This volume addresses research topics within the field of Bhakti literature.

An examination of the links between religion and statecraft and how they affected the concept of monarchy during the Han dynasty.

The Pukhtuns are numerically and politically one of the most significant ethno-linguistic groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan. This important study of Pukhtun society concentrates on the lives, thoughts and gham-khadi (funerals-weddings) ceremonies of the women, especially of the elite, wealthy and educated women (Bibiane) who have largely been overlooked in previous studies. Contesting their conventional representation as idle, it illustrates their commitment to various forms of work within familial and social contexts. It challenges the commonly assumed models of contemporary Pakistan...

Bauls have achieved fame as wandering minstrels and mystics in India and Bangladesh. They are recruited from Hindu and Muslim communities and renowned for their beautiful songs. Using fieldwork and oral and written texts, Jeanne Openshaw analyzes the rise of the Bauls to their present revered status, traversing from the conventional historical and textual approaches towards an ethnographic study of their world, where love and the body are valued and women extolled above men. Her approach is challenging and sympathetic to this spiritual and creative people.

Since the time of the Upanishads, the Indian tradition of semantic elucidation known as nirvacana analysis has been a powerful tool in the interpretation of Sanskrit texts. By drawing on the appropriate literature and deploying the model provided by the tradition itself, the author explains how it was used and why it became so significant. The book will be an important reference tool for students of Sanskrit and Indian studies, as well as to those in the field of indigenous Indian linguistics.

The editors bring together an international team of contributors consisting of archaeologists, geographers, historians, anthropologists and agronomists in a penetrating account of the transformation of nomadic society. The chapters provide an integrated analysis of the changing relations of ecology, economy and socio-political organization in the steppes of the central Middle East, documenting the longue-duree of history alongside the rapid transformations in the twentieth century. This is an accessible and interactive book that will attract readers from a variety of disciplines, including...

Recent archaeological discoveries, including manuscripts, have shed new light on China's history, in particular Qin and Han (221 BCE-220 CE), this volume's main focus. They make possible a deeper account of the growth of cities and of the spread of Chinese influence over distant areas. This book provides the first comprehensive survey of recent developments, evaluating the newly-found evidence in the light of earlier conclusions from China, Japan, Europe and America. Through cross-cultural comparisons and a close study of both the excavated and received literature, new conclusions are...

This is a complete catalogue, in Japanese with a parallel Japanese/English introduction, of early books acquired by the diplomats W. G. Aston, Ernest Satow, and Heinrich von Siebold in Japan, mostly in the 1860s and 1870s. Of the 2,500 items, some are manuscripts and some movable-type books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the bulk, however, are wood-block printed books of the Edo period (1600 1868). The editors' introduction outlines the history of the collection, identifying some of the more important items and explaining the bibliographical principles on which the catalogue...

The aim of this study is to describe the traditional Biblical and patristic Amharic commentary material of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and to present in translation a sufficient sample of the Amharic, and also the Geez, commentary material, that its character can be clearly seen. Accordingly, the study is divided into three parts - a general introduction, an annotated translation of a Geez commentary, and an annotated translation of an Amharic commentary. The book chosen for parts II and III is the Apocalypse of John.

In his final book, the late Arthur Hatto analyses the Khanty epic tradition in Siberia on the basis of eighteen texts of Khanty oral heroic epic poems recorded and edited by a succession of Hungarian and Russian scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book examines the world view of an indigenous culture as reconstructed from its own words, demonstrates a flexible outline for organising an analytical dossier of the genre of oral heroic epic poetry in a specific culture, and presents an abundance of new information to compare with better-known heroic epics. Consisting of main...