Download or read book Rice in Southeast Asian Myth and Ritual written by Anthony R. Walker and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Art of Rice written by Roy W. Hamilton and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term Asia is a problematic and highly artificial construct, because hardly anything - not language, religion, politics, or even geography - unites this huge area. Within the context of this study, however - which focuses on parts of South, Southeast, and East Asia (home to the vast majority of the population) - there exists a unifying factor of paramount significance: rice. Not only is rice the staple food in these regions, it is the focal point of a pervasive set of interrelated beliefs and practices. For those who consume it, this foodstuff is considered divinely given and is felt to sustain them in a special way, one that may be understood as constitutional and even spiritual. This volume explores beliefs and practices relating to rice as they are made manifest in the unique arts and material cultures of the various peoples considered. Incorporating essays by twenty-seven authorities representing a wide variety of cultures and writing from diverse perspectives, the book is astounding in its polyphony. The thirty-five lavishly illustrated essays describe rice-related rituals and beliefs in parts of Thailand, Nepal, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, China, and Korea. Throughout, the juxtaposition of magnificent photographs of works of art - paintings, prints, ceramics, textiles, lacquerware, and sculpture - with objects of a more humble nature – agricultural implements, rice-straw ornaments, cooking utensils, baskets, puppets, votive plaques, and more - serves to indicate the striking pervasiveness of rice in all aspects and all walks of life. Wedding ceremonies, parades, festivals, celebrations of birth, rites held to honor the rice goddess, and those performed to ensure success at every step in the rice-growing cycle are vividly described and illustrated with striking field photographs. The whole gives the reader the rare opportunity to compare similarities and differences in how a rich array of Asian cultures views the food that nourishes them.
Download or read book Animism in Southeast Asia written by Kaj Arhem and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animism refers to ontologies or worldviews which assign agency and personhood to human and non-human beings alike. Recent years have seen a revival of this concept in anthropology, where it is now discussed as an alternative to modern-Western naturalistic notions of human-environment relations. Based on original fieldwork, this book presents a number of case studies of animism from insular and peninsular Southeast Asia and offers a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon – its diversity and underlying commonalities and its resilience in the face of powerful forces of change. Critically engaging with the current standard notion of animism, based on hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist societies in other regions, it examines the roles of life forces, souls and spirits in local cosmologies and indigenous religion. It proposes an expansion of the concept to societies featuring mixed farming, sacrifice and hierarchy and explores the question of how non-human agents are created through acts of attention and communication, touching upon the relationship between animist ontologies, world religion, and the state. Shedding new light on Southeast Asian religious ethnographic research, the book is a significant contribution to anthropological theory and the revitalization of the concept of animism in the humanities and social sciences.
Download or read book Vernacular Chinese Character Manuscripts from East and Southeast Asia written by David Holm and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-07-22 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Buddhist Funeral Cultures of Southeast Asia and China written by Paul Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The centrality of death rituals has rarely been documented in anthropologically informed studies of Buddhism. Bringing together a range of perspectives including ethnographic, textual, historical and theoretically informed accounts, this edited volume presents the diversity of the Buddhist funeral cultures of mainland Southeast Asia and China. While the contributions show that the ideas and ritual practices related to death are continuously transformed in local contexts through political and social changes, they also highlight the continuities of funeral cultures. The studies are based on long-term fieldwork and covering material from Theravāda Buddhism in Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and various regions of Chinese Buddhism, both on the mainland and in the Southeast Asian diasporas. Topics such as bad death, the feeding of ghosts, pollution through death, and the ritual regeneration of life show how Buddhist cultures deal with death as a universal phenomenon of human culture.
Download or read book The Flaming Womb written by Barbara Watson Andaya and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2006-07-31 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Princess of the Flaming Womb," the Javanese legend that introduces this pioneering study, symbolizes the many ambiguities attached to femaleness in Southeast Asian societies. Yet despite these ambiguities, the relatively egalitarian nature of male–female relations in Southeast Asia is central to arguments claiming a coherent identity for the region. This challenging work by senior scholar Barbara Watson Andaya considers such contradictions while offering a thought-provoking view of Southeast Asian history that focuses on women’s roles and perceptions. Andaya explores the broad themes of the early modern era (1500–1800)—the introduction of new religions, major economic shifts, changing patterns of state control, the impact of elite lifestyles and behaviors—drawing on an extraordinary range of sources and citing numerous examples from Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese, Philippine, and Malay societies. In the process, she provides a timely and innovative model for putting women back into world history Andaya approaches the problematic issue of "Southeast Asia" by considering ways in which topography helped describe a geo-cultural zone and contributed to regional distinctiveness in gender construction. She examines the degree to which world religions have been instrumental in (re)constructing conceptions of gender— an issue especially pertinent to Southeast Asian societies because of the leading role so often played by women in indigenous ritual. She also considers the effects of the expansion of long-distance trade, the incorporation of the region into a global trading network, the beginnings of cash-cropping and wage labor, and the increase in slavery on the position of women. Erudite, nuanced, and accessible, The Flaming Womb makes a major contribution to a Southeast Asia history that is both regional and global in content and perspective.
Download or read book Southeast Asia written by Christoph Antweiler and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2004 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Contributions to Southeast Asian Ethnography written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Deathpower written by Erik W. Davis and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Cambodia, Erik W. Davis radically reorients approaches toward the nature of Southeast Asian Buddhism's interactions with local religious practice and, by extension, reorients our understanding of Buddhism itself. Through a vivid study of contemporary Cambodian Buddhist funeral rites, he reveals the powerfully integrative role monks play as they care for the dead and negotiate the interplay of non-Buddhist spirits and formal Buddhist customs. Buddhist monks perform funeral rituals rooted in the embodied practices of Khmer rice farmers and the social hierarchies of Khmer culture. The monks' realization of death underwrites key components of the Cambodian social imagination: the distinction between wild death and celibate life, the forest and the field, and moral and immoral forms of power. By connecting the performative aspects of Buddhist death rituals to Cambodian history and everyday life, Davis undermines the theory that Buddhism and rural belief systems necessarily oppose each other. Instead, he shows Cambodian Buddhism to be a robust tradition with ethical and popular components extending throughout Khmer society.
Download or read book Parts and Wholes written by Laila Prager and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2016 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This festschrift for Josephus D.M. Platenkamp brings some central concerns of anthropology into focus: social morphology, exchange, cosmology, history, and practical applications. Ranging across several disciplines and continents, but with a preference for Southeast Asia, the contributions look at a common approach that unites these diverse themes. In this view, the most constitutive relationships of society are based on exchange. Exchange and ritual articulate central values of a society, thus appearing as parts in relationship to a whole. These relationships encompass both human and non-human beings, the social and the cosmological domain. Thus, the study of these subject issues merges into a single project. (Series: ?Anthropology: Research and Science / Ethnologie: Forschung und Wissenschaft, Vol. 27) [Subject: Anthropology]Ã?Â?Ã?Â?
Download or read book Oral Traditions of Southeast Asia and Oceania written by Herman C. Kemp and published by Yayasan Obor Indonesia. This book was released on 2004 with total page 718 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Hmong 1987 1995 written by J. Christina Smith and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 1998 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Experiments in Holism written by Ton Otto and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-08-02 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experiments in Holism Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology presents a series of essays that critically examine the ongoing relevance of holism and its theoretical and methodological potential in today’s world. Contributions from a diverse collection of leading anthropologists reveal how recent critiques of the holistic approach have not led to its wholesale rejection, but rather to a panoply of experiments that critically reassess and reemploy holism. The essays focus on aspects of holism including its utilization in current ethnographic research, holistic considerations in cultural anthropology, the French structuralist tradition, the predominantly English tradition of social anthropology, and many others. Collectively, the essays show how holism is simultaneously central to, and problematically a part of, the theory and practice of anthropology. Experiments in Holism reveals how contemporary attempts to rescale and retool anthropology entail new ways of coming to terms with anthropology’s heritage of holism, seeking to obviate its current excesses while recapturing its critical potential to meet the challenges of our contemporary world.
Download or read book Beneath the Volcano written by Gregory L. Forth and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-16 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beneath the Volcano is the first major account of the Nage, who inhabit the central part of Flores in eastern Indonesia. The book focuses on Nage ideas concerning a variety of spiritual beings and how these influence both ritual practices and ideas about human beings. In exploring these subjects, the author sets out to uncover a classification of spirits. While quite different from taxonomies of natural beings, Nage ways of linking named categories of spirits nevertheless reveal a regular conceptual order. In describing this order, use is made of a version of Dumont's notion of 'encompassment'. Common ideas informing relations between Nage humans and several categories of spirits are further interpreted as instances of a pervasive principle of 'symmetric inversion', according to which human beings are spirits for the spirits.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia written by Jelle J.P. Wouters and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia is the first comprehensive and critical overview of the ethnographic and anthropological work in Highland Asia over the past half a century. Opening up a grand new space for critical engagement, the handbook presents Highland Asia as a world-region that cuts across the traditional divides inherited from colonial and Cold War area divisions - the Indian Subcontinent/South Asia, Southeast Asia, China/East Asia, and Central Asia. Thirty-two chapters assess the history of research, identify ethnographic trends, and evaluate a range of analytical themes that developed in particular settings of Highland Asia. They cover varied landscapes and communities, from Kyrgyzstan to India, from Bhutan to Vietnam and bring local voices and narratives relating trade and tribute, ritual and resistance, pilgrimage and prophecy, modernity and marginalization, capital and cosmos to the fore. The handbook shows that for millennia, Highland Asians have connected far-flung regions through movements of peoples, goods and ideas, and at all times have been the enactors, repositories, and mediators of world-historical processes. Taken together, the contributors and chapters subvert dominant lowland narratives by privileging primarily highland vantages that reveal Highland Asia as an ecumune and prism that refracts and generates global history, social theory, and human imagination. In the currently unfolding Asian Century, this compels us to reorient and re-envision Highland Asia, in ethnography, in theory, and in the connections between this world-region, made of hills, highlands and mountains, and a planetary context. The handbook reveals both regional commonalities and diversities, generalities and specificities, and a broad orientation to key themes in the region. An indispensable reference work, this handbook fills a significant gap in the literature and will be of interest to academics, researchers and students interested in Highland Asia, Zomia Studies, Anthropology, Comparative Politics, Conceptual History and Sociology, Southeast Asian Studies, Central Asian Studies and South Asian Studies as well as Asian Studies in general.
Download or read book Land and Longhouse written by Rob A. Cramb and published by NIAS Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Land and Longhouse examines the role of community, market, and state in the historic transformation of upland livelihoods in Southeast Asia. Focusing on the Saribas Iban of Sarawak, the book combines in-depth, generation-long village case studies with an account of changes in land use and tenure at the regional level spanning a century and a half. This analysis demonstrates that, far from being passive victims of globalization, the Iban have been active agents in their own transformation, engaging with both market and state while retaining community values and governance. R. A. Cramb makes a significant new contribution to debates about economic, social, and environmental change and conflict in upland Southeast Asia. His book offers a fascinating, empirically rich account of interest to scholars, development practitioners, and the general reader alike. "This study is certain to become a major reference point for future work on land use, tenure, and agrarian change in Upland Southeast Asia." --Clifford Sather, University of Helsinki "Rob Cramb has written an excellent book with a much needed longitudinal perspective on agrarian change. The book is an important contribution to the urgent need for understanding the dynamics and consequences--both environmental and social--of upland transformation in Southeast Asia." --Ole Mertz, University of Copenhagen "Rob Cramb's study raises provocative questions about Iban society, the nature of the Southeast Asia uplands, and agrarian history. He presents a work distinguished by the depth of its scholarship and the breadth of the questions addressed by it." --Michael R. Dove, Yale University
Download or read book Power and Prowess written by JH Walker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-02 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A significant reinterpretation of Sarawak history, Power and Prowess explores the network of power, economic and ritual relationships that developed on the northwest coast of Borneo in the mid-nineteenth century, from which a coalition led by James Brooke established the state of Sarawak. Where many authors placed Brooke in the context of nineteenth century British imperialism, this study perceives him in the context of Bornean cultures and political economies. Brooke emerges from the historical record as a 'man of prowess', with the author identifying important ritual sources of Brooke's power among Malays, Bidayuh and Ibans, sources which derived from and expressed indigenous cultural traditions about fertility, health and status. Drawing on conceptual frameworks from political science, as well as recent southeast Asian historiography, Power and Prowess offers a detailed political history of the period and new interpretations of Brooke's career. This study also retrieves from the historical sources previously concealed narratives which reflect the interests, priorities and activities of Sarawak people themselves. J.H. WALKER lectures in political science at the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy.
