Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets

Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets
Author: Justine B. Quijada
Publisher:
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190916796

Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets examines indigenous, post-Soviet religious revival in the Republic of Buryatia through the lens of Bakhtin's chronotope. Comparing histories from Buddhist, shamanic and civic rituals, Quijada offers a new lens for analyzing ritual and an innovative approach to the ethnographic study of how people know their past.

Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets

Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets
Author: Justine Buck Quijada
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2019-02-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190916818

History in the Soviet Union was a political project. From the Soviet perspective, Buryats, an indigenous Siberian ethnic group, were a "backwards" nationality that was carried along on the inexorable march towards the Communist utopian future. When the Soviet Union ended, the Soviet version of history lost its power and Buryats, like other Siberian indigenous peoples, were able to revive religious and cultural traditions that had been suppressed by the Soviet state. In the process, they also recovered knowledge about the past that the Soviet Union had silenced. Borrowing the analytic lens of the chronotope from Bakhtin, Quijada argues that rituals have chronotopes which situate people within time and space. As they revived rituals, Post-Soviet Buryats encountered new historical information and traditional ways of being in time that enabled them to re-imagine the Buryat past, and what it means to be Buryat. Through the temporal perspective of a reincarnating Buddhist monk, Dashi-Dorzho Etigelov, Buddhists come to see the Soviet period as a test on the path of dharma. Shamanic practitioners, in contrast, renegotiate their relationship to the past by speaking to their ancestors through the bodies of shamans. By comparing the versions of history that are produced in Buddhist, shamanic and civic rituals, Buddhists, Shamans and Soviets offers a new lens for analyzing ritual, a new perspective on how an indigenous people grapples with a history of state repression, and an innovative approach to the ethnographic study of how people know about the past.

Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond

Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond
Author: Beatriz Caiuby Labate
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2014-05-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0199341214

Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar offer an in-depth exploration of how Amerindian epistemology and ontology concerning indigenous shamanic rituals of the Amazon have spread to Western societies, and of how indigenous, mestizo, and cosmopolitan cultures have engaged with and transformed these forest traditions. The volume focuses on the use of ayahuasca, a psychoactive drink essential in many indigenous shamanic rituals of the Amazon. Ayahuasca use has spread to countries far beyond its Amazonian origin, spurring a wide variety of legal and cultural responses. The essays in this volume look at how these responses have influenced ritual design and performance in traditional and non-traditional contexts, how displaced indigenous people and rubber tappers are engaged in the creative reinvention of rituals, and how these rituals help build ethnic alliances and cultural and political strategies. These essays explore important classic and contemporary issues in anthropology, including the relationship between the expansion of ecotourism and ethnic tourism and recent indigenous cultural revival and the emergence of new ethnic identities. The volume also examines trends in the commodification of indigenous cultures in post-colonial contexts, the combination of shamanism with a network of health and spiritually related services, and identity hybridization in global societies. The rich ethnographies and extensive analysis of these essays will allow deeper understanding of the role of ritual in mediating the encounter between indigenous traditions and modern societies.

Building the Buddhist Revival

Building the Buddhist Revival
Author: Gregory Adam Scott
Publisher:
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190930721

Between 1850 and 1966, tens of thousands of Buddhist sacred sites in China were destroyed, victims of targeted destruction, accidental damage, or simply neglect. During the same period, however, many of these sites were reconstructed, a process that involved both rebuilding material structures and reviving religious communities. Gregory Adam Scott argues that over the course of this period monastery reconstruction in China changed drastically. The power to determine whether and how a monastery would be reconstructed, and the types of activities that would be reinstated or newly introduced, began to shift from religious leaders and communities to state agencies that had a radically different set of motivations and values. Building the Buddhist Revival explores the history of Chinese Buddhist monastery reconstruction from the end of the Imperial period through the first seventeen years of the People's Republic.

Tibetan Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction

Tibetan Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction
Author: Matthew Kapstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2014
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199735123

What does Tibetan Buddhism teach? Just what is the position of the Dalai Lama, and how will his succession be assured? This Very Short Introduction offers a brief account responding to these questions and more, in terms that are easily accessible to those who are curious to learn the most essential features of Tibetan Buddhist history, teachings, and practice.

Bø and Bön

Bø and Bön
Author: Dmitry Ermakov
Publisher: Bo & Bon by Dmitry Ermakov
Total Pages: 904
Release: 2008
Genre: Bo Murgel
ISBN:

Comparative study between Tibetan Bon and Buryatian Bø religion of ancient Shamanic traditions.

When Sonia Met Boris

When Sonia Met Boris
Author: Anna Shternshis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2017
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0190223103

Based on nearly 500 oral history interviews, When Sonia Met Boris is an innovative study of Jewish daily life in the Soviet Union, giving a long-suppressed voice to the Jewish men and women who survived the sustained violence and everyday hardship of Stalin's Russia. It reveals how postwar Soviet Jews came to view their Jewish identity as an obstacle-a shift in attitude with ramifications for contemporary Russian Jewish culture and the broader Jewish diaspora.

Armageddon Averted

Armageddon Averted
Author: Stephen Kotkin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2008-12-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199743843

Featuring extensive revisions to the text as well as a new introduction and epilogue--bringing the book completely up to date on the tumultuous politics of the previous decade and the long-term implications of the Soviet collapse--this compact, original, and engaging book offers the definitive account of one of the great historical events of the last fifty years. Combining historical and geopolitical analysis with an absorbing narrative, Kotkin draws upon extensive research, including memoirs by dozens of insiders and senior figures, to illuminate the factors that led to the demise of Communism and the USSR. The new edition puts the collapse in the context of the global economic and political changes from the 1970s to the present day. Kotkin creates a compelling profile of post Soviet Russia and he reminds us, with chilling immediacy, of what could not have been predicted--that the world's largest police state, with several million troops, a doomsday arsenal, and an appalling record of violence, would liquidate itself with barely a whimper. Throughout the book, Kotkin also paints vivid portraits of key personalities. Using recently released archive materials, for example, he offers a fascinating picture of Gorbachev, describing this virtuoso tactician and resolutely committed reformer as "flabbergasted by the fact that his socialist renewal was leading to the system's liquidation"--and more or less going along with it. At once authoritative and provocative, Armageddon Averted illuminates the collapse of the Soviet Union, revealing how "principled restraint and scheming self-interest brought a deadly system to meek dissolution." Acclaim for the First Edition: "The clearest picture we have to date of the post-Soviet landscape." --The New Yorker "A triumph of the art of contemporary history. In fewer than 200 pagesKotkin elucidates the implosion of the Soviet empire--the most important and startling series of international events of the past fifty years--and clearly spells out why, thanks almost entirely to the 'principal restraint' of the Soviet leadership, that collapse didn't result in a cataclysmic war, as all experts had long forecasted." -The Atlantic Monthly "Concise and persuasive The mystery, for Kotkin, is not so much why the Soviet Union collapsed as why it did so with so little collateral damage." --The New York Review of Books

Queer Maghrebi French

Queer Maghrebi French
Author: Denis M Provencher
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2017-06-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1781384592

Queer Maghrebi French investigates the lives and stories of queer Maghrebi and Maghrebi French men who moved to or grew up in contemporary France and how these queer men living in France and the diaspora stake claims to time and space, construct kinship, and imagine their own future.

Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life

Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life
Author: Joel Robbins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2020-07-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0192583689

Anthropological theory can radically transform our understanding of human experience and offer theologians an introduction to the interdisciplinary nature between anthropology and Christianity. Both sociocultural anthropology and theology have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of human experience and the place of humanity in the world. But can these two disciplines, despite the radical differences that separate them, work together to transform their thinking on these topics? Robbins argues that they can. To make this point, he draws on key theological discussions of atonement, eschatology, interruption, passivity, and judgement to rethink important anthropological debates about such topics as ethical life, radical change, the ways people live in time, agency, gift giving, and the nature of humanity. The result is both a major reconsideration of important aspects of anthropological theory through theological categories and a series of careful readings of influential theologians such as Moltmann, Pannenberg, Jüngel, and Dalferth informed by rich ethnographic accounts of the lives of Christians from around the world. In conclusion, Robbins draws on contemporary discussions of secularism to interrogate the secular foundations of anthropology and suggests that the differences between anthropology and theology surrounding this topic can provide a foundation for transformative dialogue between them, rather than being an obstacle to it. Written as a work of interdisciplinary anthropological theorizing, this book also offers theologians an introduction to some of the most important ground covered by burgeoning field of the anthropology of Christianity while guiding anthropologists into core areas of theological discussion. Although theoretically ambitious, the book is clearly argued throughout and written to be accessible to all readers in the social sciences, theology, and religious studies interested in the place of religion in social life and human experience.