Download or read book Trans Himalayan Caravans written by Janet Rizvi and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book documents the extraordinarily complex pattern of trade upon which the pre-Independence economy of Ladakh largely depended. Although the trans-Himalayan traffic in subsistence commodities in other parts of the Himalaya has been researched, that in Ladakh has until now remained almost entirely undocumented. The book is based mainly on oral evidence; this is related to documentary sources ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. This intriguing account of Ladakhi trade is spiced with enough personal details of the traders at all levels, to demonstrate that trade' is something more than a matter of routes and commodities, prices and rates of profit; it is an activity carried out by real human beings, profoundly colouring their entire way of life.
Download or read book Tibetan Caravans written by Abdul Wahid Radhu and published by . This book was released on 2017-06-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born into an eminent merchant family in Ladakh in 1918, Khwaja Abdul Wahid Radhu, often described as 'the last caravaneer of Tibet and Central Asia', led an unusual life of adventure, inspiration and enlightenment. His family, and later he, had the ancestral honour of leading the biannual caravan which carried the Ladakhi kings' tribute and homage to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government. Tibetan Caravans, his memoir, is an unparalleled narrative about trans-Himalayan trade--the riches, the politics and protocol, the challenging yet magnificent natural landscape, altitude sickness, snow storms, bandits and raiders, monks and soldiers. The book also contains rare and fascinating details about the close connections between Ladakh, Tibet and Kashmir, the centuries-old interplay between Buddhism and Islam in the region, the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and life in Lhasa before and after its takeover by China. In this rich and insightful memoir, Abdul Wahid Radhu reminisces about a bygone era when borders were fluid, and mutual respect formed the basis for trade relations across cultures and people. As his son, Siddiq Wahid, says in his introduction, Tibetan Caravans is a testimony to the organic relationships between 'societies who have learned how to hear each other out, argue, even do battle and yet remain hospitable to each other.'
Download or read book Himalaya written by Philip Parker and published by Anova Books. This book was released on 2012-11-30 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At some 1500 miles long and 250 miles at its widest the Himalaya range is home to the fourteen greatest mountain peaks on the planet each of which towers over 8,000 metres. Celebrated by the region�s early ancient kingdoms, many of these peaks remain sacred in both the Hindu and Buddhist religions and have additionally inspired western explorers and adventurers for some 300 years. Himalaya examines the geographical origins of the region, its earliest peoples and the onward western discovery and exploration commencing with the Jesuits, progressing through myriad nineteenth century gentlemen surveyors, culminating in Edmund Hilary and Tensing Norgay�s ascent of Everest in 1953 and continuing to the present day with extreme mountaineers and adventure tourists. However the book does not solely deal with the attempts to summit the majestic Everest. Its broader brief, and chronological structure, allows the inclusion of narrative and journal extracts from the equally heroic pioneering ascents of Himalayan peaks including K2 (1954), Nanga Parbat (1953), Annapurna (1950), Kangchenjunga (1955), and Lhotse (1956) as well as subsequent new frontiers, peaks, routes and mountaineering techniques. The volume includes specially commissioned pieces where legendary climbers reflect on their intrepid experiences and heroism on the highest mountains on earth. These accounts are set beside stunning commissioned cartography, historical photographs, newly shot stills of ephemera and artifacts as well as the most recent Himalayan work from some of the world�s leading adventure photographers.
Download or read book The Himalayas written by Andrew J. Hund and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-06-15 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thorough and detailed resource that describes the history, culture, and geography of the Himalayan region, providing an indispensable reference work to both general readers and seasoned scholars in the field. The Himalayas: An Encyclopedia of Geography, History, and Culture serves as a convenient and authoritative reference for anyone exploring the region and seeking to better understand the history, events, peoples, and geopolitical details of this unique area of the world. It explores the geography and details of the demographics, discusses relevant historical events, and addresses socioeconomic movements, political intrigues and controversies, and cultural details as to give an overarching impression of the region as a coherent and cohesive whole. Readers will come away with a vastly heightened understanding of the geographical region we recognize as the Himalayas, and grasp the issues of geography, history, and culture that are central to contemporary understandings of the human culture in the region. The alphabetically arranged and succinct entries provide easy access to detailed, authoritative information. Additionally, sidebars throughout the book relate compelling facts that point readers to new and interesting avenues of exploration. The volume also includes a chronological overview of the region, ten primary source documents, and a comprehensive bibliography of supporting works.
Download or read book Into the Untravelled Himalaya written by Harish Kapadia and published by Indus Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Himalayan Histories written by Chetan Singh and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-12-27 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Himalayan Histories, by one of India's most reputed historians of the Himalaya, is essential for a more complete understanding of Indian history. Because Indian historians have mainly studied riverine belts and life in the plains, sophisticated mountain histories are relatively rare. In this book, Chetan Singh identifies essential aspects of the material, mental, and spiritual world of western Himalayan peasant society. Human enterprise and mountainous terrain long existed in a precarious balance, occasionally disrupted by natural adversity, in this large and difficult region. Small peasant communities lived in scattered environmental niches and tenaciously extracted from their harsh surroundings a rudimentary but sustainable livelihood. These communities were integral constituents of larger political economies that asserted themselves through institutions of hegemonic control, the state being one such institution. This laboriously created life-world was enlivened by myth, folklore, legend, and religious tradition. When colonial rule was established in the region during the nineteenth century, it transformed the peasants' relationship with their natural surroundings. While old political allegiances were weakened, resilient customary hierarchies retained their influence through religio-cultural practices.
Download or read book The Caravan written by Delhi Press and published by Delhi Press. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The country's first and only publication devoted to narrative journalism, The Caravan occupies a singular position among Indian magazines. It is a new kind of magazine for a new kind of reader, one who demands both style and substance. Since its relaunch in January 2010, the magazine has earned a reputation as one of the country's most sophisticated publications-a showcase for the region's finest writers and a distinctive blend of rigorous reporting, incisive criticism and commentary, stunning photo essays, and gripping new fiction and poetry. Its commitment to great storytelling has earned it the respect of readers from around the world. "India's best English language magazine", The Guardian, London "For those with an interest in India, it has become an absolute must-read", The New Republic, Washington The Caravan fills a niche in the Indian media that has remained vacant for far too long, catering to the intellectually curious and aesthetically refined reader, who seeks a magazine of exceptional quality.
Download or read book High Frontiers written by Kenneth M. Bauer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an ethnographic and ecological history of Dolpo, a culturally Tibetan region in western Nepal. Bauer describes Dolpo since the 1950s and traces how pastoralists living in the trans-Himalaya have adapted to sweeping changes in their economic, political and cultural circumstances.
Download or read book Beyond Lines of Control written by Ravina Aggarwal and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-30 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Kashmir conflict, the ongoing border dispute between India and Pakistan, has sparked four wars and cost thousands of lives. In this innovative ethnography, Ravina Aggarwal moves beyond conventional understandings of the conflict—which tend to emphasize geopolitical security concerns and religious essentialisms—to consider how it is experienced by those living in the border zones along the Line of Control, the 435-mile boundary separating India from Pakistan. She focuses on Ladakh, the largest region in northern India’s State of Jammu and Kashmir. Located high in the Himalayan and Korakoram ranges, Ladakh borders Pakistan to the west and Tibet to the east. Revealing how the shadow of war affects the lives of Buddhist and Muslim communities in Ladakh, Beyond Lines of Control is an impassioned call for the inclusion of the region’s cultural history and politics in discussions about the status of Kashmir. Aggarwal brings the insights of performance studies and the growing field of the anthropology of international borders to bear on her extensive fieldwork in Ladakh. She examines how social and religious boundaries are created on the Ladakhi frontier, how they are influenced by directives of the nation-state, and how they are shaped into political struggles for regional control that are legitimized through discourses of religious purity, patriotism, and development. She demonstrates in lively detail the ways that these struggles are enacted in particular cultural performances such as national holidays, festivals, rites of passage ceremonies, films, and archery games. By placing cultural performances and political movements in Ladakh center stage, Aggarwal rewrites the standard plot of nation and border along the Line of Control.
Download or read book Geographical Diversions written by Tina Harris and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working at the intersections of cultural anthropology, human geography, and material culture, Tina Harris explores the social and economic transformations taking place along one trade route that winds its way across China, Nepal, Tibet, and India. How might we make connections between seemingly mundane daily life and more abstract levels of global change? Geographical Diversions focuses on two generations of traders who exchange goods such as sheep wool, pang gdan aprons, and more recently, household appliances. Exploring how traders "make places," Harris examines the creation of geographies of trade that work against state ideas of what trade routes should look like. She argues that the tensions between the apparent fixity of national boundaries and the mobility of local individuals around such restrictions are precisely how routes and histories of trade are produced. The economic rise of China and India has received attention from the international media, but the effects of major new infrastructure at the intersecting borderlands of these nationstates--in places like Tibet, northern India, and Nepal--have rarely been covered. Geographical Diversions challenges globalization theories based on bounded conceptions of nation-states and offers a smaller-scale perspective that differs from many theories of macroscale economic change.
Download or read book Peace and Conflict in Ladakh written by Fernanda Pirie and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthropological study of Ladakh analyses the means by which small communities create spaces of order amidst the heterogeneous forces of modernity. In doing so it also filling a conspicuous gap in the secondary literature on Tibetan law.
Download or read book Sites of Asian Interaction written by Tim Harper and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A focus on the sites of Asian interaction enables this volume to shed new light on the growing field of diaspora studies. Research on Asia's many diasporas has enriched the older literature on migration to illuminate the links of kinship, affect, trade, and information that connect locations across Asia, and beyond. But where many recent works on particular diasporas have tended to look inwards - at how distinctive diasporic cultures maintained a sense of 'home' while abroad - the volume's focus has been on how different diasporas have come into contact with each other in particular places, often for the first time. It also engages with research in the fields of urban studies and urban history. The articles develop the already rich historical literature on port cities across Asia – the quintessential sites of Asian cosmopolitanism – as well as more recent work on the 'moving metropolises' and 'mobile cities' of contemporary Asia.
Download or read book Arts in the Margins of World Encounters written by Willemijn de Jong and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Arts in the Margins of World Encounters' presents original contributions that deal with artworks of differently marginalized people—such as ethnic minorities, refugees, immigrants, disabled people, and descendants of slaves—, a wide variety of art forms—like clay figures, textile, paintings, poems, museum exhibits and theatre performances—, and original data based on committed, long-term fieldwork and/or archival research in Brazil, Martinique, Rwanda, India, Indonesia, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. The volume develops theoretical approaches inspired by innovative theorists and is based on currently debated analytical categories including the ethnographic turn in contemporary art, polycentric aesthetics, and aesthetic cannibalization, among others. This collection also incorporates fascinating and intriguing contemporary cases, but with solid theoretical arguments and grounds. 'Arts in the Margins of World Encounters' will appeal to students at all levels, scholars, and practitioners in arts, aesthetics, anthropology, social inequality, and discrimination, as well as researchers in other fields, including post-colonialism and cultural organizations.
Download or read book White as the Shroud written by Myra MacDonald and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between South and Central Asia, in the high mountains and cold deserts, India, Pakistan and China have fought brutal wars over barren, uninhabited territory in a bid for control over their national peripheries, including Xinjiang and Tibet in China, and Jammu and Kashmir on the Indian subcontinent. White as the Shroud explores this broader story through the most surreal of such conflicts: the Siachen war, fought between India and Pakistan for control of the eponymous glacier. The tale of Siachen highlights the absurdity of seeking hard borders in such desolate mountains, as well as the brutality of high-altitude warfare--more soldiers were killed by the weather and terrain than by the fighting. As one of the few people to have visited both sides of the glacier, Indian and Pakistani, Myra MacDonald provides a first-hand view of the battlefield and a wealth of eyewitness testimony from combatants. She sets this account in the overarching narrative of the Kashmir conflict, India's defeat by China in 1962, and the 1999 India-Pakistan Kargil war. White as the Shroud brings a fresh perspective to one of the most volatile corners of the world, raising questions about borders and the wars fought to defend them.
Download or read book Floating Economies written by Michael J. Casimir and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2021-03-03 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Himalayas of the Indian part of Kashmir three communities depend on the ecology of the Dal lake: market gardeners, houseboat owners and fishers. Floating Economies describes for the first time the complex intermeshing economy, social structure and ecology of the area against the background of history and the present volatile socio-political situation. Using a holistic and multidisciplinary approach, the author deals with the socioeconomic strategies of the communities whose livelihoods are embedded here and analyses the ecological condition of the Dal, and the reasons for its progressive degradation.
Download or read book Narratives Routes and Intersections in Pre Modern Asia written by Radhika Seshan and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 11 Fairs and pilgrimages as points of intersections: the case of medieval western Maharashtra -- 12 Continuing routes, changed intersections: a study of Fort St. George (Madras) in the seventeenth century
Download or read book Becoming Other written by Alex Gillespie and published by IAP. This book was released on 2006-12-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The research reported in this book is unapologetically Meadian. While the work of George Herbert Mead has been of widespread significance, and his name is often cited, there are in fact few empirical studies that have sought to rigorously instantiate his ideas. This is in part because his theory is abstruse and in part because there have been so many divergent interpretations of his theory. The point of departure for the present research is a novel interpretation of Mead. Mead’s core problematic, I argue, is how to explain self-reflection, and his answer to this is the theory of the social act. The present research is an attempt to instantiate this reading. This book puts to rest any glorification of postmodernist belief in the local nature of knowledge and context specificity of human cultural acts as a part of the image of fragmented human lives. Human beings are differentiated and hierarchically integrated wholes who regulate their own organization by cultural means. This conceptual deathblow to postmodernist ideologies is done here without denying the reality of context specificity. In fact, all the evidence in this book shows that each and every moment in the touring act is context bound, and hence unique. Yet there is generality operating upon—and creating—that uniqueness. The author’s careful development of theoretical insights George Herbert Mead reached in his self-dialogues almost a century ago is a new step in the development of cultural psychology as a Wissenschaft aiming at making sense of the human conditions in its generic ways. This itself is an exploring act—one that the social sciences need very much at our present time of abundance of fragmented bits and pieces of information about “the others” that lead us to search for our own unified selves through invention of new ways for touring.
