You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Tibet is known for its broad range of marriage practices, particularly polyandry, where two or more brothers share one wife. With economic development and massive Chinese social and political reforms, including new marriage laws prohibiting plural marriages, polyandry was expected to disappear from Tibetan social lives. This book takes as its starting point the surprising increase in polyandry in Panam valley from the 1980s. It explores married lives in polyandrous houses and develops a theory of a flexible kinship of potentiality through the lens of a farming village in Tibet Autonomous Region.
Introduction -- The return of polyandry -- Trajectories into houses -- Fraternal relations -- Female roles -- The house as ritual space -- Moral networks and enduring hierarchies -- Conclusion -- Epilogue -- Appendix. Timeline -- Glossary of Tibetan terms.
The first comprehensive exploration of disability and citizenship in Chinese society and culture from 1949 to the present day.
An intimate meditation on aging and dying in exile among elderly Tibetans in Dharamsala, India In a Tibetan saying, the journey of life is likened to a climb up to a mountain pass. Upon reaching it, the journey concludes and one must cross over into death and the next rebirth. The impermanence of life—described by the Buddha as the nature of reality—crystallizes at the mountain pass, manifesting itself through the painful and arduous descent ahead and a series of sufferings. In this book, Harmandeep Kaur Gill offers an intimate meditation on the last part of the journey at the mountain pass through closely drawn portraits of elderly, exiled Tibetans who aged in Dharamsala, India, far awa...
None
This study explores how Tibetans manoeuvre within two contradictory value systems - those of old Tibet and the new People's Republic of China - balancing between ideals and pragmatism. More specifically, it asks how it is that the social categories of pre-communist Lhasa persist and are relevant in daily life despite decades of Chinese rule and the comprehensive restructuring of Tibetan society.
Questions regarding the origins, mobility, and effects of analytical concepts continue to emerge as anthropology endeavors to describe similarities and differences in social life around the world. Cutting and Connecting rethinks this comparative enterprise by calling in a conceptual debt that theoretical innovations from Melanesian anthropology owe to network analysis originally developed in African contexts. On this basis, the contributors adopt and employ concepts from recent studies of Melanesia to analyze contemporary life on the African continent and to explore how this exchange influences the borrowed anthropological perspectives. By focusing on ways in which networks are cut and connections are made, these empirical investigations show how particular relationships are created in today’s Africa. In addition, the volume aims for an approach that recasts relationships between theory and place and concepts and ethnography, in a manner that destabilizes the distinction between fieldwork and writing.
Only fifty years ago, Tibetan medicine, now seen in China as a vibrant aspect of Tibetan culture, was considered a feudal vestige to be eliminated through government-led social transformation. Medicine and Memory in Tibet examines medical revivalism on the geographic and sociopolitical margins both of China and of Tibet�s medical establishment in Lhasa, exploring the work of medical practitioners, or amchi, and of Medical Houses in the west-central region of Tsang. Due to difficult research access and the power of state institutions in the writing of history, the perspectives of more marginal amchi have been absent from most accounts of Tibetan medicine. Theresia Hofer breaks new ground both theoretically and ethnographically, in ways that would be impossible in today�s more restrictive political climate that severely limits access for researchers. She illuminates how medical practitioners safeguarded their professional heritage through great adversity and personal hardship.
Tibetan understandings of nyoné — ‘madness’— encompass a broad range of concepts. Perspectives on the causation and treatment of madness as an illness are informed by Tantric and medical understandings of mind-body structure and (dys)functioning, as well as people’s relationships with non-human entities. In addition, ‘madness’ may be seen as a sign of enlightenment in the case of some Tantric practitioners. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Tibetan region of Amdo in northwest China, as well as examination of Tibetan medical and religious texts, Illness and Enlightenment explores the multi-faceted concept of nyoné through key Tibetan concepts of wind, heart, and mind, as well as human-spirit relationships.
Bodies in Balance: The Art of Tibetan Medicine is the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary exploration of the triangular relationship among the Tibetan art and science of healing (Sowa Rigpa), Buddhism, and arts and crafts. Generously illustrated with more than 200 images, Bodies in Balance includes essays on contemporary practice, pharmacology and compounding medicines, astrology and divination, history and foundational treatises. The volume brings to life the theory and practice of this ancient healing art. 2015 Best Art Book Accolade, ICAS Book Prize in the Humanities Category Bodies in Balance: The Art of Tibetan Medicine is the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary exploration of the...