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Imagining the Good Life
This is a book of great originality that analyses cultural change and experience of development in terms of the pursuit of the ‘good life’ as a social process. While recent anthropological critiques of development highlight the importance of ‘local knowledge’, this book argues that these critiques have not gone far enough, and suggests that a much more fundamental issue concerns the ends of development as seen from a more holistic, cultural perspective. Based on ethnographic research among an ethnic Tibetan community in the Nepal Himalaya, the book eloquently illustrates how the pursuit of the good life is inextricably tied to space and history, and demonstrates the relevance of ethno-historically generated conceptions of the ‘good life’ to the practice of development.
The Navel of the Demoness
This groundbreaking study focuses on a village called Te in a "Tibetanized" region of northern Nepal. While Te's people are nominally Buddhist, and engage the services of resident Tibetan Tantric priests for a range of rituals, they are also exponents of a local religion that involves blood sacrifices to wild, unconverted territorial gods and goddesses. The village is unusual in the extent to which it has maintained its local autonomy and also in the degree to which both Buddhism and the cults of local gods have been subordinated to the pragmatic demands of the village community. Charles Ramble draws on extensive fieldwork, as well as 300 years' worth of local historical archives (in Tibetan...
Himalayan Languages
With its many and diverse languages, including some with very long documented histories, its cultural diversity, and its widespread multilingualism- both the stable and transient kind- the Himalayan region is a treasure trove of empirical data for linguistic research on language typology and universals, historical linguistics, language contact and areal linguistics. Himalayan Languages contains contributions on Himalayan linguistics written by some of the leading experts in the field. The volume is divided into three parts: First, a general overview is given of the linguistic study of Himalayan languages and language communities. The second part offers synchronic studies of individual languages of the region (Indo-Aryan languages Shina and Kalasha, and Tibeto-Burman languages Belhare, Magar, Kinnauri, Classical Tibetan and Thangmi). The papers in the third part of the volume address topics in historical and areal linguistics, with an emphasis on the Tibeto-Burman languages of the region, discussing grammaticalization processes (in Sunwar, Newar, Seke, Tshangla and Bantawa) and the subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman.
Fluid Boundaries
More than an ethnography, this book clarifies one of the most important current debates in anthropology: How should anthropologists regard culture, history, and the power process? Since the 1980s, the Thakali of Nepal have searched for an identity and a clarification of their "true" culture and history in the wake of their rise to political power and achievement of economic success. Although united in this search, the Thakali are divided as to the answers that have been proposed: the "Hinduization" of religious practices, the promotion of Tibetan Buddhism, the revival of practices associated with the Thakali shamans, and secularization. Ironically, the attempts by the Thakali to define their identity reveal that to return to tradition they must first re-create it—but this process of re-creation establishes it in a way in which it has never existed. To return to "tradition"—to become Thakali again—is, in a way, to become Thakali for the very first time.
The Mardzong Manuscripts
In 2008, an international team of climbers discovered a large collection of Tibetan manuscripts in a cave complex called Mardzong, in Nepal’s remote Mustang district. The following year, the entire cache—over five thousand folios from some sixty different works of the Buddhist and Bön religions, some more than seven centuries old—were removed to the safe keeping of a monastery, where they were later examined by experts from different disciplines. This book is the result of their findings. The authors present what they have been able to discover about the content of these manuscripts, their age, the materials with which they were made, the patrons who commissioned them and the scribes and artists who created them. Contributors include: Agnieszka Helman-Ważny, Charles Ramble, Nyima Drandul Gurung, Naljor Tsering, Sarah Skumanov, Emilie Arnaud-Nguyen and Bazhen Zeren
The Scientific Study of Society
Tradition recognises five social sciences: anthropology, economies, social psychology, sociology, and political science. But who knows what is going on in all five disciplines? Social scientists from one discipline often know little or nothing about the progress made by social scientists from another discipline working on essentially the same social problem. Sometimes, even of a neighbouring discipline is terra incognita. the methodology The problem becomes worse when we widen the remit to natural scientists and engineers. I have found little evidence myself that they see themselves as standing on the other side of an unbridgeable golf between two cultures. They observe the intellectual exce...
The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Practice
"This Handbook provides a state-of-the-art exploration of several key dynamics in current studies of the Buddhist tradition with a focus on practice. Embodiment, materiality, emotion, and gender shape the way most Buddhists engage with their traditions, in contrast to popular representations of Buddhism as spiritual, disembodied, and largely devoid of ritual. This volume highlights how practice often represents a fluid, dynamic, and strategic means of defining identity and negotiating the challenges of everyday life. Essays explore the transformational aims of practices that require practitioners to move, gesture, and emote in prescribed ways, including the ways that scholars' own embodied p...
