Download or read book A History and Anthropological Study of the Ancient Kingdoms of the Sino Tibetan Borderland Naxi and Mosuo written by Christine Mathieu and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Naxi and the Mosuo (who are officially considered a part of the Naxi) are peoples living in northwestern Yunnan Province of China. Anthropologist Mathieu investigates the histories of these groups through a reading of textual sources, local and imperial historiography, oral tradition, and religious ceremonial texts. Her major objective is to describe the process by which the tribes oriented towards Tibet were transformed into vassal subjects of the Chinese empire. She also seeks to elucidate the ethnic relationship between the Naxi and Mosuo. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
Download or read book Bon and Naxi Manuscripts written by Agnieszka Helman-Ważny and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-01-30 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume offers a dozen studies of manuscripts of the Tibetan Bon and Naxi Dongba traditions across time and space. While some of the contributions focus on particular features of manuscripts from either tradition, others explicitly bridge the two by considering common codicological and material aspects of selected examples or common themes in the content of the texts. This is the first primarily object-based study to deal with the cultural history and technology of books from the two traditions. It discusses collections of Bon and Naxi manuscripts, the concepts and history of both traditions, the science and technology of book studies as it relates to these collections, the relationship between text and image, writing materials, and the historical and archaeological context of the manuscripts' places of origin. The authors are specialists in different fields including philology, anthropology, art history, codicology and archaeometry. The contributions shed light on trade routes, materials and technologies as well as on reading practices and ritual usage of Bon and Naxi manuscripts.
Download or read book Religious Revival in the Tibetan Borderlands written by Koen Wellens and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revival of religious practices of all sorts in China, after decades of systematic government suppression, is a topic of considerable interest to scholars in disciplines ranging from religious studies to anthropology to political science. This book examines contemporary religious practices among the Premi people of the Sichuan-Yunnan-Tibet area, a group of about 60,000 who speak a language belonging to the Qiang branch of Tibeto-Burman. Koen Wellens's ethnographic research in two Premi communities on opposite sides of the border, and his analysis of available historical documents, find multiple advocates and rationales for the revival of both formal Tibetan Buddhism and the indigenous Premi practices centered on ritual specialists called anji. Wellens argues that the variety in the shape the revitalization process takes--as it affects Premi on the Sichuan side of the border and their counterparts on the Yunnan side--can only be understood in a local cultural context. This full-length study of the Premi, the first in a language other than Chinese, makes a valuable contribution to our ethnographic knowledge of Southwest China, as well as to our understanding of contemporary Chinese religious and cultural politics.
Download or read book The Paper Road written by Erik Mueggler and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-11-02 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exhilarating book interweaves the stories of two early twentieth-century botanists to explore the collaborative relationships each formed with Yunnan villagers in gathering botanical specimens from the borderlands between China, Tibet, and Burma. Erik Mueggler introduces Scottish botanist George Forrest, who employed Naxi adventurers in his fieldwork from 1906 until his death in 1932. We also meet American Joseph Francis Charles Rock, who, in 1924, undertook a dangerous expedition to Gansu and Tibet with the sons and nephews of Forrest’s workers. Mueggler describes how the Naxi workers and their Western employers rendered the earth into specimens, notes, maps, diaries, letters, books, photographs, and ritual manuscripts. Drawing on an ancient metaphor of the earth as a book, Mueggler provides a sustained meditation on what can be copied, translated, and revised and what can be folded back into the earth.
Download or read book Chieftains into Ancestors written by David Faure and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While official Chinese history has always been written from a centrist viewpoint, Chieftains into Ancestors describes the intersection of imperial administration and chieftain-dominated local culture in the culturally diverse southwestern region of China. Contemplating the rhetorical question of how one can begin to rewrite the story of a conquered people whose past was never transcribed in the first place, the authors combine anthropological fieldwork with historical textual analysis to build a new regional history – one that recognizes the ethnic, religious, and gendered transformations that took place in China’s nation-building process.
Download or read book The Cosmological Origins of Myth and Symbol written by Laird Scranton and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-09-24 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstructs a theoretic parent cosmology that underlies ancient religion • Shows how this parent cosmology provided the conceptual origins of written language • Uses techniques of comparative cosmology to synchronize the creation traditions of the Dogon, ancient Egyptians, and ancient Buddhists • Applies the signature elements of this parent cosmology to explore and interpret the creation tradition of a present-day Tibetan/Chinese tribe called the Na-Khi--the keepers of the world’s last surviving hieroglyphic language Great thinkers and researchers such as Carl Jung have acknowledged the many broad similarities that exist between the myths and symbols of ancient cultures. One largely unexplored explanation for these similarities lies in the possibility that these systems of myth all descended from one common cosmological plan. Outlining the most significant aspects of cosmology found among the Dogon, ancient Egyptians, and ancient Buddhists, including the striking physical and cosmological parallels between the Dogon granary and the Buddhist stupa, Laird Scranton identifies the signature attributes of a theoretic ancient parent cosmology--a planned instructional system that may well have spawned these great ancient creation traditions. Examining the esoteric nature of cosmology itself, Scranton shows how this parent cosmology encompassed both a plan for the civilized instruction of humanity as well as the conceptual origins of language. The recurring shapes in all ancient religions were key elements of this plan, designed to give physical manifestation to the sacred and provide the means to conceptualize and compare earthly dimensions with those of the heavens. As a practical application of the plan, Scranton explores the myths and language of an obscure Chinese priestly tribe known as the Na-Khi--the keepers of the world’s last surviving hieroglyphic language. Suggesting that cosmology may have engendered civilization and not the other way around, Scranton reveals how this plan of cosmology provides the missing link between our macroscopic universe and the microscopic world of atoms.
Download or read book Asian Highlands Perspectives 6 Collected Papers written by Charles Kevin Stuart and published by ASIAN HIGHLANDS PERSPECTIVES. This book was released on 2011 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Brag 'go Wolf Begging Ritual (Spyang sprang) (007-22) Mgon po tshe ring Local History in A mdo: The Tsong kha Range (Ri rgyud) (023-97) Tuttle, Gray Stag rig Tibetan Village: Hair Changing and Marriage (151-217) 'brug mo skyid, Charles Kevin Stuart, Alexandru Anton-Luca, and Steve Frediani Sustainable Development of Monastic Tourism in Tibetan Areas (219-250) Pad ma 'tsho Matrilineal Marriage in Tibetan Areas in Western Sìchuān Province (251-280) Mǐn, Féng Collecting Water From the Yellow River (281-296) Ring mtsho and Tshe-ring-bsam-grub Review-Hartley, L and P Schiaffini-Vedani (eds). 2008. Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change. (297-301) Thurston, Timothy Review-Wu Yazhi 吴雅芝. 2006. Zui hou de chuanshuo: elunchun zu wenhua yanjiu 最后的传说：鄂伦春族文化研 (The Final Legend: Research on Oroqen Culture). (303-306) Henochowicz, Anne Story-A Bleeding Watermelon (307-311) Nor bzang Folktale-The King of Seven Seeds (313-320) Bsod nams rgyal mtshan A New Investigation of the Geographic Position of the Báilán Capital of the Tŭyùhún (99-150) Shìkuí, Zhū, and Chéng Qĭjùn
Download or read book China s Last but one matriarchy written by Pedro Ceinos Arcones and published by Pedro Ceinos. This book was released on 2014-04-14 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hidden in the tropical mountains of China’s southern border lives one of the most interesting Chinese minorities: The Jino nationality. With a population of only 21,000 people they are one of the less known ethnic groups in China, who in the past were often confused with the surrounding minorities. The study of their culture started only in the last decades of the 20th century and showed the world an ethnic group characterized for the strength with which they preserved their matriarchal tendencies and their surprising adaptability to their tropical environment. The shadow of their former matriarchy, and of their goddesses, was found everywhere in the Jino life and culture, as a giant umbrella that covered their main activities, especially prominent in their myths and legends, as well as in the spiritual life that directed their everyday activities: farming and hunting, house building, village ceremonies and rituals performed by their main religious specialists. The apparent simplicity of this original society slowly revealed a complex technology developed by hundreds of years of adaptation to their particular environment, a technology that allowed them to continuously inhabit lands that otherwise would have been fit for habitation only for a short time. At the heart of this technology was a reverential respect for the mother earth, embodied especially as the Goddess of the Fields and the Lady of the Beasts, and a common exhaustive knowledge of the different kinds of soils, their responses to the changing climatic conditions, to the seasonal weather oscillations, and to different rice varieties. Their ideas about the characteristics of their soils basically correspond with modern geological classifications; their calendar of 11 months (designed to remember the main steps in the creation process of the goddess Amoyaobai) fits perfectly with their agricultural activities; their knowledge of more than 100 varieties of rice allowed them to optimally use every natural resource.
Download or read book Asian Horizons written by Angelo Andrea Di Castro and published by Monash University Publishing. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asian Horizons is published in honour of the great scholar of Asia, Professor Giuseppe Tucci (1894–1984). Through the work of present-day scholars, both senior and emerging, this volume represents their efforts to maintain the impetus of the profound legacy Tucci left. Renowned to this day as a founding scholar in an extraordinarily wide variety of disciplines, as well as being an explorer of hitherto largely unknown lands, such as Tibet, Tucci gained a deep knowledge of Asia through a familiarity with its people, places and literature. His contribution to modern scholarship is nothing less than remarkable. The volume reflects the broad variety of topics in which Tucci himself displayed deep interest and serves as an homage to his work.
Download or read book An Investigation of Various Linguistic Changes in Chinese and Naxi written by Jung-yao Lu and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-08-19 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The comparative analysis of historical linguistics focuses on reconstructing ancient patterns based on diachronic records and typological data from several languages or dialects in a language group. The ultimate aim of the comparative reconstruction which requires significant cross-linguistic observation and theoretical reasoning is to demonstrate the historical process of language changes. This book considers the diachronic development of both the Chinese language and the Naxi language, focusing particularly upon six contentious linguistic issues that are associated with various linguistic changes in most areas of the grammar of these languages, including phonological changes, semantic changes, syntactic changes, and contact-induced changes. These linguistic issues are: (1) tonal splits in proto-checked syllables and subgrouping of Loloish; (2) the semantic development of RETURN–还 in Chinese; (3) the semantic development of TAKE–把 in Chinese; (4) the development of agentive passive markers in certain dialects of Chinese; (5) definiteness and nominalization, relativization, and genitivization in Chinese; and (6) the development of nominalization, relativization, and genitivization in Naxi. This volume provides new methods and perspectives through which these issues can be analyzed and resolved on the basis of typological and diachronic evidence. It uses cross-linguistic data from Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages in order to reconstruct various diachronic developments in Chinese and Naxi.
Download or read book Lost Secrets of the Gods written by Michael Pye and published by Red Wheel/Weiser. This book was released on 2014-07-21 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are there 10,000-year-old secret societies that still exist today? Was there a race of giants that once inhabited the Americas? Did ancient Egypt and ancient China have heretofore undiscovered ties? Lost Secrets of the Gods delves into these ancient mysteries and many more in articles by some of the world’s most intrepid and knowledgeable researchers. The old paradigms of history are being radically transformed as we discover more evidence of little-known cultures and what they achieved. Many ancient cultures spoke and wrote of visitors that gave them knowledge and helped shape their societies. Who were they, and where did they come from? We now know that many ancient cultures had advanced knowledge of science, agriculture, and astronomy, only some of which has been rediscovered in the last 100 years. Were The Iliad and The Odyssey really about an epic struggle in pre-Celtic Europe? What happened to the Persian army that completely disappeared from Egypt 2,500 years ago? Did the ancients know how to create psychic guard dogs to protect sacred sites? There is much more to history than what has officially been recorded. Lost Secrets of the Gods reveals startling truths and asks fascinating questions traditional historians have long ignored.
Download or read book A Communion of Subjects written by Paul Waldau and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2006-12-19 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Communion of Subjects is the first comparative and interdisciplinary study of the conceptualization of animals in world religions. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including Thomas Berry (cultural history), Wendy Doniger (study of myth), Elizabeth Lawrence (veterinary medicine, ritual studies), Marc Bekoff (cognitive ethology), Marc Hauser (behavioral science), Steven Wise (animals and law), Peter Singer (animals and ethics), and Jane Goodall (primatology) consider how major religious traditions have incorporated animals into their belief systems, myths, rituals, and art. Their findings offer profound insights into humans' relationships with animals and a deeper understanding of the social and ecological web in which we all live. Contributors examine Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Daoism, Confucianism, African religions, traditions from ancient Egypt and early China, and Native American, indigenous Tibetan, and Australian Aboriginal traditions, among others. They explore issues such as animal consciousness, suffering, sacrifice, and stewardship in innovative methodological ways. They also address contemporary challenges relating to law, biotechnology, social justice, and the environment. By grappling with the nature and ideological features of various religious views, the contributors cast religious teachings and practices in a new light. They reveal how we either intentionally or inadvertently marginalize "others," whether they are human or otherwise, reflecting on the ways in which we assign value to living beings. Though it is an ancient concern, the topic of "Religion and Animals" has yet to be systematically studied by modern scholars. This groundbreaking collection takes the first steps toward a meaningful analysis.
Download or read book Chasing Traces written by Pierre Petit and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the connected highlands of southwest China, Vietnam, and Laos, recalling the past is a highly sensitive act. Among local societies, many may actively avoid recalling the past for fear of endangering themselves and others. Oral traditions and rare archives remain the main avenues to visit the past, but the national revolutionary narrative and the language of heritagization have strongly affected the local expression of historical memory. Yet this does not prevent local societies from producing their stories in their own terms, even if often in conflict with both national and Western categories. Producing history, ethnohistory, historical anthropology, and historical geography in the Southeast Asian highlands raises significant questions relating to methodology, epistemology, and ethics, for which most researchers are often ill-prepared. How can scholars manage to competently access information about the past? How is one to capture history-in-the-making through events, speech acts, rituals, and performances? How is the memory of the past transmitted—or not—and with what logic? Based on the experiences and reflections of a dozen diverse scholars rooted in decades of work in these three communist states, Chasing Traces is the first book about historical ethnography and related issues in the Southeast Asian highlands. Taking a critically reflexive posture, the authors make a plea for the individual, the hidden, and the backstage, for what life is really like on the ground, as opposed to imagined homogeneity, legibility, and unambiguousness. Their investigations on the history of ethnic minority communities adds archival historiography to ethnographic fieldwork and examines the relationship between the two fields. The individual chapters each tell distinctive stories of the conjunction of fieldwork, archival research, official surveillance, community participation, cultural norms, partnership with local scholars, and the other factors that both facilitate and frustrate the research enterprise of writing about the past in these societies. A timely work, this volume also provides guidelines for alternative ways to document and reflect when physical access becomes limited due to factors such as pandemic, political instability, and violence, and offers creative ways for researchers to cope with these dramatic shifts.
Download or read book Moving Mountains written by Jean Michaud and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mountainous borderlands of socialist China, Vietnam, and Laos are home to some seventy million minority people of diverse ethnicities. In Moving Mountains, anthropologists, geographers, and political economists with first-hand experience in the region explore these peoples' survival strategies, as they respond to unprecedented economic and political change. Although highland peoples are typically represented as marginalized and powerless, this volume argues that ethnic minorities draw on culture and ethnicity to indigenize modernity and maintain their livelihoods. This unprecedented glimpse into a poorly understood region shows that development initiatives must be built on strong knowledge of local cultures in order to have lasting effect.
Download or read book China s Cosmological Prehistory written by Laird Scranton and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-08-22 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the earliest creation traditions and symbols of China and their similarities to those of other ancient cultures • Reveals the deep parallels between early Chinese words and those of other ancient creation traditions such as the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt • Explores the 8 stages of creation in Taoism and the cosmological origins of Chinese ancestor worship, the zodiac, the mandala, and the I Ching • Provides further evidence that the cosmology of all ancient cultures arose from a single now-lost source Building on his extensive research into the sacred symbols and creation myths of the Dogon of Africa and those of ancient Egypt, India, and Tibet, Laird Scranton investigates the myths, symbols, and traditions of prehistoric China, providing further evidence that the cosmology of all ancient cultures arose from a single now-lost source. Scranton explores the fundamental similarities between the language that defined ancient Chinese cosmology and that of other creation traditions, revealing the connections between the phonetic structure of the words, their glyphs, and their use. He demonstrates striking parallels between the earliest systems of writing in China and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. He examines the 8 levels of creation in Taoism and the cosmological origins of Chinese ancestor worship, mythical emperors, the zodiac, the mandala, and the I Ching. He details the fundamental principles of land-use in ancient China in relation to the symbolism of a Buddhist stupa and the Dogon granary, ritual shrines that are also the central symbol of other creation traditions. Understanding the true meanings of these symbol complexes also reveals the sophisticated scientific understanding of these ancient cultures, for these creation symbols directly correlate with our modern understanding of atoms and the energetic makeup of matter. In exploring Chinese cosmological traditions, Scranton sheds new light on the contention that the sacred knowledge of the ancients is the legacy of an earlier culture who gave primitive humanity the tools they needed to birth the first known civilizations.
Download or read book Handbook on Ethnic Minorities in China written by Xiaowei Zang and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This much-needed volume explains who ethnic minorities are and how well do they do in China. In addition to offering general information about ethnic minority groups in China, it discusses some important issues around ethnicity, including ethnic inequality, minority rights, and multiculturalism. Drawing on insights and perspectives from scholars in different continents the contributions provide critical reflections on where the field has been and where it is going, offering readers possible directions for future research on minority ethnicity in China. The Handbook reviews research and addresses key conceptual, theoretical and methodological issues in the study of ethnicity in China.
Download or read book Grassroots Values and Local Cultural Heritage in China written by Harriet Evans and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-10-06 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recent heritage boom in China is transforming local social, economic, and cultural life and reshaping domestic and global notions of China's national identity. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted largely by young anthropologists in China, Grassroots Values and Local Cultural Heritage in China departs from the dominant top-down UNESCO-influenced narrative of cultural heritage preservation and approaches the local not as a fixed definition of place but as a shifting site of negotiation between state, entrepreneurial, transcultural, and local community interests. The volume takes readers along an unusual trajectory between a disadvantaged neighborhood in central Beijing, metropolitan centers in Anhui and Sichuan, Quanzhou in the southeast, and Yunnan in the southwest before finally ending at the great Samye Monastery in Tibet. Across these sites, the contributors converge in apprehending the grassroots as an arena of everyday life and belonging underpinning ordinary social interactions and cultural practices as diverse as funeral rituals, Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimages, and encounters between young contemporary artists and the Bloomsbury Group. In examining the diversity of local cultural practices and knowledge that underpin ideas about cultural value, this volume argues that grassroots cultural beliefs are essential to the liveability and sustainability of life and living heritage.
