Religious Revival in the Tibetan Borderlands PDF Download

Author: Koen Wellens
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295801557
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
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Wellens's ethnographic research in two Premi communities on opposite sides of the border, and his analysis of available historical documents, find multiple advocates and rationales for the revival of both formal Tibetan Buddhism and the indigenous Premi practices centered on ritual specialists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.

Author: Rebecca Clothey
Publisher: ASIAN HIGHLANDS PERSPECTIVES
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 502

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Book Description
· A Space for the Possible: Globalization and English Language Learning for Tibetan Students in China (007-032) by Clothey, Rebecca, and Elena McKinlay · An A mdo Tibetan Pastoralist Family's Lo sar in Stong skor Village by Thurston, Timothy, and Tsering Samdrup · Hail Prevention Rituals and Ritual Practitioners in Northeast Amdo (071-111) by Rdo rje don grub · Pyramid Schemes on the Tibetan Plateau (113-140) by Gonier, Devin, and Rgyal yum sgrol ma · Tibetans and Muslims in Northwest China: Economic and Political Aspects of a Complex Historical Relationship (141-186) by Horlemann, Bianca · Sacred Dairies, Dairymen, and Buffaloes of the Nilgiri Mountains in South India (187-256) by Walker, Anthony · An A mdo Family's Income and Expenditure in 2011 (257-283) by Rdo rje bkra shis, Rta mgrin bkra shis, and Charles Kevin Stuart · Architecture in The bo, 'Brug chu, and Co ne Counties, Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Gansu (285-333) by Chos dbying rdo rje · Change, Reputation, and Hair: A Female Rite of Passage in Mtha' ba Village (335-364) by Blo bzang tshe ring, Don 'grub sgrol ma, Gerald Roche, and Charles Kevin Stuart · A College Student (367-386) by 'Phrin las nyi ma · Set Free by Tragedy (387-395) by G.yang mtsho skyid · Who is to Blame? (397-408) by Klu rgyal 'bum · Young Love (409-419) by Bkra shis rab rten · Silent as a Winter Cuckoo (421-426) by Pad+ma dbang chen · QQ Destiny (427-434) by Pad+ma dbang chen · Review - China's Last Imperial Frontier and The Sichuan Frontier and Tibet (437-442) by Entenmann, Robert · Review - Harnessing Fortune (443-448) by Fischler, Lisa C. · Review - Inter-Ethnic Dynamics in Asia (449-453) by Ramirez, Philippe · Review - Spirits of the Place (455-459) by Noseworthy, William B. · Review - Moving Mountains (461-469) by Noseworthy, William B. · Review - The Complete Works of Zhuang Xueben (471-476) by Holmes-Tagchungdarpa, Amy · Review - Religious Revival in the Tibetan Borderlands (477-480) by Wang, Bo · Review - The Sun Rises (481-485 ) by Bender, Mark · Review - Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (Chinese Edition) (487-495) by Yu, Dan Smyer, and Zomkyid Drolma · Review - Labrang Monastery (497-500) by Robinson, Christina Kilby · Asian Highlands Perspectives 21 - All Papers (001-500) by Various

Author: Gerald Roche
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501777793
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
In The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, Gerald Roche sheds light on a global crisis of linguistic diversity that will see at least half of the world's languages disappear this century. Roche explores the erosion of linguistic diversity through a study of a community on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau in the People's Republic of China. Manegacha is but one of the sixty minority languages in Tibet and is spoken by about 8,000 people who are otherwise mostly indistinguishable from the Tibetan communities surrounding them. Recently, many in these communities have switched to speaking Tibetan, and Manegacha faces an uncertain future. The author uses the Manegacha case to show how linguistic diversity across Tibet is collapsing under assimilatory state policies. He looks at how global advocacy networks inadequately acknowledge this issue, highlighting the complex politics of language in an inter-connected world. The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet broadens our understanding of Tibet and China, the crisis of global linguistic diversity, and the radical changes needed to address this crisis.

Author: Liang Yongjia
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429944039
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book is based on anthropological fieldwork among the Bai, an ethnic minority with a population of two million in Dali, southwest China. It explores the religious and ethnic revival in the last two decades against a historical background. It explains why and how religions and ethnic identity are revived in contemporary China, with the revived analytical concept of "alterity", which suggests a world beyond here and now. The book focuses on the particular institutions and ritual technologies that seek for access to the invisible, transcendental other—both spatial and temporal. It covers a variety of topics, including pre-modern kingship, modern utopia, religious alterity, ethnic identity, religious associations, the Intangible Cultural Heritage, and temple restorations.

Author: Mette Halskov Hansen
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295805439
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In twenty-first-century China, socialist educational traditions have given way to practices that increasingly emphasize the individual. This volume investigates that trend, drawing on Hansen's fieldwork in a rural high school in Zhejiang where students, teachers, and officials of different generations, genders, and social backgrounds form what is essentially a miniature version of Chinese society. Hansen paints a complex picture of the emerging “neosocialist” educational system and shows how individualization of students both challenges and reinforces state control of society.

Author: Emily Ng
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520972635
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Traversing visible and invisible realms, A Time of Lost Gods attends to profound rereadings of politics, religion, and madness in the cosmic accounts of spirit mediumship. Drawing on research across a temple, a psychiatric unit, and the home altars of spirit mediums in a rural county of China’s Central Plain, it asks: What ghostly forms emerge after the death of Mao and the so-called end of history? The story of religion in China since the market reforms of the late 1970s is often told through its destruction under Mao and relative flourishing thereafter. Here, those who engage in mediumship offer a different history of the present. They approach Mao’s reign not simply as an earthly secular rule, but an exceptional interval of divine sovereignty, after which the cosmos collapsed into chaos. Caught between a fading era and an ever-receding horizon, those “left behind” by labor outmigration refigure the evacuated hometown as an ethical-spiritual center to come, amidst a proliferation of madness-inducing spirits. Following pronouncements of China’s rise, and in the wake of what Chinese intellectuals termed semicolonialism, the stories here tell of spirit mediums, patients, and psychiatrists caught in a shared dilemma, in a time when gods have lost their way.

Author: Emily Chao
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295804386
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Lijiang, a once-sleepy market town in southwest China, has become a magnet for tourism since the mid-1990s. Drawing on stories about taxi drivers, reluctant brides, dogmeat, and shamanism, Emily Chao illustrates how biopolitics and the essentialization of difference shape the ways in which Naxi residents represent and interpret their social world. The vignettes presented here are lively examples of the cultural reverberations that have occurred throughout contemporary China in the wake of its emergence as a global giant. With particular attention to the politics of gender, ethnicity, and historical representation, Chao reveals how citizens strategically imagine, produce, and critique a new moral economy in which the market and neoliberal logic are preeminent.

Author: Ronald M. Davidson
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publishe
ISBN: 9788120832787
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 620

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Book Description
How did a society on the edge of collapse and dominated by wandering bands of armed men give way to a vibrant Buddhist culture, led by yogins and scholars? Ronald M. Davidson explores how the translation and spread of esoteric Buddhist texts dramatically shaped Tibetan society and led to its rise as the center of Buddhist culture throughout Asia, replacing India as the perceived source of religious ideology and tradition. During the Tibetan Renaissance (950-1200 C.E.), monks and yogins translated an enormous number of Indian Buddhist texts. They employed the evolving literature and practices of esoteric Buddhism as the basis to reconstruct Tibetan religious, cultural, and political institutions. Many translators achieved the de facto status of feudal lords and while not always loyal to their Buddhist vows, these figures helped solidify political power in the hands of religious authorities and began a process that led to the Dalai Lama's theocracy. Davidson's vivid portraits of the monks, priests, popular preachers, yogins, and aristocratic clans who changed Tibetan society and culture further enhance his perspectives on the tensions and transformations that characterized medieval Tibet.

Author: Jane E. Caple
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824878051
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
The speed and extent of the Tibetan Buddhist monastic revival make it one of the most extraordinary stories of religious resurgence in post-Mao China. At the end of the 1970s, there were no working monasteries; within a decade, thousands had been reconstructed and repopulated. Most studies have focused on the political challenges facing Tibetan monasteries, emphasizing their relationship to the Chinese state. Yet, in their efforts to revive and develop their institutions, monks have also had to negotiate a rapidly changing society, playing a delicate balancing act fraught with moral dilemma as well as political danger. Drawing on the recent “moral turn” in anthropology, this volume, the first full-length ethnographic study of the subject, explores the social and moral dimensions of monastic revival and reform across a range of Geluk monasteries in northeast Tibet (Amdo/Qinghai Province) from the 1980s on. Author Jane Caple’s analysis shows that ideas and debates about how best to maintain the mundane bases of monastic Buddhism—economy and population—are intermeshed with those concerning the proper role and conduct of monks and the ethics of monastic-lay relations. Facing a shrinking monastic population, monks are grappling with the impacts of secular education, demographic transition, rising living standards, urbanization, and marketization, all of which have driven debates within Buddhism elsewhere and fueled perceptions of monastic decline. Some Tibetans—including monks—are even questioning the “good” of the mass form of monasticism that has been a distinctive feature of Tibetan society for hundreds of years. Given monastic Buddhism’s integral position in Tibetan community life and association with Tibetan identity, Caple argues that its precarity in relation to Tibetan society raises questions about its future that go well beyond the issue of religious freedom.

Author: Jelle J.P. Wouters
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000598586
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
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.