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The Qing Dynasty was the last of the conquest dynasties to rule China. Its rulers, Manchus from the north, held power for three centuries despite major cultural and ideological differences with the Han majority. In this book, Evelyn Rawski re-interprets the remarkable success of this dynasty, arguing that it derived not from the assimilation of the dominant Chinese culture but rather from an artful synthesis of Manchu leadership styles with Han Chinese policies.
Shamanism, Discourse, Modernity considers indigenous peoples’ struggles for human rights, anxieties about anthropocentric mastery of nature, neoliberal statecraft, and entrepreneurialism of the self. The book focuses on four domains - shamanism, indigenism, environmentalism and neoliberalism - in terms of interrelated historical processes and overlapping discourses. In doing so, it engages with shamanism’s manifold meanings in a world increasingly sensitive to indigenous peoples’ practices of territoriality, increasingly concerned about humans’ integral relationship with natural environments, and increasingly encouraged and coerced to adjust self-conduct to comport with and augment government conduct.
This book offers global perspectives from Mediterranean, Asian, Australian, and American cultures on sacred sites and their related stories in regional history. Contemporary society witnesses many travelers visiting sacred sites (temples, mountains, castles, churches, houses) throughout the world. These visits often involve discovery of new historical facts through the origin stories of the associated tribe, region, or nation. The transmission of oral tradition and myth carries on the significant meaning of those religious sites. This volume unveils multi-angle perspectives of symbolic and mystical places. The contributors describe the religio-political experiences of each regional case, and analyze the religiosity of local people as a lens through which readers can re-examine the concept of iconography, syncretism, and materialism. In addition, contributors interpret the growth of new religions as the alternative perspectives of anti-traditional religions. This new approach offers significant insight into comprehending the practical agony and sorrow of regional people in the context of contemporary history.
The rise of Spatial Humanities has spurred a digital revolution in the field of Chinese studies, especially in the study of religion. Based on years of data compilation and analysis of religious sites, this book explores the formation of Regional Religious Systems (RRS) in Greater China in unprecedented scope and depth. It addresses quantitatively the enduring historical and contemporary issues of China’s deep-rooted regionalism and spatially variegated cultural and religious landscape. A range of topics are explored: theoretical discussions of the concept of RRS; case studies of regional and local religious institutions; the formation of local cults and pilgrimage network; and the spread of religious networks to overseas Chinese communities and the Bon religion in Tibet. The book also considers long-standing challenges of researching with spatial data for humanities and social science research, such as data collection, integration, spatial analysis, and map creation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, Chinese Studies, Digital Humanities, Human Geography and Sociology.
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.
Compiled from ancient and scattered texts and based on groundbreaking new research, Handbook of Chinese Mythology is the most comprehensive English-language work on the subject ever written from an exclusively Chinese perspective. This work focuses on the Han Chinese people but ranges across the full spectrum of ancient and modern China, showing how key myths endured and evolved over time. A quick reference section covers all major deities, spirits, and demigods, as well as important places, mythical animals and plants, and related items.
Based on first-hand materials gathered through decades of field research and fleshed out with the author's insightful religious, cultural, and historical observations extending back to Qing Dynasty times, ancient archaeological discoveries and the legacy of Siberian peoples, this two-volume ethnological study investigates shamanic rituals, myths and lore in northern China and explores the common ideology underlying the origins of the region's cultures. The two volumes discuss the spiritual world of northern Shamanism and investigates the various shamanic rituals, divination, spirit idols and myths, illuminating how worship and ideas are imbedded in and interweave with the indigenous environm...
Historical Perspectives on East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine brings together over fifty papers by leading contemporary historians from more than a dozen nations. It is the third in a series of books growing out of the tri-annual International Conference on the History of Science in East Asia, the largest and most prestigious gathering of scholars in the field. The current volume broadens the field's traditional focus on China to include path-breaking work on Vietnam, Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and even the transmission of Asian science and technology to Europe and the United States. Topics covered include: traditional Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipino medicines; Chinese astronomy; Japanese earthquakes; science and technology policy; architecture; the digital revolution; and much else.
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