Place and Spirit in Taiwan

Place and Spirit in Taiwan PDF Author: Alessandro Dell'Orto
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135790396
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Based on field-work in Taiwan, this book examines the ancient, indigenous religious cult of Tudi Gong both as a religio-social phenomenon and as an appropriate medium for exploring and analysing the social changes that have been occurring in contemporary Taiwan, and the people's strategic adaptations to these changes. In this comprehensive ethnography of Tudi Gong, Dell'Orto engages in a theoretical discussion of the practices, processes and strategies of ethnography and ethnographic writing, and contributes to the construction of an anthropology of place by analysing a number of key concepts related to the notion of place and space. The study combines the use of personal ethnography with raconteurs' own accounts as a way of tracing senses of place and memories of the past. This is a pioneering foundation text for an anthropology of non domestic place and space and brings the most important recent work of social geographers into the field of anthropology.

Place and Spirit in Taiwan

Place and Spirit in Taiwan PDF Author: Alessandro Dell'Orto
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135790396
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
Based on field-work in Taiwan, this book examines the ancient, indigenous religious cult of Tudi Gong both as a religio-social phenomenon and as an appropriate medium for exploring and analysing the social changes that have been occurring in contemporary Taiwan, and the people's strategic adaptations to these changes. In this comprehensive ethnography of Tudi Gong, Dell'Orto engages in a theoretical discussion of the practices, processes and strategies of ethnography and ethnographic writing, and contributes to the construction of an anthropology of place by analysing a number of key concepts related to the notion of place and space. The study combines the use of personal ethnography with raconteurs' own accounts as a way of tracing senses of place and memories of the past. This is a pioneering foundation text for an anthropology of non domestic place and space and brings the most important recent work of social geographers into the field of anthropology.

Two Trees Make a Forest

Two Trees Make a Forest PDF Author: Jessica J. Lee
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1646220005
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This "stunning journey through a country that is home to exhilarating natural wonders, and a scarring colonial past . . . makes breathtakingly clear the connection between nature and humanity, and offers a singular portrait of the complexities inherent to our ideas of identity, family, and love" (Refinery29). A chance discovery of letters written by her immigrant grandfather leads Jessica J. Lee to her ancestral homeland, Taiwan. There, she seeks his story while growing closer to the land he knew. Lee hikes mountains home to Formosan flamecrests, birds found nowhere else on earth, and swims in a lake of drowned cedars. She bikes flatlands where spoonbills alight by fish farms, and learns about a tree whose fruit can float in the ocean for years, awaiting landfall. Throughout, Lee unearths surprising parallels between the natural and human stories that have shaped her family and their beloved island. Joyously attentive to the natural world, Lee also turns a critical gaze upon colonialist explorers who mapped the land and named plants, relying on and often effacing the labor and knowledge of local communities. Two Trees Make a Forest is a genre–shattering book encompassing history, travel, nature, and memoir, an extraordinary narrative showing how geographical forces are interlaced with our family stories.

Transitions to Modernity in Taiwan

Transitions to Modernity in Taiwan PDF Author: Niki Alsford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315279193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
On 19 April 1895, British Consul Lionel Charles Hopkins, at the northern port of Tamsui, was summoned by Tang Jingsong, the governor of Taiwan, to his yamen in the western district of Taipei. Shortly after his arrival, Hopkins was handed a petition. Signed by a number of Taiwanese ‘notables’, the document appealed to the British government to incorporate the island into a protectorate in the wake of an impending Japanese invasion. The British declined. This book addresses the interconnectivity of these two communities, by focusing on the market town of Dadaocheng in northern Taiwan. It seeks to contextualise and examine the establishment of a ‘settler society’ as well as the creation of a sojourning British community, showing how they became a precursor of modernity and ‘middle classism’ there. By uncovering who the signatories of the petition were and what their motivation was to call upon the British consulate to bring the island under its protection, it brings into focus a remarkable period of transition not only for the history of Taiwan but also for the modern history of China. Using 1895 as a year of enquiry, it ultimately challenges the current orthodoxy that modernity in Taiwan was simply a by-product of the Japanese colonial period. As a social and transnational history of the events that took place in Taiwan during 1895, this book will be useful for students of East Asian Studies, Modern Chinese Studies and Asian History.

Re-writing Culture in Taiwan

Re-writing Culture in Taiwan PDF Author:
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113403623X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description


The Haunting Fetus

The Haunting Fetus PDF Author: Marc L. Moskowitz
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824824280
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
The Haunting Fetus focuses on the belief in modern Taiwan that an aborted fetus can return to haunt its family. Although the topic has been researched in Japan and commented on in the Taiwanese press, it has not been studied systematically in relation to Taiwan in either English or Chinese. This fascinating study looks at a range of topics pertaining to the belief in haunting fetuses, including abortion, sexuality, the changing nature of familial power structures, the economy, and traditional and modern views of the spirit world in Taiwan and in traditional Chinese thought. It addresses the mental, moral, and psychological aspects of abortion within the context of modernization processes and how these ramify through historical epistemologies and folk traditions. The author illustrates how images of fetus-ghosts are often used to manipulate women, either through fear or guilt, into paying exorbitant sums of money for appeasement. He argues at the same time, however, that although appeasement can be expensive, it provides important psychological comfort to women who have had abortions as well as a much-needed means to project personal and familial feelings of transgression onto a safely displaced object. In addition to bringing to the surface underlying tensions within a family, appeasing fetus-ghosts, like other dealings with supernatural beings in Chinese religions, allows for atonement through economic avenues. The paradox in which fetus-ghost appeasement simultaneously exploits and assists evinces the true complexity of the issue--and of religious and gender studies as a whole.

Spirit of Place

Spirit of Place PDF Author: Chad Oppenheim
Publisher: Tra Publishing
ISBN: 1732297827
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 119

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Book Description
Spirit of Place is the first monograph on the work of Chad Oppenheim and his firm, Oppenheim Architects, and features seven of the award-winning firm’s projects, with a focus on how the architectural design honors the natural elements of each site. Oppenheim Architects’ first monograph, Spirit of Place, explores seven of the award-winning architectural firm’s acclaimed projects, located in beautiful settings across the globe. The book includes 120 stunning photographs and minimal text. The projects presented range in scale and location from homes in the Bahamas and Aspen to a resort in the Jordanian desert. The images, like the architecture, focus on and celebrate the natural world, illustrating Chad Oppenheim’s design philosophy that “form follows feeling.” Through passion and sensitivity towards man and nature, the firm designs monumental yet silent work that invokes a site’s inherent power. “For thousands of years, civilization has constructed its buildings on the land. We prefer to construct our buildings with the land, where architecture recedes and becomes a frame,” writes Chad Oppenheim. The projects are categorized by each site’s predominant natural element: dune, desert, stream, river, sea, canyon, and peninsula. The volume includes text by Chad Oppenheim, Val K. Warke, Antón García-Abril, and Mark Jarzombek. This book will appeal to readers interested in architecture, photography, nature, sustainability, and the environment.

Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters

Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters PDF Author: Avron Boretz
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824860713
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Demon warrior puppets, sword-wielding Taoist priests, spirit mediums lacerating their bodies with spikes and blades—these are among the most dramatic images in Chinese religion. Usually linked to the propitiation of plague gods and the worship of popular military deities, such ritual practices have an obvious but previously unexamined kinship with the traditional Chinese martial arts. The long and durable history of martial arts iconography and ritual in Chinese religion suggests something far deeper than mere historical coincidence. Avron Boretz argues that martial arts gestures and movements are so deeply embedded in the ritual repertoire in part because they iconify masculine qualities of violence, aggressivity, and physical prowess, the implicit core of Chinese patriliny and patriarchy. At the same time, for actors and audience alike, martial arts gestures evoke the mythos of the jianghu, a shadowy, often violent realm of vagabonds, outlaws, and masters of martial and magic arts. Through the direct bodily practice of martial arts movement and creative rendering of jianghu narratives, martial ritual practitioners are able to identify and represent themselves, however briefly and incompletely, as men of prowess, a reward otherwise denied those confined to the lower limits of this deeply patriarchal society. Based on fieldwork in China and Taiwan spanning nearly two decades, Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters offers a thorough and original account of violent ritual and ritual violence in Chinese religion and society. Close-up, sensitive portrayals and the voices of ritual actors themselves—mostly working-class men, many of them members of sworn brotherhoods and gangs—convincingly link martial ritual practice to the lives and desires of men on the margins of Chinese society. This work is a significant contribution to the study of Chinese ritual and religion, the history and sociology of Chinese underworld, the history and anthropology of the martial arts, and the anthropology of masculinity.

Place, Identity, and National Imagination in Post-war Taiwan

Place, Identity, and National Imagination in Post-war Taiwan PDF Author: Bi-yu Chang
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317658116
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
In the struggles for political and cultural hegemony that Taiwan has witnessed since the 1980s, the focal point in contesting narratives and the key battlefield in the political debates are primarily spatial and place-based. The major fault line appears to be a split between an imposed identity emphasizing cultural origin (China) and an emphasis on the recovery of place identity of ‘the local’ (Taiwan). Place, Identity and National Imagination in Postwar Taiwan explores the ever-present issue of identity in Taiwan from a spatial perspective, and focuses on the importance of, and the relationship between, state spatiality and identity formation. Taking postwar Taiwan as a case study, the book examines the ways in which the Kuomintang regime naturalized its political control, territorialized the island and created a nationalist geography. In so doing, it examines how, why and to what extent power is exercised through the place-making process and considers the relationship between official versions of ‘ROC geography’ and the islanders’ shifting perceptions of the ‘nation’. In turn, by addressing the relationship between the state and the imagined community, Bi-yu Chang establishes a dialogue between place and cultural identity to analyse the constant changing and shaping of Chinese and Taiwanese identity. With a diverse selection of case studies including cartographical development, geography education, territorial declaration and urban planning, this interdisciplinary book will have a broad appeal across Taiwan studies, geography, cultural studies, history and politics.

Asha and the Spirit Bird

Asha and the Spirit Bird PDF Author: Jasbinder Bilan
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
ISBN: 1338571079
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
In contemporary India, 12-year-old Asha will journey across the dangerous Himalayas to find her missing father and save her family's home -- guided by a mythical bird and a green-eyed tiger who she believes to be the spirits of her ancestors. This is an incredibly unique debut about loss, family, buried treasure, and hope. Asha lives on a family farm with her mother in rural India in the foothills of the Himalayas. Life would be perfect if her father were with them instead of working at the factory in the faraway city. But she knows they wouldn't be able to afford their home without the money he sends home.When four months go by without a single letter, a ruthless debt collector arrives with a warning, and soon the entire world that Asha has known is threatened. Determined to save her home, Asha and her best friend must swallow their fears and set out on a dangerous journey across the Himalayas to find her father.As desperation turns to peril, Asha will face law enforcement, natural disaster, and the wild dangers of the Himalayas. But with a majestic bird and a green-eyed tiger as her guides, who she believes to be the spirits of her ancestors, she's determined to keep faith in order to save her family.

Formosan Odyssey

Formosan Odyssey PDF Author: John Grant Ross
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781788691635
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Until the early twentieth century, Taiwan was one of the wildest places in Asia. The author's travels, made around the island in the wake of the devastating 921 earthquake, and his experiences from five years of living in a small town, provide an intimate picture of modern Taiwan.