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Relics of the Buddha
Buddhism is popularly seen as a religion stressing the truth of impermanence. How, then, to account for the long-standing veneration, in Asian Buddhist communities, of bone fragments, hair, teeth, and other bodily bits said to come from the historic Buddha? Early European and American scholars of religion, influenced by a characteristic Protestant bias against relic worship, declared such practices to be superstitious and fraudulent, and far from the true essence of Buddhism. John Strong's book, by contrast, argues that relic veneration has played a serious and integral role in Buddhist traditions in South and Southeast Asia-and that it is in no way foreign to Buddhism. The book is structure...
Rethinking Mao
Offers a different perspective on Mao Zedong, the major architect of the Chinese Revolution and leader of the People's Republic of China until his death in 1976. Utilizing a number of documents written by Mao, here, the author 'rethinks' Mao by subjecting a number his controversial themes to fresh scrutiny.
Southern Heritage on Display
How ritualized public ceremonies affirm or challenge cultural identities associated with the American South W. J. Cash's 1941 observation that “there are many Souths and many cultural traditions among them” is certainly validated by this book. Although the Civil War and its “lost cause” tradition continues to serve as a cultural root paradigm in celebrations, both uniting and dividing loyalties, southerners also embrace a panoply of public rituals—parades, cook-offs, kinship homecomings, church assemblies, music spectacles, and material culture exhibitions—that affirm other identities. From the Appalachian uplands to the Mississippi Delta, from Kentucky bluegrass to Carolina pied...
Southern Indians and Anthropologists
Ranging in setting from a children's summer school program to a museum of history and culture to a fatherhood project, these eleven papers document some of the many ways in which anthropologists and Native Americans are striving to work together at higher levels of accountability, reciprocity, and mutual enrichment. The Native American groups discussed in the volume include the Yuchi of Oklahoma, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina, the Powhatans of Virginia, the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, and the Waccamaw Siouan community of coastal North Carolina. The volume's contributors consider such issues as education, community development,...
Spiritual Currency in Northeast Brazil
This book examines the spiritual community of the followers of St. Francis of Wounds in the town of Canindé in northeast Brazil. Their tradition involves pilgrimage and the practice of crafting unique offerings in payment for healing and reversal of bad fortune--a practice predating Christianity and brought to the new world by explorers and early European colonial powers. King argues that these marginalized Brazilians, living in a region where poverty is endemic, use St. Francis of Wounds to replace the medical and social services that the government has failed to provide. She further illustrates the evolution of the regional practice with photographs documenting all stages of this tradition, especially the folk art ex-votos used to pay for the saint's intervention.
Red Legacies in China
What has contemporary China inherited from its revolutionary past? How do the realities and memories, aesthetics and practices of the Mao era still reverberate in the post-Mao cultural landscape? The essays in this volume propose “red legacies” as a new critical framework from which to examine the profusion of cultural productions and afterlives of the communist revolution in order to understand China’s continuities and transformations from socialism to postsocialism. Organized into five parts—red foundations, red icons, red classics, red bodies, and red shadows—the book’s interdisciplinary contributions focus on visual and performing arts, literature and film, language and thought, architecture, museums, and memorials. Mediating at once unfulfilled ideals and unmourned ghosts across generations, red cultural legacies suggest both inheritance and debt, and can be mobilized to support as well as to critique the status quo.
Death's Social and Material Meaning Beyond the Human
Death studies typically focus on the death of humans, overlooking the wider factors involved in social and natural processes around death. This edited volume provides an alternative focus for death studies by looking beyond human death, to reveal the complex interconnections among human and more than human creatures, entities and environments. Bringing together a diverse range of international scholars, the book sheds light on topics which have previously remained at the margins of contemporary death studies and death care cultures. Organised around three themes - Knowledge and Mediation, Care and Remembrance, and Agency and Power - this book pushes the boundaries of death studies to explore death and dying from beyond the perspective of a nature/culture binary.
Stealing Shining Rivers
In this revelatory book, Molly Doane describes how Chimalapas, a rainforest in Mexico's southern state of Oaxaca, was appropriated and redefined by environmentalists. It demonstrates that good intentions are not always enough to produce results that benefit both a habitat and its many different types of indigenous inhabitants.
Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine
Chinese medicine approaches emotions and emotional disorders differently than the Western biomedical model. Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine offers an ethnographic account of emotion-related disorders as they are conceived, talked about, experienced, and treated in clinics of Chinese medicine in contemporary China. While Chinese medicine (zhongyi) has been predominantly categorized as herbal therapy that treats physical disorders, it is also well known that Chinese patients routinely go to zhongyi clinics for treatment of illness that might be diagnosed as psychological or emotional in the West. Through participant observation, interviews, case studies, and zhongyi publications, both classic and modern, the author explores the Chinese notion of "body-person," unravels cultural constructions of emotion, and examines the way Chinese medicine manipulates body-mind connections.
Signifying Serpents and Mardi Gras Runners
These case studies explore how competing interests among the keepers of a community's heritage shape how that community both regards itself and reveals itself to others. As editors Celeste Ray and Luke Eric Lassiter note in their introduction, such stakeholders are no longer just of the community itself, but are now often "outsiders"--tourists, the mass media, and even anthropologists and folklorists. The setting of each study is a different marginalized community in the South. Arranged around three themes that have often surfaced in debates about public folklore and anthropology over the last two decades, the studies consider issues of representation, identity, and practice. One study of re...
