Sasaks, a people of the Indonesian archipelago, cope with one of the country's worst health records by employing various medical traditions, including their own secret ethnomedical knowledge. But anxiety, in the presence and absence of illness, profoundly shapes the ways Sasaks use healing and knowledge. Hay addresses complex questions regarding cultural models, agency, and other relationships to conclude that the ethnomedical knowledge they use to cope with their illnesses ironically inhibits improvements in their health care. M. Cameron Hay is a NSF Advance Fellow and an Assistant...
Sasaks, a people of the Indonesian archipelago, cope with one of the country's worst health records by employing various medical traditions, inclu...
A World Transformed looks at the Vietnamese revolution from the perspective of Vietnamese culture itself rather than as a reaction to the Cold War or to the actions of external enemies. Kim N. B. Ninh explores the complex debates within Vietnamese society about the self, culture, and national identity. She shows how a collective sense of the nation's weakness united communists and many intellectuals, who looked to the establishment of a socialist state to offer both the ideology and the organization that would encourage the emergence of a modern, independent, postcolonial...
A World Transformed looks at the Vietnamese revolution from the perspective of Vietnamese culture itself rather than as a reaction to the Cold ...
Art as Politics explores the intersection of art, identity politics, and tourism in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Based on long-term ethnographic research from the 1980s to the present, the book offers a nuanced portrayal of the Sa'dan Toraja, a predominantly Christian minority group in the world's most populous Muslim country. Celebrated in anthropological and tourism literatures for their spectacular traditional houses, sculpted effigies of the dead, and pageantry-filled funeral rituals, the Toraja have entered an era of accelerated engagement with the global economy marked by on-going struggles...
Art as Politics explores the intersection of art, identity politics, and tourism in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Based on long-term ethnographic research f...
How did early Buddhists actually encounter the seminal texts of their religion? What were the attitudes held by monks and laypeople toward the written and oral Pali traditions? In this pioneering work, Daniel Veidlinger explores these questions in the context of the northern Thai kingdom of Lan Na. Drawing on a vast array of sources, including indigenous chronicles, reports by foreign visitors, inscriptions, and palm-leaf manuscripts, he traces the role of written Buddhist texts in the predominantly oral milieu of northern Thailand from the fifteenth to the nineteenth...
How did early Buddhists actually encounter the seminal texts of their religion? What were the attitudes held by monks and laypeople toward the writ...
How are meta-narratives of development entangled in people's identities and life trajectories? How do they inhabit people's histories, their understandings of their place in the world, and their dreams for the future? The idea of development has been deconstructed and scrutinized as a "Western" metaphor ordering global difference and as a banner under which diverse schemes for societal improvement find legitimacy and common purpose. But how is development assimilated into the worldviews of development's subjects? How does it reshape identities and in what ways is it reshaped in the...
How are meta-narratives of development entangled in people's identities and life trajectories? How do they inhabit people's histories, their unders...
For over a century French officials in Indochina systematically uprooted metis children - those born of Southeast Asian mothers and white, African, or Indian fathers - from their homes. The Uprooted offers an in-depth investigation of this child-removal program: the motivations behind it, reception of it, and resistance to it.
For over a century French officials in Indochina systematically uprooted metis children - those born of Southeast Asian mothers and white, African, or...
An intimate ethnographic exploration of the ways in which Minangkabau people understand human value. Gregory Simon's book, based on extended ethnographic research in the small city of Bukittinggi, shines new light on Minangkabau social life by delving into people's interior lives, calling into question many assumptions about Southeast Asian values and the nature of Islamic practice.
An intimate ethnographic exploration of the ways in which Minangkabau people understand human value. Gregory Simon's book, based on extended ethnograp...