A masterful art historical analysis of how Late Preclassic (300 BC to AD 250) rulers in Chiapas, Mexico, created an elite visual language to express political and supernatural authority which spread ...through much of the Maya world.
In the 1970s and 1980s many institutions, agencies and scholars believed that the Himalayan region was facing severe environmental disaster, due primarily to rapid growth in population that has ...caused extensive deforestation, which in turn has led to massive landsliding and soil erosion. This series of assumptions was first challenged in the book: The Himalayan Dilemma (1989: Ives and Messerli, Routledge). Nevertheless, the environmental crisis paradigm still commands considerable support, including logging bans in the mountain watersheds of China, India, and Thailand, and is constantly being promoted by the news media. Himalayan Perceptions identifies the confusion of misunderstanding, vested interests, changing perceptions, and institutional unwillingness to base development policy on sound scientific knowledge. It analyzes the large amount of new research published since 1989 and totally refutes the entire construct. It examines recent social and economic developments in the region and identifies warfare, guerrilla activities, and widespread oppression of poor ethnic minorities as the primary cause for the instability that pervades the entire region. It is argued that the development controversy is further confounded by exaggerated reporting, even falsification, by news media, environmental publications, and agency reports alike.
Jack D. Ives is Senior Advisor on Sustainable Mountain Development at The United Nations University, Tokyo.
1. The Myth of Himalayan Environmental Degradation 2. The Himalayan Region: An Overview 3. Status of the Mountain Forests 4. Geomorphology of Agricultural Landscapes 5. Flooding in Bangladesh: Causes and Perceptions of Causes 6. Mountain Hazards 7. Development of Tourism and its Impacts 8. Conflict, Tension, and the Oppression of Mountain Peoples 9. Prospects for Future Development: Assets and Obstacles 10. What are the facts? Misleading Perceptions, Misconceptions, and Distortions 11. Conclusions: Redefining the Dilemma; is there a way out?
Heads of State Arnold, Denise Y.; Hastorf, Christine A.
2008, 20160701, 2016-07-01, 2016-06-29
eBook
The human head has had important political, ritual and symbolic meanings throughout Andean history. Scholars have spoken of captured and trophy heads, curated crania, symbolic flying heads, head ...imagery on pots and on stone, head-shaped vessels, and linguistic references to the head. In this synthesizing work, cultural anthropologist Denise Arnold and archaeologist Christine Hastorf examine the cult of heads in the Andes-past and present-to develop a theory of its place in indigenous cultural practice and its relationship to political systems. Using ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork, highland-lowland comparisons, archival documents, oral histories, and ritual texts, the authors draw from Marx, Mauss, Foucault, Assadourian, Viveiros del Castro and other theorists to show how heads shape and symbolize power, violence, fertility, identity, and economy in South American cultures.
Sonja Luehrmann explores the Soviet atheist effort to build a society without gods or spirits and its afterlife in post-Soviet religious revival. Combining archival research on atheist propaganda of ...the 1960s and 1970s with ethnographic fieldwork in the autonomous republic of Marij El in Russia's Volga region, Luehrmann examines how secularist culture-building reshaped religious practice and interreligious relations. One of the most palpable legacies of atheist propaganda is a widespread didactic orientation among the population and a faith in standardized programs of personal transformation as solutions to wider social problems. This didactic trend has parallels in globalized forms of Protestantism and Islam but differs from older uses of religious knowledge in rural Russia. At a time when the secularist modernization projects of the 20th century are widely perceived to have failed, Secularism Soviet Style emphasizes the affinities and shared histories of religious and atheist mobilizations.
Early Andean historiography reveals a subaltern history of indigenous gender and sexuality that saw masculinity and femininity not as essential absolutes. Third-gender ritualists, Ipas, mediated ...between the masculine and feminine spheres of culture in important ceremonies and were recorded in fragments of myths and transcribed oral accounts. Ritual performance by cross-dressed men symbolically created a third space of mediation that invoked the mythic androgyne of the pre-Hispanic Andes. The missionaries and civil authorities colonizing the Andes deemed these performances transgressive and sodomitical. In this book, Michael J. Horswell examines alternative gender and sexuality in the colonial Andean world, and uses the concept of the third gender to reconsider some fundamental paradigms of Andean culture. By deconstructing what literary tropes of sexuality reveal about Andean pre-Hispanic and colonial indigenous culture, he provides an alternative history and interpretation of the much-maligned aboriginal subjects the Spanish often referred to as “sodomites.” Horswell traces the origin of the dominant tropes of masculinist sexuality from canonical medieval texts to early modern Spanish secular and moralist literature produced in the context of material persecution of effeminates and sodomites in Spain. These values traveled to the Andes and were used as powerful rhetorical weapons in the struggle to justify the conquest of the Incas.
Agnieszka Helman-Ważny's Archaeology of Tibetan Books provides a comprehensive guide to the making of Tibetan books. Concerned with the relation of papers, inks, and layout to questions of provenance ...and dating, this work is a must-have companion to any textual analysis.
In Europe and North and South America during the early modern period, people believed that their dreams might be, variously, messages from God, the machinations of demons, visits from the dead, or ...visions of the future. Interpreting their dreams in much the same ways as their ancient and medieval forebears had done-and often using the dream-guides their predecessors had written-dreamers rejoiced in heralds of good fortune and consulted physicians, clerics, or practitioners of magic when their visions waxed ominous.Dreams, Dreamers, and Visionstraces the role of dreams and related visionary experiences in the cultures within the Atlantic world from the late thirteenth to early seventeenth centuries, examining an era of cultural encounters and transitions through this unique lens.
In the wake of Reformation-era battles over religious authority and colonial expansion into Asia, Africa, and the Americas, questions about truth and knowledge became particularly urgent and debate over the meaning and reliability of dreams became all the more relevant. Exploring both indigenous and European methods of understanding dream phenomena, this volume argues that visions were central to struggles over spiritual and political authority. Featuring eleven original essays,Dreams, Dreamers, and Visionsexplores the ways in which reports and interpretations of dreams played a significant role in reflecting cultural shifts and structuring historic change.
Contributors:Emma Anderson, Mary Baine Campbell, Luis Corteguera, Matthew Dennis, Carla Gerona, María V Jordán, Luís Filipe Silvério Lima, Phyllis Mack, Ann Marie Plane, Andrew Redden, Janine Rivière, Leslie Tuttle, Anthony F. C. Wallace.
Making sense of war Weiner, Amir
2001., 20120116, 2012, 2000, c2001., 2001-01-01
eBook
In Making Sense of War, Amir Weiner reconceptualizes the entire historical experience of the Soviet Union from a new perspective, that of World War II. Breaking with the conventional interpretation ...that views World War II as a post-revolutionary addendum, Weiner situates this event at the crux of the development of the Soviet--not just the Stalinist--system. Through a richly detailed look at Soviet society as a whole, and at one Ukrainian region in particular, the author shows how World War II came to define the ways in which members of the political elite as well as ordinary citizens viewed the world and acted upon their beliefs and ideologies.
As Karyn R. Lacy's innovative work in the suburbs of Washington, DC, reveals, there is a continuum of middle-classness among blacks, ranging from lower-middle class to middle-middle class to ...upper-middle class. Focusing on the latter two, Lacy explores an increasingly important social and demographic group: middle-class blacks who live in middle-class suburbs where poor blacks are not present. These "blue-chip black" suburbanites earn well over fifty thousand dollars annually and work in predominantly white professional environments. Lacy examines the complicated sense of identity that individuals in these groups craft to manage their interactions with lower-class blacks, middle-class whites, and other middle-class blacks as they seek to reap the benefits of their middle-class status.
Terrorism, black poverty, and economic exploitation produced a condition of collective trauma and social suffering for thousands of black Deltans in the Twentieth Century. Based on oral histories ...with African American activists and community leaders, this work reveals the impact of that oppression.
