Author: George Black
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0593534115
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 513
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Book Description
The moving story of how a small group of people—including two Vietnam veterans—forced the U.S. government to take responsibility for the ongoing horrors—agent orange and unexploded munitions—inflicted on the Vietnamese. "Fifty years after the last U.S. service member left Vietnam, the scars of that war remain...This [is the] remarkable story of a group of individuals determined to heal those enduring wounds.”—Elliot Ackerman, author of The Fifth Act and 2034 The American war in Vietnam has left many long-lasting scars that have not yet been sufficiently examined. The worst of them were inflicted in a tiny area bounded by the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail in neighboring Laos. That small region saw the most intense aerial bombing campaign in history, the massive use of toxic chemicals, and the heaviest casualties on both sides. In The Long Reckoning, George Black recounts the inspirational story of the small cast of characters—veterans, scientists, and Quaker-inspired pacifists, and their Vietnamese partners—who used their moral authority, scientific and political ingenuity, and sheer persistence to attempt to heal the horrors that were left in the wake of the military engagement in Southeast Asia. Their intersecting story is one of reconciliation and personal redemption, embedded in a vivid portrait of Vietnam today, with all its startling collisions between past and present, in which one-time mortal enemies, in the endless shape-shifting of geopolitics, have been transformed into close allies and partners. The Long Reckoning is being published on the fiftieth anniversary of the day the last American combat soldier left Vietnam.
Author: Richard J. Chacon
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031375033
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
This edited volume analyzes the belief in supernatural gamekeepers and/or animal masters of wildlife from a cross-cultural perspective. It documents the antiquity and widespread occurrence of the belief in supernatural gamekeepers at the global level. This interdisciplinary volume documents both the antiquity and the widespread geographical distribution of this belief along with surveying the various manifestations of this cosmology by way of studies from Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America. Some chapters explore the manifestations of this belief as they appear in petroglyphs/pictographs and other forms of material culture. Others focus on the environmental impacts of these beliefs/rituals and prescribed foraging restrictions by analyzing how they affect game harvests. The internationally recognized scholars in this volume assess the efficacy of this particular form of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and investigate if adherence to the belief in animal masters actually causes hunters to refrain from overharvesting wild game and thereby contributes to sustainable hunting practices. This volume is of interest to anthropologists, archaeologists and other social scientists researching traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), indigenous conservation, biodiversity, and sustainability practices, and animal deities.
Author: Holly High
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824886658
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
In Projectland, anthropologist Holly High combines an engaging first-person narrative of her fieldwork with a political ethnography of Laos, more than forty years after the establishment of the Lao PDR and more than seven decades since socialist ideologues first “liberated” parts of upland country. In a remote village of Kandon, High finds that although socialism has declined significantly as an economic model, it is ascendant and thriving in the culture of politics and the politics of culture. Kandon is remarkable by any account. The villagers are ethnic Kantu (Katu), an ethnicity associated by early ethnographers above all with human sacrifice. They had repelled French control, and as the war went on, the revolutionary forces of Sekong were headquartered in Kandon territories. In 1996, Kandon village moved and resettled in a plateau area. “New Kandon” has become Sekong Province’s first certified “Culture Village,” the nation’s very first “Open Defecation Free and Model Health Village,” and the president of Laos personally granted the village a Labor Flag and Medal. High provides a unique and timely assessment of the Lao Party-state’s resettlement politics, and she recounts with skillful nuance the stories that are often cast into shadows by the usual focus on New Kandon as a success. Her book follows the lives of a small group of villagers who returned to the old village in the mountains, effectively defying policy but, in their words, obeying the presence that animates the land there. Revealing her sensibility with tremendous composure, High tells the experiences of women who, bound by steep bride-prices to often violent marriages, have tasted little of the socialist project of equality, unity, and independence. These women spoke to the author of “necessities” as a limit to their own lives. In a context where the state has defined the legitimate forms of success and agency, “necessity” emerged as a means of framing one’s life as nonconforming but also nonagentive.
Author: Yasmine Musharbash
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000182355
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
Monsters are culturally meaningful across the world. Starting from this key premise, this book tackles monsters in the context of social change. Writing in a time of violent upheaval, when technological innovation brings forth new monsters while others perish as part of the widespread extinctions that signify the Anthropocene, contributors argue that putting monsters at the center of social analysis opens up new perspectives on change and social transformation. Through a series of ethnographically grounded analyses they capture monsters that herald, drive, experience, enjoy, and suffer the transformations of the worlds they beleaguer. Topics examined include the evil skulking new roads in Ancient Greece, terror in post-socialist Laos’s territorial cults, a horrific flying head that augurs catastrophe in the rain forest of Borneo, benign spirits that accompany people through the mist in Iceland, flesh-eating giants marching through neo-colonial central Australia, and ghosts lingering in Pacific villages in the aftermath of environmental disasters. By taking the proposition that monsters and the humans they haunt are intricately and intimately entangled seriously, this book offers unique, cross-cultural perspectives on how people perceive the world and their place within it. It also shows how these experiences of belonging are mediated by our relationships with the other-than-human.
Author: Michael Kleinod
Publisher: Göttingen University Press
ISBN: 3863952464
Category : Ecotourism
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
This study treats ecotourism in National Protected Areas of Lao PDR as a “recreational frontier” which instrumentalizes the recreation of human natures in capitalism’s centers for that of nonhuman natures at capitalism’s (closing) frontiers. This world-ecological practice of ecorational instrumentality – i.e. of nature domination in the name of “Nature” – presents a remedy for capitalism’s crisis that is itself crisis-ridden, enacting a central tension of ecocapitalism: that between “conservation” and “development”. This epistemic-institutional tension is traced through the preconditions, modes and effects of ecotourism in Laos by gradually zooming from the most general scale of societal nature relations into the most detailed intricacies of ecotouristic practice. The combination of Bourdieu, Marx and Critical Theory enables a systematic analysis of the recreational frontier as enactment of various contradictions deriving from the “false-and-real” Nature/Society dualism.
Author: Kaj Arhem
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317336623
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
Animism refers to ontologies or worldviews which assign agency and personhood to human and non-human beings alike. Recent years have seen a revival of this concept in anthropology, where it is now discussed as an alternative to modern-Western naturalistic notions of human-environment relations. Based on original fieldwork, this book presents a number of case studies of animism from insular and peninsular Southeast Asia and offers a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon – its diversity and underlying commonalities and its resilience in the face of powerful forces of change. Critically engaging with the current standard notion of animism, based on hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist societies in other regions, it examines the roles of life forces, souls and spirits in local cosmologies and indigenous religion. It proposes an expansion of the concept to societies featuring mixed farming, sacrifice and hierarchy and explores the question of how non-human agents are created through acts of attention and communication, touching upon the relationship between animist ontologies, world religion, and the state. Shedding new light on Southeast Asian religious ethnographic research, the book is a significant contribution to anthropological theory and the revitalization of the concept of animism in the humanities and social sciences.
Author: Benjamin Baumann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000064387
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
Challenging the assumption that the capitalist transformation includes a radical break with the past, this edited volume traces how historically older forms of social inequality are transformed but persist in the present to shape the social structure of contemporary societies in the global South. Each social collective comprises an interpretation of itself – including the meaning of life, the concept of a human person, and the notion of a collective. This volume studies the interpretation that various social collectives have of themselves. This interpretation is referred to as social ontology. All chapters of the edited volume focus on the relation between social ontology and structures of inequality. They argue that each society comprises several historical layers of social ontology that correspond to layers of inequality, which are referred to as sociocultures. Thereby, the volume explains why and how structures of inequality differ between contemporary collectives in the global South, even though all of them seem to have similar structures, institutions, and economies. The volume is aimed at academics, students and the interested public looking for a novel theorization of social inequality pertaining to social collectives in the global South.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004528067
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
China, Laos, and Vietnam are three of a handful of late socialist countries where capitalist economics rubs up against party-state politics. In these countries, sweeping processes of change open up new vistas of opportunity and imaginaries of the future alongside much uncertainty and anxiety, especially for their large rural populations. Contributors to this edited volume demonstrate the diverse ways in which rural people build futures in this unique policy landscape and how their aspirations and desires are articulated as projects involving both citizens and the state. This produces a politics of development that happens through and around the state as people navigate discourses of betterment to imagine and make new futures at individual and collective levels.
Author: Ruijing Wang
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643908881
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
Despite living in a state that honours science and debases `superstition', and despite making substantial use of the multiple medical resources available to them, Akha villagers in Yunnan still put their greatest trust for health and wellbeing into healing rituals, especially when it comes to their children. The book delves into these apparent contradictions. What is this Akha way of childcare that continues in twenty-first-century China? It is generally believed that children fall sick from soul loss or attack by spirits. Accordingly, parents frequently invite ritual experts to perform sacrificial rituals for the diagnosis and healing of their children. Relatives (kin and affines), big men, ancestors and spirits all play indispensable roles in these protective rituals. As the process of a healing ritual unfolds, a network of social organisation, kinship, and cosmology is woven.
Author: Riamsara Kuyakanon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000482308
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
Cosmopolitical Ecologies Across Asia offers a unique insight into the non-human and spiritual dimensions of environmental management in a changing world. This volume presents a comparative, place-based exploration of landscapes across Asia and the entities, practices and knowledges that inhabit them. Rather than treating sacred mountains, terrains and water sources as self-contained, esoteric religious phenomena, the authors consider them within critical 'cosmopolitical ecologies' framings in which non-human entities are engaged as actors in the socio-political arena. The chapters include case studies of healing springs recognized by governments, and sacred mountains that are addressed by heads of states and Communist Party cadres, or that speak to the faithful through spirit mediums in a politics of re-enchantment. Contributors explore the diverse ways in which non-human entities such as forest spirits, reindeer, mountains and Buddhist Masters of the Land are engaged by humans to navigate environmental change and address a range of ecological threats from large-scale mining to climate change. Cosmopolitical ecologies approaches encompass the healing power of topography as well as transformative intimacies with other-than-human beings such as sparrows within an Islamic eco-theological poetic setting. In this light the book observes dynamic and creative processes of cosmological innovation including the repurposing of ritual to address challenges such as the Covid-19 epidemic. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environment and society across disciplinary perspectives in general, and to anthropologists, human geographers, political ecologists, indigenous studies, area studies, environmental sciences and environmental humanities scholars in particular. The Introduction to this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
