Kategoria BISAC: History >> Asia - Central Asia

A pioneering study of kinship, patronage, and politics in Central Asia, Blood Ties and the Native Son tells the story of the rise and fall of a man called Rahim, an influential and powerful patron in rural northern Kyrgyzstan, and of how his relations with clients and kin shaped the economic and social life of the region. Many observers of politics in post-Soviet Central Asia have assumed that corruption, nepotism, and patron-client relations would forestall democratization. Looking at the intersection of kinship ties with political patronage, Aksana Ismailbekova finds instead that this...

A pioneering study of kinship, patronage, and politics in Central Asia, Blood Ties and the Native Son tells the story of the rise and fall of a man called Rahim, an influential and powerful patron in rural northern Kyrgyzstan, and of how his relations with clients and kin shaped the economic and social life of the region. Many observers of politics in post-Soviet Central Asia have assumed that corruption, nepotism, and patron-client relations would forestall democratization. Looking at the intersection of kinship ties with political patronage, Aksana Ismailbekova finds instead that this...

This book explores the cultural history of embryology in Tibet, in culture, religion, art and literature, and what this reveals about its medicine and religion. Filling a significant gap in the literature this is the first in-depth exploration of Tibetan medical history in the English language. It reveals the prevalence of descriptions of the development of the human body from conception to birth found in all forms of Tibetan religious literature, as well as in medical texts and in art.

By analysing stories of embryology, Frances Garrett explores questions of cultural transmission...

This reader contains a selection of materials, which range in time from the pre-literary language to contemporary items from newspapers. It includes examples taken from the literary language under Soviet rule and as Kyrgyz (Kirghiz) is used in the West and in China. The book is designed to present the reader with an understanding of both the variety of materials available in Kyrgyz and with the internal structure of the language. The material ranges in difficulty from primers to historical documents. Each text is presented as it originally appeared, followed by a literal English...

In Knowledge and the Ends of Empire, Ian W. Campbell investigates the connections between knowledge production and policy formation on the Kazak steppes of the Russian Empire. Hoping to better govern the region, tsarist officials were desperate to obtain reliable information about an unfamiliar environment and population. This thirst for knowledge created opportunities for Kazak intermediaries to represent themselves and their landscape to the tsarist state. Because tsarist officials were uncertain of what the steppe was, and disagreed on what could be made of it, Kazaks were able...

Central Asia is a wide subject of research in the archaeological and historical studies of the Ancient World. Scholars have usually focused on the complex and diverse questions that resulted from the analysis of the historical realities of this key region during Antiquity. The purpose of this book is to undertake an approach to the polymorphic and multiple aspects of Central Asia in Antiquity from several points of view. The starting point is the confidence in an interdisciplinary perspective as the mainway to understand the different aspects of the region in a very wide chronology: from...

The great river civilization of the Oxus is one of the forgotten jewels of the ancient world. In history, this grand arterial 1,500-mile waterway was always seen as the natural frontier between the northern provinces of the Iranian empires and the outer Turanian lands. It was for centuries central to Achaemenid and later Persian power. But, as the author shows, it has a prehistory which goes very much further back: and a succession of skilled yet still elusive Bronze Age cultures flourished here well before the rise of Cyrus the Great in the 6th century BCE.

This richly illustrated...