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The Ends of Kinship
Connecting Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York
For centuries, people from Mustang, Nepal, have relied on agriculture, pastoralism, and trade as a way of life. Seasonal migrations to South Asian cities for trade as well as temporary wage labor abroad have shaped...
ISBN: 9780295747699
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Bad Dog
Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice
Fifty-plus years of media fearmongering coupled with targeted breed bans have produced what could be called “America’s Most Wanted” dog: the pit bull. However, at the turn of the twenty-first century, competing narratives began to...
ISBN: 9780295748023
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Exile from the Grasslands
Tibetan Herders and Chinese Development Projects
At the beginning of the new millennium, the Chinese government launched the Great Opening of the West, a development strategy targeted at remote areas inhabited mainly by indigenous ethnic groups. Intended to modernize infrastructure and...
ISBN: 9780295748191
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Mountains of Blame
Climate and Culpability in the Philippine Uplands
Swidden agriculture has long been considered the primary cause of deforestation throughout Southeast Asia, and the Philippine government has used this belief to exclude the indigenous people of Palawan Island from their ancestral lands and...
ISBN: 9780295748160
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Gardens of Gold
Place-Making in Papua New Guinea
Since the start of colonial gold mining in the early 1920s, the Biangai villagers of Elauru and Winima in Papua New Guinea have moved away from planting yams and other subsistence foods to instead cultivating...
ISBN: 9780295747590
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Rural Origins, City Lives
Class and Place in Contemporary China
Many of the millions of workers streaming in from rural China to jobs at urban factories soon find themselves in new kinds of poverty and oppression. Yet, their individual experiences are far more nuanced than...
ISBN: 9780295748085
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Shifting Livelihoods
Gold Mining and Subsistence in the Chocó, Colombia
People employ various methods to extract gold in the rainforests of the Chocó, in northwest Colombia: Rural Afro-Colombian artisanal miners work hillsides with hand tools or dredge mud from river bottoms. Migrant miners level the...
ISBN: 9780295747538
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Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories
Jarai and Other Lives in the Cambodian Highlands
In the hill country of northeast Cambodia, just a few kilometers from the Vietnam border, sits the village of Tang Kadon. This community of hill rice farmers of the Jarai ethnic minority group survived aerial...
ISBN: 9780295746906
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Ancient Ink
The Archaeology of Tattooing
The human desire to adorn the body is universal and timeless. While specific forms of body decoration and the motivations for them vary by region, culture, and era, all human societies have engaged in practices...
ISBN: 9780295742830
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Roses from Kenya
Labor, Environment, and the Global Trade in Cut Flowers
Kenya supplies more than 35 percent of the fresh-cut roses and other flowers sold annually in the European Union. This industry—which employs at least 90,000 workers, most of whom are women—is lucrative but enduringly controversial....
ISBN: 9780295746500
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The Way of the Barbarians
Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China
Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that...
ISBN: 9780295746036
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The Gift of Knowledge / Ttnúwit Átawish Nch'inch'imamí
Reflections on Sahaptin Ways
The Gift of Knowledge / Ttnuwit Atawish Nch’inch’imamí is a treasure trove of material for those interested in Native American culture. Author Virginia Beavert grew up in a traditional, Indian-speaking household. Both her parents and...
ISBN: 9780295746128
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The Shaman's Wages
Trading in Ritual on Cheju Island
Breaking from previous scholarship on Korean shamanism, which focuses on mansin of mainland Korea, The Shaman’s Wages offers the first in-depth study of simbang, hereditary shamans on Cheju Island off the peninsula’s southwest coast. In...
ISBN: 9780295745954
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The Kongs of Qufu
The Descendants of Confucius in Late Imperial China
The city of Qufu, in north China’s Shandong Province, is famous as the hometown of Kong Qiu (551–479 BCE)—known as Confucius in English and as Kongzi or Kong Fuzi in Chinese. In The Kongs of...
ISBN: 9780295745930
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Working with the Ancestors
Mana and Place in the Marquesas Islands
Throughout the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia, forest spirits share space with ancestral ruins and active agricultural plots, affecting land use and heritage preservation. As Marquesans continue their efforts to establish UNESCO World Heritage status,...
ISBN: 9780295745831
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Tea and Solidarity
Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka
Beyond nostalgic tea industry ads romanticizing colonial Ceylon and the impoverished conditions that beleaguer Tamil tea workers are the stories of the women, men, and children who have built their families and lives in line...
ISBN: 9780295745671
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The Nuosu Book of Origins
A Creation Epic from Southwest China
The Nuosu people, who were once overlords of vast tracts of farmland and forest in the uplands of southern Sichuan and neighboring provinces, are the largest division of the Yi ethnic group in southwest China....
ISBN: 9780295745695
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Herring and People of the North Pacific
Sustaining a Keystone Species
Herring are vital to the productivity and health of marine systems, and socio-ecologically Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) is one of the most important fish species in the Northern Hemisphere. Human dependence on herring has evolved...
ISBN: 9780295748290
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Living with Oil and Coal
Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India
The nineteenth-century discovery of oil in the eastern Himalayan foothills, together with the establishment of tea plantations and other extractive industries, continues to have a profound impact on life in the region. In the Indian...
ISBN: 9780295743950
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The New Way
Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam
In the mid-1980s, a radio program with a compelling spiritual message was accidentally received by listeners in Vietnam’s remote northern highlands. The Protestant evangelical communication had been created in the Hmong language by the Far...
ISBN: 9780295744308
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