Kategoria BISAC: History >> Asia - General

The forms of contemporary society and politics are often understood to be diametrically opposed to any expression of the supernatural; what happens when those forms are themselves regarded as manifestations of spirits and other occult phenomena? In Not Quite Shamans, Morten Axel Pedersen explores how the Darhad people of Northern Mongolia's remote Shishged Valley have understood and responded to the disruptive transition to postsocialism by engaging with shamanic beliefs and practices associated with the past.

For much of the twentieth century, Mongolia's communist rulers...

The Asia-Pacific region has not only the greatest concentration of population but is, arguably, the future economic centre of the world. Epidemiological transition in the region is occurring much faster than it did in the West and many countries face the emerging problem of chronic diseases at the same time as they continue to grapple with communicable diseases.

This book explores how disease patterns and health problems in Asia and the Pacific, and collective responses to them, have been shaped over time by cultural, economic, social, demographic, environmental and...

Animal and Shaman presents a comparative survey of the ancient customs and religions of Central Asia. The Pre-Christian and Pre-Muslim peoples of the region, such as the Huns, Scythians, Turks, Mongols, Manchus, Finns and Hungarians, shared a number of traditions and rituals. Characteristics observed by anthropologists today may be traced directly back to an ancient past.

In ancient times there were remarkable commonalities in the forms of worship and spiritual expression among the different peoples of Inner Eurasia, all largely based on the role of animals in their lives....

Europe s imperial projects were often predicated on a series of legal and scientific distinctions that were frequently challenged by the reality of social and sexual interactions between the colonized and the colonizers.When Emmanuelle Saada discovered a 1928 decree defining the status of persons of mixed parentage born in French Indochina the" metis" she found not only a remarkable artifact of colonial rule, but a legal bombshell that introduced race into French law for the first time. The decree was the culmination of a decades-long effort to resolve the metis question: the educational,...