Title: A history of modern Tibet, 1913-1951: the demise of the Lamaist state
Author: Goldstein, Melvyn C
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Asian History | Tibet
Publisher's Description: The "Tibetan Question," the nature of Tibet's political status vis-à-vis China, has been the subject of often bitterly competing views while the facts of the issue have not been fully accessible to interested observers. While one faction has argued that Tibet was, in the main, historically independent until it was conquered by the Chinese Communists in 1951 and incorporated into the new Chinese state, the other faction views Tibet as a traditional part ofChina that split away at the instigation of the British after the fall of the Manchu Dynasty and was later dutifully reunited with "New China" in 1951. In contrast, this comprehensive study of modern Tibetan history presents a detailed, non-partisan account of the demise of the Lamaist state.Drawing on a wealth of British, American, and Indian diplomatic records; first-hand-historical accounts written by Tibetan participants; and extensive interviews with former Tibetan officials, monastic leaders, soldiers, and traders, Goldstein meticulously examines what happened and why. He balances the traditional focus on international relations with an innovative emphasis on the intricate web of internal affairs and events that produced the fall of Tibet. Scholars and students of Asian history will find this work an invaluable resource and interested readers will appreciate the clear explanation of highly polemicized, and often confusing, historical events.   [brief]
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Title: Buddhism in contemporary Tibet: religious revival and cultural identity
Author: Goldstein, Melvyn C
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Religion | Cultural Anthropology | Tibet | Buddhism
Publisher's Description: Following the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, the People's Republic of China gradually permitted the renewal of religious activity. Tibetans, whose traditional religious and cultural institutions had been decimated during the preceding two decades, took advantage of the decisions of 1978 to begin a Buddhist renewal that is one of the most extensive and dramatic examples of religious revitalization in contemporary China. The nature of that revival is the focus of this book. Four leading specialists in Tibetan anthropology and religion conducted case studies in the Tibet autonomous region and among the Tibetans of Sichuan and Qinghai provinces. There they observed the revival of the Buddhist heritage in monastic communities and among laypersons at popular pilgrimages and festivals. Demonstrating how that revival must contend with tensions between the Chinese state and aspirations for greater Tibetan autonomy, the authors discuss ways that Tibetan Buddhists are restructuring their religion through a complex process of social, political, and economic adaptation. Buddhism has long been the main source of Tibetans' pride in their culture and country. These essays reveal the vibrancy of that ancient religion in contemporary Tibet and also the problems that religion and Tibetan culture in general are facing in a radically altered world.   [brief]
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Title: Echoes from Dharamsala: music in the life of a Tibetan refugee community
Author: Diehl, Keila
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Music | Ethnomusicology | Tibet | Southeast Asia | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: In Echoes from Dharamsala, Keila Diehl uses music to understand the experiences of Tibetans living in Dharamsala, a town in the Indian Himalayas that for more than forty years has been home to Tibet's government-in-exile. The Dalai Lama's presence lends Dharamsala's Tibetans a feeling of being "in place," but at the same time they have physically and psychologically constructed Dharamsala as "not Tibet," as a temporary resting place to which many are unable or unwilling to become attached. Not surprisingly, this community struggles with notions of home, displacement, ethnic identity, and assimilation. Diehl's ethnography explores the contradictory realities of cultural homogenization, hybridity, and concern about ethnic purity as they are negotiated in the everyday lives of individuals. In this way, she complicates explanations of culture change provided by the popular idea of "global flow." Diehl's accessible, absorbing narrative argues that the exiles' focus on cultural preservation, while crucial, has contributed to the development of essentialist ideas of what is truly "Tibetan." As a result, "foreign" or "modern" practices that have gained deep relevance for Tibetan refugees have been devalued. Diehl scrutinizes this tension in her discussion of the refugees' enthusiasm for songs from blockbuster Hindi films, the popularity of Western rock and roll among Tibetan youth, and the emergence of a new genre of modern Tibetan music. Diehl's insight into the soundscape of Dharamsala is enriched by her own experiences as the keyboard player for a Tibetan refugee rock group called the Yak Band. Her groundbreaking study reveals the importance of music as a site where official and personal, old and new representations of Tibetan culture meet and where different notions of "Tibetan-ness" are being imagined, performed, and debated.   [brief]
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Title: The sound of two hands clapping: the education of a Tibetan Buddhist monk
Author: Dreyfus, Georges B. J
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Religion | Buddhism | Tibet | Autobiographies and Biographies | Buddhism
Publisher's Description: A unique insider's account of day-to-day life inside a Tibetan monastery, The Sound of Two Hands Clapping reveals to Western audiences the fascinating details of monastic education. Georges B. J. Dreyfus, the first Westerner to complete the famous Ge-luk curriculum and achieve the distinguished titl . . . [more]
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Title: Sensory biographies: lives and deaths among Nepal's Yolmo Buddhists
Author: Desjarlais, Robert R
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Buddhism | Aging
Publisher's Description: Robert Desjarlais's graceful ethnography explores the life histories of two Yolmo elders, focusing on how particular sensory orientations and modalities have contributed to the making and the telling of their lives. These two are a woman in her late eighties known as Kisang Omu and a Buddhist priest in his mid-eighties known as Ghang Lama, members of an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people whose ancestors have lived for three centuries or so along the upper ridges of the Yolmo Valley in north central Nepal. It was clear through their many conversations that both individuals perceived themselves as nearing death, and both were quite willing to share their thoughts about death and dying. The difference between the two was remarkable, however, in that Ghang Lama's life had been dominated by motifs of vision, whereas Kisang Omu's accounts of her life largely involved a "theatre of voices." Desjarlais offers a fresh and readable inquiry into how people's ways of sensing the world contribute to how they live and how they recollect their lives.   [brief]
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Title: Death is that man taking names: intersections of American medicine, law, and culture
Author: Burt, Robert 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Law | Health Care | History of Medicine | Ethics | Religion
Publisher's Description: The American culture of death changed radically in the 1970s. For terminal illnesses, hidden decisions by physicians were rejected in favor of rational self-control by patients asserting their "right to die" - initially by refusing medical treatment and more recently by physician-assisted suicide. This new claim rested on two seemingly irrefutable propositions: first, that death can be a positive good for individuals whose suffering has become intolerable; and second, that death is an inevitable and therefore morally neutral biological event. Death Is That Man Taking Names suggests, however, that a contrary attitude persists in our culture - that death is inherently evil, not just in practical but also in moral terms. The new ethos of rational self-control cannot refute but can only unsuccessfully try to suppress this contrary attitude. The inevitable failure of this suppressive effort provokes ambivalence and clouds rational judgment in many people's minds and paradoxically leads to inflictions of terrible suffering on terminally ill people. Judicial reforms in the 1970s of abortion and capital punishment were driven by similarly high valuations of rationality and public decision-making - rejecting physician control over abortion in favor of individual self-control by pregnant women and subjecting unsupervised jury decisions for capital punishment to supposed rationally guided supervision by judges. These reforms also attempt to suppress persistently ambivalent attitudes toward death, and are therefore prone to inflicting unjustified suffering on pregnant women and death-sentenced prisoners. In this profound and subtle account of psychological and social forces underlying American cultural attitudes toward death, Robert A. Burt maintains that unacknowledged ambivalence is likely to undermine the beneficent goals of post-1970s reforms and harm the very people these changes were intended to help.   [brief]
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Title: Twice dead: organ transplants and the reinvention of death
Author: Lock, Margaret M
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Ethics | Sociology | Sociology | Ethics | Sociology | Ethnic Studies | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: Tales about organ transplants appear in mythology and folk stories, and surface in documents from medieval times, but only during the past twenty years has medical knowledge and technology been sufficiently advanced for surgeons to perform thousands of transplants each year. In the majority of cases individuals diagnosed as "brain dead" are the source of the organs without which transplants could not take place. In this compelling and provocative examination, Margaret Lock traces the discourse over the past thirty years that contributed to the locating of a new criterion of death in the brain, and its routinization in clinical practice in North America. She compares this situation with that in Japan where, despite the availability of the necessary technology and expertise, brain death was legally recognized only in 1997, and then under limited and contested circumstances. Twice Dead explores the cultural, historical, political, and clinical reasons for the ready acceptance of the new criterion of death in North America and its rejection, until recently, in Japan, with the result that organ transplantation has been severely restricted in that country. This incisive and timely discussion demonstrates that death is not self-evident, that the space between life and death is historically and culturally constructed, fluid, multiple, and open to dispute. In addition to an analysis of that professional literature on and popular representations of the subject, Lock draws on extensive interviews conducted over ten years with physicians working in intensive care units, transplant surgeons, organ recipients, donor families, members of the general public in both Japan and North America, and political activists in Japan opposed to the recognition of brain death. By showing that death can never be understood merely as a biological event, and that cultural, medical, legal, and political dimensions are inevitably implicated in the invention of brain death, Twice Dead confronts one of the most troubling questions of our era.   [brief]
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Title: What difference does a husband make?: women and marital status in Nazi and postwar Germany
Author: Heineman, Elizabeth D 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | German Studies | Women's Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: In October 1946, seven million more women than men lived in occupied Germany. In this study of unwed, divorced, widowed, and married women at work and at home across three political regimes, Elizabeth Heineman traces the transitions from early National Socialism through the war and on to the consolidation of democracy in the West and communism in the East.Based on thorough and extensive research in German national and regional archives as well as the archives of the U.S. occupying forces, this pathbreaking book argues that marital status can define women's position and experience as surely as race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Heineman finds that, while the war made the experience of single women a dramatic one, state activity was equally important. As a result, West German women continued to be defined in large part by their marital status. In contrast, by the time of reunification marital status had become far less significant in the lives of East German women.In one broad, comprehensive sweep, Elizabeth Heineman compares prewar and postwar, East and West, lived experience and public policy. Her sharp analytical insights will enrich our understanding of the history of women in modern Germany and the role of marital status in twentieth-century life worldwide.   [brief]
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Title: Claiming the high ground: Sherpas, subsistence, and environmental change in the highest Himalaya 
Author: Stevens, Stanley F
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Geography | Cultural Anthropology | Tibet
Publisher's Description: Stanley Stevens brings a new historical perspective to his remarkably well-researched study of a subsistence society in ever-increasing contact with the outside world. The Khumbu Sherpas, famous for their mountaineering exploits, have frequently been depicted as victims of the world's highest-altitude tourist boom. But has the flow of outsiders to Mt. Everest and the heights of Nepal in fact destroyed a stable, finely balanced relationship between the Sherpas and their environment?Stevens's innovative use of oral history and cultural ecology suggests that tourism is not the watershed circumstance many have considered it to be. Drawing on extensive interviews and data gathered during three years of fieldwork, and with the use of numerous maps and charts, he documents the Sherpas' ingenious adaptation to high-altitude conditions, their past and present agricultural, pastoral, trade, and forest management practices, and their own perspectives on the environmental history of their homeland. This is a book for geographers, anthropologists, and all those interested in conservation of the earth's high places.   [brief]
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Title: Mesocosm: Hinduism and the organization of a traditional Newar city in Nepal 
Author: Levy, Robert I. (Robert Isaac) 1924-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Tibet | Hinduism | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Mesocosm is a study of Hinduism in its most fully realized form as a symbolic system for organizing the life of a particular kind of city - what the author terms an "archaic" city. The work is a detailed description and analysis of the symbolic world of Bhaktapur, a unicultural city in the Kathmandu Valley, a city which is perhaps the last surviving example of a type of organization once widespread in the ancient world.Robert Levy views Bhaktapur as a structured "mesocosm," mediating between the microcosm of individual self-conception and the macrocosm of the culturally conceived larger universe. The city is a bounded entity, grounded on a minutely divided and interrelated sacrilized space. It uses that space, roles assigned by an elaborate caste system, a semantically differentiated pantheon, and the tempos and forms of the festival year and rites of passage to construct a "civic dance," a web of communication and instruction which deeply affects the experience of Bhaktapur's citizens. Levy investigates the meaning of the community to the people who live there and suggests how the religious forms that have challenged Hinduism in South Asia - Christianity and, above all, Islam - are profoundly antithetical to Hinduism as the organizing principle for cities such as Bhaktapur. Mesocosm is a groundbreaking contribution to anthropology, social and religious history, and Indian and Nepalese studies.   [brief]
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Title: Death Valley & the Amargosa: a land of illusion
Author: Lingenfelter, Richard E
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: History | California and the West | United States History
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Title: The rest is silence: death as annihilation in the English Renaissance 
Author: Watson, Robert N
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: How did the fear of death coexist with the promise of Christian afterlife in the culture and literature of the English Renaissance? Robert Watson exposes a sharp edge of blasphemous protest against mortality that runs through revenge plays such as The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet , and through plays of procreation such as Measure for Measure and Macbeth . Tactics of denial appear in the vengefulness that John Donne directs toward female bodies for failing to bestow immortality, and in the promise of renewal that George Herbert sets against the threat of closure.Placing these literary manifestations in the context of specific Jacobean deathbed crises and modern cultural distortions, Watson explores the psychological roots and political consequences of denying that death permanently erases sensation and consciousness.   [brief]
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Title: Aging, death, and human longevity: a philosophical inquiry
Author: Overall, Christine 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Philosophy | Ethics | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: With the help of medicine and technology we are living longer than ever before. As human life spans have increased, the moral and political issues surrounding longevity have become more complex. Should we desire to live as long as possible? What are the social ramifications of longer lives? How does a longer life span change the way we think about the value of our lives and about death and dying? Christine Overall offers a clear and intelligent discussion of the philosophical and cultural issues surrounding this difficult and often emotionally charged issue. Her book is unique in its comprehensive presentation and evaluation of the arguments - both ancient and contemporary - for and against prolonging life. It also proposes a progressive social policy for responding to dramatic increases in life expectancy. Writing from a feminist perspective, Overall highlights the ways that our biases about race, class, and gender have affected our views of elderly people and longevity, and her policy recommendations represent an effort to overcome these biases. She also covers the arguments surrounding the question of the "duty to die" and includes a provocative discussion of immortality. After judiciously weighing the benefits and the risks of prolonging human life, Overall persuasively concludes that the length of life does matter and that its duration can make a difference to the quality and value of our lives. Her book will be an essential guide as we consider our social responsibilities, the meaning of human life, and the prospects of living longer.   [brief]
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Title: The life of Buddhism
Author: Reynolds, Frank 1930-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Religion | Asian Studies | Buddhism
Publisher's Description: Bringing together fifteen essays by outstanding Buddhist scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America, this book offers a distinctive portrayal of the "life of Buddhism." The contributors focus on a number of religious practices across the Buddhist world, from Sri Lanka to New York, Japan to Tibet. The essays highlight not so much Buddhist doctrine or sacred texts, but rather the actual behavior and lived experience of Buddhist adherents. A general introduction by Frank E. Reynolds and Jason A. Carbine provides a historical overview and briefly characterizes the three major variants of Buddhist tradition - the Hinayana/Theravada branch practiced in Sri Lanka and much of Southeast Asia; the Mahayana branch located most notably in East Asia; and the Vajrayana/Esoteric branch established in Tibet and Japan. It also takes note of a distinctive form of Buddhism that is now emerging among non-Asian practitioners in the West. The editors introduce each essay with a brief commentary that situates its contents within the Buddhist tradition as a whole. The pieces offer concise depictions and analyses of particular aspects of Buddhist life, including temple architecture and iconography, the consecration of sacred objects, meditative practices, devotional expressions, exorcisms, and pilgrimage journeys. Topics discussed also include the construction of religio-political and religio-social hierarchies, gender roles, the management of asocial behavior, and confrontations with dying and death.   [brief]
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Title: Losing face: status politics in Japan 
Author: Pharr, Susan J
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Asian Studies | Asian History | Japan | Politics
Publisher's Description: How does a "homogeneous" society like Japan treat the problem of social inequality? Losing Face looks beyond conventional structural categories (race, class, ethnicity) to focus on conflicts based on differences in social status. Three rich and revealing case studies explore crucial asymmetries of a . . . [more]
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Title: Deep politics and the death of JFK
Author: Scott, Peter Dale
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Politics | Popular Culture | United States History | American Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Peter Dale Scott's meticulously documented investigation uncovers the secrets surrounding John F. Kennedy's assassination. Offering a wholly new perspective - that JFK's death was not just an isolated case, but rather a symptom of hidden processes - Scott examines the deep politics of early 1960s American international and domestic policies.Scott offers a disturbing analysis of the events surrounding Kennedy's death, and of the "structural defects" within the American government that allowed such a crime to occur and to go unpunished. In nuanced readings of both previously examined and newly available materials, he finds ample reason to doubt the prevailing interpretations of the assassination. He questions the lone assassin theory and the investigations undertaken by the House Committee on Assassinations, and unearths new connections between Oswald, Ruby, and corporate and law enforcement forces.Revisiting the controversy popularized in Oliver Stone's movie JFK, Scott probes the link between Kennedy's assassination and the escalation of the U.S. commitment in Vietnam that followed two days later. He contends that Kennedy's plans to withdraw troops from Vietnam - offensive to a powerful anti-Kennedy military and political coalition - were secretly annulled when Johnson came to power. The split between JFK and his Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the collaboration between Army Intelligence and the Dallas Police in 1963, are two of the several missing pieces Scott adds to the puzzle of who killed Kennedy and why.Scott presses for a new investigation of the Kennedy assassination, not as an external conspiracy but as a power shift within the subterranean world of American politics. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK shatters our notions of one of the central events of the twentieth century.   [brief]
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Title: Tokugawa village practice: class, status, power, law 
Author: Ooms, Herman
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian History | Japan | Law
Publisher's Description: In contrast to modern Japanese citizens, during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) villagers frequently resorted to lawsuits to settle conflicts. Herman Ooms uses colorful, skillfully analyzed case studies to trace the evolution of class and status conflicts through lawsuits and petitions in villages. Inspired by the work of Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu, this exploration of social and legal history illuminates the texture and detail of village life, focusing on relations to authority.Opening with a story of an angry peasant woman's lifelong struggle against village authority (a story involving murder and revenge), Ooms highlights the role played by obscure historical actors including local elites, commoners, women, and outcastes. He also discusses the important role lineages played in village politics and examines the origins of discrimination against Japan's burakumin , or outcastes.   [brief]
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Title: Death ritual in late imperial and modern China
Author: Watson, James L
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: History | China | Anthropology | Asian History
Publisher's Description: During the late imperial era (1500-1911), China, though divided by ethnic, linguistic, and regional differences at least as great as those prevailing in Europe, enjoyed a remarkable solidarity. What held Chinese society together for so many centuries? Some scholars have pointed to the institutional control over the written word as instrumental in promoting cultural homogenization; others, the manipulation of the performing arts. This volume, comprised of essays by both anthropologists and historians, furthers this important discussion by examining the role of death rituals in the unification of Chinese culture.   [brief]
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Title: Birds of the Salton Sea: status, biogeography, and ecology
Author: Patten, Michael A
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Organismal Biology | Ecology | Ornithology | Animals | California and the West
Publisher's Description: The Salton Sea, California's largest inland lake, supports a spectacular bird population that is among the most concentrated and most diverse in the world. Sadly, this crucial stopover along the Pacific Flyway for migratory and wintering shorebirds, landbirds, and waterfowl is dangerously close to collapse from several environmental threats. This book is the first thoroughly detailed book to describe the birds of Salton Sea, more than 450 species and subspecies in all. A major contribution to our knowledge about the birds of western North America, it will also be an important tool in the struggle to save this highly endangered area. Synthesizing data from many sources, including observations from their long-term work in the area, the authors' species accounts discuss each bird's abundance, seasonal status, movement patterns, biogeographic affinities, habitat associations, and more. This valuable reference also includes general information on the region's fascinating history and biogeography, making it an unparalleled resource for the birding community, for wildlife managers, and for conservation biologists concerned with one of the most threatened ecosystems in western North America.   [brief]
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Title: The death of authentic primitive art and other tales of progress
Author: Errington, Shelly 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Art History | Architectural History | Art Theory
Publisher's Description: In this lucid, witty, and forceful book, Shelly Errington argues that Primitive Art was invented as a new type of art object at the beginning of the twentieth century but that now, at the century's end, it has died a double but contradictory death. Authenticity and primitivism, both attacked by cultural critics, have died as concepts. At the same time, the penetration of nation-states, the tourist industry, and transnational corporations into regions that formerly produced these artifacts has severely reduced supplies of "primitive art," bringing about a second "death."Errington argues that the construction of the primitive in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and the kinds of objects chosen to exemplify it) must be understood as a product of discourses of progress - from the nineteenth-century European narrative of technological progress, to the twentieth-century narrative of modernism, to the late- twentieth-century narrative of the triumph of the free market. In Part One she charts a provocative argument ranging through the worlds of museums, art theorists, mail-order catalogs, boutiques, tourism, and world events, tracing a loosely historical account of the transformations of meanings of primitive art in this century. In Part Two she explores an eclectic collection of public sites in Mexico and Indonesia - a national museum of anthropology, a cultural theme park, an airport, and a ninth-century Buddhist monument (newly refurbished) - to show how the idea of the primitive can be used in the interests of promoting nationalism and economic development.Errington's dissection of discourses about progress and primitivism in the contemporary world is both a lively introduction to anthropological studies of art institutions and a dramatic new contribution to the growing field of cultural studies.   [brief]
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