding, even after a terrible tragedy.
Download or read book The Sa dan Toraja written by Hetty Nooy-Palm and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-10-22 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book To Speak in Pairs written by James J. Fox and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-02 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays represents an important advance in the study of oral literature in context.
Download or read book Celebrating Life Customs around the World 3 volumes written by Victoria R. Williams and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 1137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book documents hundreds of customs and traditions practiced in countries outside of the United States, showcasing the diversity of birth, coming-of-age, and death celebrations worldwide. From the beginning of our lives to the end, all of humanity celebrates life's milestones through traditions and unique customs. In the United States, we have specific events like baby showers, rites of passage such as Bat and Bar Mitzvahs and "sweet 16" birthday parties, and sober end-of-life traditions like obituaries and funeral services that honor those who have died. But what kinds of customs and traditions are practiced in other countries? How do people in other cultures welcome babies, prepare to enter into adulthood, and commemorate the end of the lives of loved ones? This three-volume encyclopedia covers more than 300 birth, life, and death customs, with the books' content organized chronologically by life stage. Volume 1 focuses on birth and childhood customs, Volume 2 documents adolescent and early-adulthood customs, and Volume 3 looks at aging and death customs. The entries in the first volume examine pre-birth traditions, such as baby showers and other gift-giving events, and post-birth customs, such as naming ceremonies, child-rearing practices, and traditions performed to ward off evil or promote good health. The second volume contains information about rites of passage as children become adults, including indigenous initiations, marriage customs, and religious ceremonies. The final volume concludes with coverage on customs associated with aging and death, such as retirement celebrations, elaborate funeral processions, and the creation of fantasy coffins. The set features beautiful color inserts that illustrate examples of celebrations and ceremonies and includes an appendix of excerpts from primary documents that include legislation on government-accepted names, wedding vows, and maternity/paternity leave regulations.
Download or read book Death in Spring written by Mercè Rodoreda and published by Open Letter Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Merce Rodoreda depicts the story of the bizarre and destructive customs of a nameless town-burying the dead in trees after filling their mouths with cement to prevent their soul from escaping, or sending a man to swim in the river that courses underneath the town to discover if they will be washed away by a flood-through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy who must come to terms with the rhyme and reason of this ritual violence, and with his wild, child-like, and teenaged stepmother, who becomes his playmate.
Download or read book Banua Toraja written by Jowa Imre Kis-Jovak and published by Kit Pub. This book was released on 1988 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Toraja written by Nigel Barley and published by Monsoon Books. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1985, Dr. Nigel Barley, senior anthropologist at The British Museum, set off for the relatively unknown Indonesian island of Sulawesi in search of the Toraja, a people whose culture includes headhunting, transvestite priests and the massacre of buffalo. In witty and finely crafted prose, Barley offers fascinating insight into the people of Sulawesi and he recounts the tale of the four Torajan woodcarvers he invites back to London to construct an Indonesian rice barn in The British Museum. Previously published as "Not a Hazardous Sport".
Download or read book The Sa dan Toraja A Study of Their Social Life and Religion written by H. Nooy-Palm and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until about 1870 the Sa’dan-toraja of Sulawesi had little contact with the outside world. Several factors, of which the introduction of the coffee-growing and the coffee trade was chronologically one of the first, have changed their life as a megalithic people enmeshed in mythology and ritual drastically. The conversion of nearly half the population to Christianity after 1945 brought a particularly profound change in Sa’dan-Toraja society. Old customs, in particular as regards funerary rites, have a tenacious life, however. In autochthonous Toraja culture rituals are the main focus of attention. They are divided into ceremonies of the East and those of the West. The former, associated with sunrise and life, comprise feasts of the living; yellow and white are the colours belonging to these joyous festivals. The West is associated with sunset, death and darkness; the main colour connected with it is black. So death rituals are referred to a “night ceremonies”. In time these death feasts grew more and more complicated, finally overshadowing the festivals of the East.
Download or read book They Do What written by Javier A. Galván and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-06-19 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This single-volume work covers many traditions, customs, and activities Westerners may find unusual or shocking, covering everything from the Ashanti people's funeral celebrations to wife-carrying competitions in Finland. In Maharashtra, India, a tradition exists to throw newborn babies off the tops of buildings. At the Vegetarian Festival in Phuket, Thailand, some people ritualistically pierce their cheeks and faces with swords and knives. How did these surprising customs come to be? From camel wrestling to cheese-rolling competitions to a tomato-throwing festival, this fascinating single-volume encyclopedia examines more than 100 customs, traditions, and rituals that may be considered strange and exotic to U.S. readers. This work provides high school and undergraduate students with a compelling and fascinating exploration of world customs and traditions. Comprising entries by anthropologists, religious leaders, scholars, dancers, musicians, historians, and artists from almost every continent in the world, this encyclopedia provides readers a truly global and multidisciplinary perspective. The entries explore the origins of the custom, explain how it was established as a tradition, and describe how and where it is practiced. A thematic guide enables readers to look up entries by the type of tradition or custom, such as birth, coming of age, courtship and wedding, funeral, daily customs, holidays, and festivals.
Download or read book Feasts of Honor written by Toby Alice Volkman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the Toraja of highland Sulawesi, Indonesia, mortuary rituals are great performances. Bellowing water buffalo and squealing pigs for sacrifice, colorful displays of ritual architecture, and formal processions of gift-bearing guests set the scene for complex dramas about status, human value, and ties to ancestors, followers, and kin. To Indonesians throughout the archipelago, Toraja rituals have come to represent the cultural identity of this well-known group. Feasts of Honor is an exploration of these rituals, their changing meanings, and the lively dialogues they have sparked within Toraja culture, from the Dutch Colonial period to the recent era of nationalism, tourism, and migration.
Download or read book Indonesia Today written by and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Japanese Tree Burial written by Sébastien Penmellen Boret and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tree burial, a new form of disposal for the cremated remains of the dead, was created in 1999 by Chisaka Genpo, the head priest of a Zen Buddhist temple in northern Japan. Instead of a conventional family gravestone, perpetuating the continuity of a household and its identity, tree burial uses vast woodlands as cemeteries, with each burial spot marked by a tree and a small wooden tablet inscribed with the name of the deceased. Tree burial is gaining popularity, and is a highly-effective means of promoting the rehabilitation of Japanese forestland critically damaged by post-war government mismanagement. This book, based on extensive original research, explores the phenomenon of tree burial, tracing its development, discussing the factors which motivate Japanese people to choose tree burial, and examining the impact of tree burial on traditional views of death, memorialisation, and the afterlife. The author argues that non-traditional, non-ancestral modes of burial have become a means of negotiating new social orders and that this symbiosis of environmentalism and memorialisation corroborates the idea that graveyards are not only places for the containment of human remains and the memorialisation of the dead, but spaces where people (re)construct, challenge, and find new senses of belonging to the wider society in which they live. Throughout, the book demonstrates how the new practice fits with developing ideas of ecology, with the individual’s corporality nourishing the earth and thus re-entering the cycle of life in nature.
Download or read book Songs of Memory in Islands of Southeast Asia written by Nicole Revel and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-three years of joint endeavors and extensive field collecting of the narratives referred to in the present volume have resulted in the availability of a multimedia archive of Philippine epics, ballads and rituals both at the Pardo de Tavera collection of the Rizal Library, Ateneo de Manila University, and online. The linguists, anthropologists, and ethno-musicologists who have contributed to this book have long been conscious of the close links between ‘Intangible Heritage’ and ‘Tangible Heritage’. In the Philippines, sung narratives have been recorded in situ (through both audio and audio-video media), transcribed, translated, digitized, and analyzed by scholars and knowledgeable persons from fifteen cultural communities in the islands of Luzon, Panay, Palawan, Mindanao, Sulu, and Tawi-Tawi. Meanwhile, other scholars have dedicated their lifelong research to the Mergui Archipelago, central Sulawesi, southwest Maluku, and East Timor. Emerging from international collaboration, the scholarship provided here seeks not only to safeguard and comprehend the uniqueness and evolving beauty of ancient sung narratives that are currently performed in the islands of Southeast Asia, but also to defend their vitality in today’s changing world. This collection of twelve essays is the most recent achievement of ongoing studies of performances by singers of tales and ritualists in contemporary socio-cultural contexts by means of pioneering initiatives in the Digital Humanities, multiple analytical approaches and expert use of our growing technical capacity to safeguard and explore Intangible Heritage.
Download or read book Methods of Desire written by Aurora Donzelli and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-08-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Indonesia has undergone a radical program of administrative decentralization and neoliberal reforms. In Methods of Desire, author Aurora Donzelli explores these changes through an innovative perspective—one that locates the production of neoliberalism in novel patterns of language use and new styles of affect display. Building on almost two decades of fieldwork, Donzelli describes how the growing influence of transnational lending agencies is transforming the ways in which people desire and voice their expectations, intentions, and entitlements within the emergent participatory democracy and restructuring of Indonesia’s political economy. She argues that a largely overlooked aspect of the Era Reformasi concerns the transition from a moral regime centered on the expectation that desires should remain hidden to a new emphasis on the public expression of individuals’ aspirations. The book examines how the large-scale institutional transformations that followed the collapse of the Suharto regime have impacted people’s lives and imaginations in the relatively remote and primarily rural Toraja highlands of Sulawesi. A novel concept of the individual as a bundle of audible and measurable desires has emerged, one that contrasts with the deep-rooted reticence toward the expression of personal preferences. The spreading of foreign discursive genres such as customer satisfaction surveys, training sessions, electoral mission statements, and fundraising auctions, and the diffusion of new textual artifacts such as checklists, flowcharts, and workflow diagrams are producing forms of citizenship, political participation, and moral agency that contrast with the longstanding epistemologies of secrecy typical of local styles of knowledge and power. Donzelli’s long-term ethnographic study examines how these foreign protocols are being received, absorbed, and readapted in a peripheral community of the Indonesian archipelago. Combining a telescopic perspective on our contemporary moment with a microscopic analysis of conversational practices, the author argues that the managerial forms of political rationality and the entrepreneurial morality underwriting neoliberal apparatuses proliferate through the working of small cogs, that is, acts of speech. By examining these concrete communicative exchanges, she sheds light on both the coherence and inconsistency underlying the worldwide diffusion of market logic to all domains of life.
Download or read book Indonesia written by Melanie Guile and published by Heinemann-Raintree Library. This book was released on 2003-12 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the language, religion, arts, architecture, and customs of the diverse cultures found on the islands of Indonesia.
Download or read book Wise Trees written by Diane Cook and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading landscape photographers Diane Cook and Len Jenshel present Wise Trees—a stunning photography book containing more than 50 historical trees with remarkable stories from around the world. Supported by grants from the Expedition Council of the National Geographic Society, Cook and Jenshel spent two years traveling to fifty-nine sites across five continents to photograph some of the world’s most historic and inspirational trees. Trees, they tell us, can live without us, but we cannot live without them. Not only do trees provide us with the oxygen we breathe, food gathered from their branches, and wood for both fuel and shelter, but they have been essential to the spiritual and cultural life of civilizations around the world. From Luna, the Coastal Redwood in California that became an international symbol when activist Julia Butterfly Hill sat for 738 days on a platform nestled in its branches to save it from logging, to the Bodhi Tree, the sacred fig in India that is a direct descendent of the tree under which Buddha attained enlightenment, Cook and Jenshel reveal trees that have impacted and shaped our lives, our traditions, and our feelings about nature. There are also survivor trees, including a camphor tree in Nagasaki that endured the atomic bomb, an American elm in Oklahoma City, and the 9/11 Survivor Tree, a Callery pear at the 9/11 Memorial. All of the trees were carefully selected for their role in human dramas. This project both reflects and inspires awareness of the enduring role of trees in nurturing and sheltering humanity. Photographers, environmentalists, history buffs, and nature-lovers alike will appreciate the extraordinary stories found within the pages of Wise Trees!
Download or read book Collected Works written by Marc Chomel and published by Dorrance Publishing. This book was released on 2014-02-05 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected Works by Marc Chomel Collected Works is the product of a vivid and varied imagination. Marc Chomel's writing is at once a light-hearted celebration of the nature of fiction writing and an engaging examination of the darker side of the human existence. Chomel's poems, essays, and fiction pieces address the often ironic nature of death, love, loss, depression, and the emerging social orders of our modern world. These issues are addressed through multiple angles throughout the different literary mediums of poetry, essay, and fiction. The poems of Collected Works will impact, the essays enlighten. His fiction will accomplish all of the aforementioned with his truly creative storylines, which often approach science fiction. These poems and stories attempt to directly address the schisms between cultures and traditions. The collection is meant at once to entertain and to provoke. They are not to be missed. About the Author Marc Chomel is an acting prosecuting attorney. He has worked in the Los Angeles County for 25 years, having been raised a first generation American in Texas. As is reflected in his cultured writing content, the author was heavily influenced by the traditions, teachings, and culture of a European household. As an attorney, Marc Chomel has grappled with the nature of violent crime for most of his adult life. Further, he has been fascinated by the motivations behind human conduct as well as the manner in which the social and legal systems address crime and other actions. Marc Chomel also cites French and South American authors as an influence upon his own writing. As an escape from his self-described compulsions with love and death, Chomel finds solace in the outdoors, ranging from mountains to the local beaches of California, and further still to the natural terrains of foreign countries. He has traveled extensively. In addition to writing, Marc Chomel enjoys planning car rallies, building furniture, and politics. He enjoys meeting new people, but when invited to an elegant soirée, is more inclined to speak to the help than to the guests and hosts.
