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Author: Koen Wellens
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295801557
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
Revival of religious practices of all sorts in China, after decades of systematic government suppression, is a topic of considerable interest to scholars in disciplines ranging from religious studies to anthropology to political science. This book examines contemporary religious practices among the Premi people of the Sichuan-Yunnan-Tibet area, a group of about 60,000 who speak a language belonging to the Qiang branch of Tibeto-Burman. Koen Wellens's ethnographic research in two Premi communities on opposite sides of the border, and his analysis of available historical documents, find multiple advocates and rationales for the revival of both formal Tibetan Buddhism and the indigenous Premi practices centered on ritual specialists called anji. Wellens argues that the variety in the shape the revitalization process takes--as it affects Premi on the Sichuan side of the border and their counterparts on the Yunnan side--can only be understood in a local cultural context. This full-length study of the Premi, the first in a language other than Chinese, makes a valuable contribution to our ethnographic knowledge of Southwest China, as well as to our understanding of contemporary Chinese religious and cultural politics.
Author: Koen Wellens
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295801557
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Get Book Here
Book Description
Revival of religious practices of all sorts in China, after decades of systematic government suppression, is a topic of considerable interest to scholars in disciplines ranging from religious studies to anthropology to political science. This book examines contemporary religious practices among the Premi people of the Sichuan-Yunnan-Tibet area, a group of about 60,000 who speak a language belonging to the Qiang branch of Tibeto-Burman. Koen Wellens's ethnographic research in two Premi communities on opposite sides of the border, and his analysis of available historical documents, find multiple advocates and rationales for the revival of both formal Tibetan Buddhism and the indigenous Premi practices centered on ritual specialists called anji. Wellens argues that the variety in the shape the revitalization process takes--as it affects Premi on the Sichuan side of the border and their counterparts on the Yunnan side--can only be understood in a local cultural context. This full-length study of the Premi, the first in a language other than Chinese, makes a valuable contribution to our ethnographic knowledge of Southwest China, as well as to our understanding of contemporary Chinese religious and cultural politics.
Author: Weiping Wu
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1526455595
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1566
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Book Description
The study of contemporary China constitutes a fascinating yet challenging area of scholarly inquiry. Recent decades have brought dramatic changes to China′s economy, society and governance. Analyzing such changes in the context of multiple disciplinary perspectives offers opportunites as well as challenges for scholars in the field known as contemporary China Studies. The SAGE Handbook of Contemporary China is a two-volume exploration of the transformations of contemporary China, firmly grounded in the both disciplinary and China-specific contexts. Drawing on a range of scholarly approaches found in the social sciences and history, an international team of contributors engage with the question of what a rapidly changing China means for the broader field of contemporary China studies, and identify areas of promising future research. Part 1: Context: History, Economy, and the Environment Part 2: Economic Transformations Part 3: Politics and Government Part 4: China on the Global Stage Part 5: China′s Foreign Policy Part 6: National and Nested Identities Part 7: Urbanization and Spatial Development Part 8: Poverty and Inequality Part 9: Social Change Part 10: Future Directions for Contemporary China Studies
Author: Tenzin Jinba
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231557892
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 185
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Book Description
The Beggar Lama is the story of the Gyalrong Kuzhap, a Tibetan Buddhist polymath and reincarnated lama who has led a remarkable life through the vicissitudes of the twentieth century. Born in 1930 in Tsanlha, Gyalrong, on the easternmost fringes of the Himalayan-Tibetan Plateau, he would go on to become a monk, a Communist official, a professor of Tibetan studies, and a leader in the Tibetan cultural survival movement in China. Drawing on hundreds of hours of in-depth and open-ended conversations over more than a decade, Tenzin Jinba presents the Gyalrong Kuzhap’s life story. The Beggar Lama chronicles his journeys—from Gyalrong to Lhasa, from steadfast Communist to critic of the Chinese regime, from scholar to activist—painting a compelling portrait of an influential and unconventional figure. In so doing, the book shows how the Gyalrong Kuzhap’s tale intertwines with larger social and political developments, providing a wide-ranging history of Tibet, the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, and China over the past century. The Beggar Lama shares the Gyalrong Kuzhap’s insightful and often critical views on Tibetan cultural and religious institutions, the Chinese Communist Party’s social and political agendas, Tibetan studies in China, and the prospects for Tibetan cultural rebirth. Above all, it is a story of hope in dark times, as the Gyalrong Kuzhap seeks with his “last breath” to prevent Tibetan culture and memory from vanishing.
Author: Adam Yuet Chau
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509535683
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
In recent years, there has been an astonishing revival of religious practices in China. Looking beyond numerical counts of religious practitioners, temples, and churches, anthropologist Adam Yuet Chau's vivid study explores how religion is embedded in contemporary Chinese lives and society, from personal devotion to community-wide festivals. Covering Buddhism, Daoism, and folk religion, as well as Christianity and Islam, this ethnographically rich book provides insights into the contemporary relevance of religious traditions in Chinese societies. By considering the ways in which Chinese people ‘do’ religion, Chau reveals how religious practice plays a critical role in establishing and maintaining a wide range of relationships: between people, spirits, and places; ritual service providers and their customers; the state and religious groups. He argues that relationality is the key anchor of religious lifeworlds, and this insight demands an entirely new way of approaching religion everywhere. This lively account will appeal to those studying or curious about Chinese or East Asian religions, and serves as a perfect gateway to understanding religious practices in China today.
Author: Jane E. Caple
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824878051
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
The speed and extent of the Tibetan Buddhist monastic revival make it one of the most extraordinary stories of religious resurgence in post-Mao China. At the end of the 1970s, there were no working monasteries; within a decade, thousands had been reconstructed and repopulated. Most studies have focused on the political challenges facing Tibetan monasteries, emphasizing their relationship to the Chinese state. Yet, in their efforts to revive and develop their institutions, monks have also had to negotiate a rapidly changing society, playing a delicate balancing act fraught with moral dilemma as well as political danger. Drawing on the recent “moral turn” in anthropology, this volume, the first full-length ethnographic study of the subject, explores the social and moral dimensions of monastic revival and reform across a range of Geluk monasteries in northeast Tibet (Amdo/Qinghai Province) from the 1980s on. Author Jane Caple’s analysis shows that ideas and debates about how best to maintain the mundane bases of monastic Buddhism—economy and population—are intermeshed with those concerning the proper role and conduct of monks and the ethics of monastic-lay relations. Facing a shrinking monastic population, monks are grappling with the impacts of secular education, demographic transition, rising living standards, urbanization, and marketization, all of which have driven debates within Buddhism elsewhere and fueled perceptions of monastic decline. Some Tibetans—including monks—are even questioning the “good” of the mass form of monasticism that has been a distinctive feature of Tibetan society for hundreds of years. Given monastic Buddhism’s integral position in Tibetan community life and association with Tibetan identity, Caple argues that its precarity in relation to Tibetan society raises questions about its future that go well beyond the issue of religious freedom.
Author: Zhidong Hao
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461422248
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
Since 1978, the opening up and reform in China has brought tremendous economic and social changes. While China’s economic progress has been commendable, the social problems that go with economic changes have raised serious concerns. Some of those concerns are related to gender, ethnic, labor, and environmental issues. This book is about what has happened in these arenas in China since the opening up and reform in 1978. The study of gender, ethnicity, labor, and environment touches on some of the fundamental problems of modernization, especially the development of individuals and groups. So even though gender, ethnicity, labor, and environment seem to be separate issues, they are in fact related in some fundamental ways. That’s what this book will explore as well. To understand is one thing and to do is another. This book also incorporates studies of NGO practices to see how NGOs have helped in transforming gender, ethnic, labor, and environment interplay. Our study of NGOs in helping improve such interplay sheds light on how specifically civil society can prod the state to transform social relations for the better. This book is an attempt to assess the changes, both positive and negative, in gender, ethnic, ethnic, and environmental relations in China especially in the past 30 years of opening up and reform, especially regarding national identity formation.
Author: Gerald Roche
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501777807
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
In The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, Gerald Roche sheds light on a global crisis of linguistic diversity that will see at least half of the world's languages disappear this century. Roche explores the erosion of linguistic diversity through a study of a community on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau in the People's Republic of China. Manegacha is but one of the sixty minority languages in Tibet and is spoken by about 8,000 people who are otherwise mostly indistinguishable from the Tibetan communities surrounding them. Recently, many in these communities have switched to speaking Tibetan, and Manegacha faces an uncertain future. The author uses the Manegacha case to show how linguistic diversity across Tibet is collapsing under assimilatory state policies. He looks at how global advocacy networks inadequately acknowledge this issue, highlighting the complex politics of language in an inter-connected world. The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet broadens our understanding of Tibet and China, the crisis of global linguistic diversity, and the radical changes needed to address this crisis.
Author: Kevin Latham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351718754
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 603
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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Culture and Society is an interdisciplinary resource that offers a comprehensive overview of contemporary Chinese social and cultural issues in the twenty-first century. Bringing together experts in their respective fields, this cutting-edge survey of the significant phenomena and directions in China today covers a range of issues including the following: State, privatisation and civil society Family and education Urban and rural life Gender, and sexuality and reproduction Popular culture and the media Religion and ethnicity Forming an accessible and fascinating insight into Chinese culture and society, this handbook will be invaluable to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, area studies, history, politics and cultural and media studies.
Author: Theresia Hofer
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 029574300X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
Only fifty years ago, Tibetan medicine, now seen in China as a vibrant aspect of Tibetan culture, was considered a feudal vestige to be eliminated through government-led social transformation. Medicine and Memory in Tibet examines medical revivalism on the geographic and sociopolitical margins both of China and of Tibet�s medical establishment in Lhasa, exploring the work of medical practitioners, or amchi, and of Medical Houses in the west-central region of Tsang. Due to difficult research access and the power of state institutions in the writing of history, the perspectives of more marginal amchi have been absent from most accounts of Tibetan medicine. Theresia Hofer breaks new ground both theoretically and ethnographically, in ways that would be impossible in today�s more restrictive political climate that severely limits access for researchers. She illuminates how medical practitioners safeguarded their professional heritage through great adversity and personal hardship.
Author: Agnieszka Joniak-Luthi
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295805978
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
This ethnography explores contemporary narratives of “Han-ness,” revealing the nuances of what Han identity means today in relation to that of the fifty-five officially recognized minority ethnic groups in China, as well as in relation to home place identities and the country’s national identity. Based on research she conducted among native and migrant Han in Shanghai and Beijing, Aqsu (in Xinjiang), and the Sichuan-Yunnan border area, Agnieszka Joniak-Luthi uncovers and discusses these identity topographies. Bringing into focus the Han majority, which has long acted as an unexamined backdrop to ethnic minorities, Joniak-Luthi contributes to the emerging field of critical Han studies as she considers how the Han describe themselves - particularly what unites and divides them - as well as the functions of Han identity and the processes through which it is maintained and reproduced. The Han will appeal to scholars and students of contemporary China, anthropology, and ethnic and cultural studies.
