Beyond the Green Myth

Beyond the Green Myth
Author: Peter G. Sercombe
Publisher: NIAS Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2008-03-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 8776940187

This is the first comprehensive picture of the nomadic and formerly nomadic hunting-gathering groups of the Borneo tropical rain forest, totaling about 20,000 people.

D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths

D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths
Author: Ingri d'Aulaire
Publisher: Doubleday Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2017-11-28
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1524770647

"I doubt I would have grown up to be the writer and artist I became had I not fallen in love with D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths at the age of seven."—R. J. Palacio, author of Wonder Kids can lose themselves in a world of myth and magic while learning important cultural history in this beloved classic collection of Greek mythology. Now updated with a new cover and an afterword featuring never-before-published drawings from the sketchbook of Ingri and Edgar D'Aulaire, plus an essay about their life and work and photos from the family achive. In print for over fifty years, D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths has introduced generations to Greek mythology—and continues to enthrall young readers. Here are the greats of ancient Greece—gods and goddesses, heroes and monsters—as freshly described in words and pictures as if they were alive today. No other volume of Greek mythology has inspired as many young readers as this timeless classic. Both adults and children alike will find this book a treasure for years to come.

Monster Anthropology

Monster Anthropology
Author: Yasmine Musharbash
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2020-06-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000182355

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.

The Life of the Longhouse

The Life of the Longhouse
Author: Peter Metcalf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2010
Genre: History
ISBN: 052111098X

The remarkable longhouses of Borneo remain mysterious. This book describes life within them, and puts them in their historical and ethnographic context.

The Peoples of Southeast Asia Today

The Peoples of Southeast Asia Today
Author: Robert L. Winzeler
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2010-01-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0759118647

The Peoples of Southeast Asia Today offers an anthropological treatment of the ethnography and ethnology of Southeast Asia, covering both the mainland and the insular regions. Based on the proposition that Southeast Asia is a true culture area, the book offers background information on geography, languages, prehistory and history, with a particular emphasis on the role of colonialism and the development of ethnic pluralism. It then turns to classic anthropological topics of interest including modes of adaptation, ways of life, and religion, all illustrated with relevant, current case studies. Students will find well-supported discussions of subjects ranging from the development of agriculture and language dispersals, to fantasy and reality in hunter-gatherer studies, to disputed interpretations of Thai Buddhism and Javanese Islam, to ongoing government efforts to manage religion, create proper citizens, resettle and assimilate indigenous populations, end shifting cultivation and promote modernization.

Kinship and Food in South East Asia

Kinship and Food in South East Asia
Author: Monica Janowski
Publisher: NIAS Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 8791114934

There has been a growing acceptance that food has an important role in establishing and structuring social and kin relations in South East Asian societies. This study looks at a wide variety of groups in the region and demonstrates that within all of them the feeding relationship is fundamental to the establishment and the nature of relations within generations and between generations. Presenting material from ten societies in the region, the papers included in this volume argue that the feeding of foods, drink and meals based on the focal starch crop grown by these agricultural groups - rice in eight of the groups covered here, sago in one and cassava in one - is used to manipulate 'biological' kinship and to construct a 'kinship' particular to humans; which is nevertheless founded in a 'natural' process, the 'flow of life', blessings and potency between generations.

Human Adaptation in the Asian Palaeolithic

Human Adaptation in the Asian Palaeolithic
Author: Ryan J. Rabett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2012-08-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107018293

This book examines the first human colonization of Asia and particularly the tropical environments of Southeast Asia during the Upper Pleistocene. In studying the unique character of the Asian archaeological record, it reassesses long-accepted propositions about the development of human 'modernity.' Ryan J. Rabett reveals an evolutionary relationship between colonization, the challenges encountered during this process - especially in relation to climatic and environmental change - and the forms of behaviour that emerged. This book argues that human modernity is not something achieved in the remote past in one part of the world, but rather is a diverse, flexible, responsive, and ongoing process of adaptation.

Myth's Treasure

Myth's Treasure
Author: John Ulanich
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2011-12-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1469135876

This is the story of Saturday, a statue come to life in a strange garden. He leaves it to discover that life is different in other places. He finds a kingdom of flying toads, and then a labyrinth containing even more life. Saturday explores the maze and learns about the creatures that inhabit it. He finds out about art, music, and other important things. Then he finds out how big his adventure really is. Witness the story through his eyes, and let it become your experience as well. But a word of caution; this existential fairy tale is not for the weak of heart. Abandon all despair, all ye who find... Myth's Treasure.

Lifestyle and Entertainment in Yangzhou

Lifestyle and Entertainment in Yangzhou
Author: Lucie B. Olivová
Publisher: NIAS Press
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2009
Genre: Art
ISBN: 8776940357

The Chinese city of Yangzhou has been of great cultural significance for many centuries, despite its destruction by invaders in the 17th and 19th centuries. It was a site of virtual pilgrimage for aspiring members of the Chinese educated class during the Ming and Qing periods. Moreover, because it was one of the foremost commercial centres during the late imperial period, it was the place where the merchant and scholarly classes merged to set new standards of taste and to create a cultural milieu quite unlike that of other cities, even other major centres in the region. The luxurious elegance of its gardens and the eminence of its artistic traditions meant that Yangzhou set aesthetic standards for the entire realm for much of the late imperial age. Over the years, particular regional forms of art and entertainment arose here, too, some surviving into the present time.

Spirits and Ships

Spirits and Ships
Author: Andrea Acri
Publisher: Flipside Digital Content Company Inc.
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2017-03-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9814762768

This volume seeks to foreground a borderless history and geography of South, Southeast, and East Asian littoral zones that would be maritime-focused, and thereby explore the ancient connections and dynamics of interaction that favoured the encounters among the cultures found throughout the region stretching from the Indian Ocean littorals to the Western Pacific, from the early historical period to the present. Transcending the artificial boundaries of macro-regions and nation-states, and trying to bridge the arbitrary divide between (inherently cosmopolitan) high cultures (e.g. Sanskritic, Sinitic, or Islamicate) and local or indigenous cultures, this multidisciplinary volume explores the metaphor of Monsoon Asia as a vast geo-environmental area inhabited by speakers of numerous language phyla, which for millennia has formed an integrated system of littorals where crops, goods, ideas, cosmologies, and ritual practices circulated on the sea-routes governed by the seasonal monsoon winds. The collective body of work presented in the volume describes Monsoon Asia as an ideal theatre for circulatory dynamics of cultural transfer, interaction, acceptance, selection, and avoidance, and argues that, despite the rich ethnic, linguistic and sociocultural diversity, a shared pattern of values, norms, and cultural models is discernible throughout the region.