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In this volume the role of ideology in the emergency of early states is discussed by an international group of specialists. The book is of interest to all those concerned with the complex interaction of ideological and political developments.
This groundbreaking book examines the role of rulers with nomadic roots in transforming the great societies of Eurasia, especially from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. Distinguished historian Pamela Kyle Crossley, drawing on the long history of nomadic confrontation with Eurasia’s densely populated civilizations, argues that the distinctive changes we associate with modernity were founded on vernacular literature and arts, rising literacy, mercantile and financial economies, religious dissidence, independent learning, and self-legitimating rulership. Crossley finds that political traditions of Central Asia insulated rulers from established religious authority and promoted the object...
Inuit Women is the definitive study of the Inuit during a time of rapid change. Based on fourteen years of research and fieldwork, this analysis focuses on the challenges facing Inuit women as they enter the twenty-first century. Written shortly after the creation of Nunavut, a new province carved out of traditional Inuit homelands in the Canadian North, this compelling book combines conclusions drawn from the authors' ethnographic research with the stories of Inuit women and men, told in their own words. In addition to their presentation of the personal portraits and voices of many Inuit respondents, Janet Mancini Billson and Kyra Mancini explore global issues: the impact of rapid social ch...
The transfer of knowledge is a key issue in the North as Indigenous Peoples meet the ongoing need to adapt to cultural and environmental change. In eight essays, experts survey critical issues surrounding the knowledge practices of the Inuit of northern Canada and Greenland and the Northern Sámi of Scandinavia, and the difficulties of transferring that knowledge from one generation to the next. Reflecting the ongoing work of the Research Group Circumpolar Cultures, these multidisciplinary essays offer fresh understandings through history and across geography as scholars analyze cultural, ecological, and political aspects of peoples in transition. Traditions, Traps and Trends is an important book for students and scholars in anthropology and ethnography and for everyone interested in the Circumpolar North. Contributors: Cunera Buijs, Frédéric Laugrand, Barbara Helen Miller, Thea Olsthoorn, Jarich Oosten, Willem Rasing, Kim van Dam, Nellejet Zorgdrager
Certain religious behaviours clearly reduce biological fitness. These behaviours include celibacy along with various forms of asceticism, and rituals that harm the performer. Such behaviours are found in widely different cultures. How is this possible? This book shows that these behaviours (as is religion in general) are by-products of features of the human mind whose evolutionary fitness is beyond doubt and explores those features. Which are those features? This book proposes a twofold answer. It draws attention to the layered nature of human consciousness, in which different manners of experience are superimposed on each other. This goes a long way toward accounting for the universal relig...
Using archival material and oral testimony collected during workshops in Nunavut between 1996 and 2008, Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten provide a nuanced look at Inuit religion, offering a strong counter narrative to the idea that traditional Inuit culture declined post-contact. They show that setting up a dichotomy between a past identified with traditional culture and a present involving Christianity obscures the continuity and dynamics of Inuit society, which has long borrowed and adapted "outside" elements. They argue that both Shamanism and Christianity are continually changing in the Arctic and ideas of transformation and transition are necessary to understand both how the ideology of a hunting society shaped Inuit Christian cosmology and how Christianity changed Inuit shamanic traditions.
Doctoral thesis. Analyses the traditional religion of the Inuit of northeastern Canada.
Voorts een alphabetische lijst van Nederlandsche boeken in België uitgegeven.