Anthropology of Tibet and the Himalayas

Throughout this chapter I focus on the role that media has played in not only circulating global understandings of Buddhism between East and West, but also how media transforms these understandings and  becomes utilized as a form of religious practice. With the increasing availability of Buddhist-related media sources, such as books in English and the wide variety of sources found on the Internet, young Buddhists
turn to alternative sources of knowledge about Buddhism in order to learn more about their religious and cultural background. Not only is media used as a source of knowledge, but also as a platform for practice in that media sources become the practice- such as watching a You Tube video of the Dalai Lama giving a sermon on Buddhism. What we find in examining young Buddhist engagement with religion and media is a more privatized and individualized form of Buddhist practice which serves to suit the individual needs—such as the reduction of exam stress and depression—and often situated in a hostel room with a few friends, rather than in a temple in a more formal, ritualized environment. Instead of assuming a lack of youth interest in religion due to a decrease in temple participation, in looking closer we see an active yet altered form of religious engagement, especially integrating forms of young media and a transformation of young Buddhist understandings and practices.

Résumé
Au Ladakh, le bouquetin est l’animal de loin le plus représenté sur les pétroglyphes. Chassé à l’arc, puis au fusil, c’était – jusqu’à l’interdiction de sa chasse en 1978 – un gibier très convoité, tant par les populations locales que par les Britanniques au temps du Raj: les premières appréciant sa chair goûteuse, les seconds en collectionnant les trophées.
Animal de bon augure, associé à la fécondité, le bouquetin occupe par ailleurs, au sein de la faune ladakhi, une place prépondérante sur le plan symbolique: ses cornes sont présentes sur les autels dédiés aux divinités locales, des chants en font l’éloge, des danses le mettent en scène, des figurines de pâte à son effigie sont offertes lors de la naissance d’un enfant comme lors des cérémonies de mariage et présentées pour accueillir la nouvelle année.
Mots clés : Ladakh, bouquetin, archéologie, chasse, rituel
Abstract
In Ladakh the ibex is by far the most represented animal on petroglyphs. Hunted using a bow and arrow, then the rifle, it was – until a ban on hunting in 1978 – very sought- after as game, both by local populations and by Western travellers under British rule: the former appreciated its tasty flesh while the latter collected trophies of it. An auspi- cious animal associated with fertility, the ibex occupies, among Ladakhi fauna, a pro- minent place on a symbolic level ; its horns are to be found on altars dedicated to local deities, songs sing its praise, dances portray it, dough figurines shaped like it are offered at the birth of a child just as they are at wedding ceremonies and to welcome the New Year after the winter solstice.
Keywords: Ladakh, Ibex, Archaeology, Hunting, Ritual

The concept of Original Artistic Intent is difficult to apply to Tibetan thangkas. Thangkas are composite objects produced by painters and tailors with differing intents, skills and training. Iconographic specifications, regional and doctrinal differences in style, changes in form from harsh treatment and altered mountings all complicate the issue. 2008

Cécile Ducher, « Sihlé Nicolas, Rituels bouddhiques de pouvoir et de violence : la figure du tantriste tibétain », Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines [En ligne], 46 | 2015, mis en ligne le 10 septembre 2015, consulté le 10 septembre 2015. URL : http://emscat.revues.org/2676

WESTERN TIBET AND THE WESTERN HIMALAYAS

ESSAYS ON ARCHEOLOGY, ART,  LITERATURE AND HISTORY

(edited by Amy Heller and Giacomella Orofino)

PREFACE


The present volume is the result of a panel at the International  Association for Tibetan Studies Oxford seminar, September 2003.
The raison d’être of this panel was to encourage an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Mnga' ris skor gsum and  adjacent regions.
Although they were integrated into the zone of the Tibetan empire since the seventh century, the geography of these regions led over time to distinct patterns of trade and cross-influences  with the polities of central Asia, Nepal and India.
By their diversity, the participant's research  covers a very broad time range from the Zhang  zhung period to the 20th century,  in order to offer as complete an outline as possible of the state of research in this area and to illustrate the rich terrain of information which it provides. In addition to specific topics linked to the political history of the kingdoms of Gu ge and Pu hrang, the contributions focussed on religious and secular art, architecture, and literature produced in or for western Tibet and the western Himalayas.
This particular field of studies has begun to  attract  ever increasing  interest on the part of scholars, mainly since it has proved to  be of seminal importance for the definition of the historical and cultural processes of the entire Indo-Tibetan civilization,  especially after the recent archaeological discoveries which  have produced  highly significant scientific results.
The panel was scheduled on the last morning of the Oxford seminar, which precluded a  general discussion of all participants as several were obliged to depart before the conclusion of the entire session.  In addition, two panellists were obliged to publish separately within the context of their university:  Renate Ponweiser, University of Vienna, who presented  a paper on narrative composition in the ambulatory of the cella in the ‘du khang of Ta bo, and  Zhang Changhong, Sichuan University Institute for Tibetan Studies, who presented her findings on typology of stūpa in the vicinity of Mtho gling and Dung dkar.  Geshe  Wangyel, a Bonpo lama  from  Dolpo district, northwest Nepal, unfortunately died a few weeks before the Oxford Seminar.  His presence was sorely missed. The abstract of his paper is included in the present volume as a testimony to his achievement and as a salient reminder of the scholars  of western Himalaya, who increasingly are analysing their history, religions, and societies. Enrico dell’ Angelo, director of the Khor chags restoration project, had proposed a study of the history of Khor chags monastery, but was unable to attend.  Giacomella Orofino, who participated in the same restoration project with dell’Angelo, presented the results of the ASIA restoration project  and her research on a specific text recovered in Khor chags (see below). Huo Wei, director of the Sichuan University Institute for Tibetan Studies, was prevented from attending the Oxford seminar due to unforeseen visa problems, and his paper has been included in the present volume. His student Zhang Changhong represented their institute at the Oxford seminar.
In terms of content, the volume begins with archaeology, secular and religious. Aldenderfer  and Huo Wei present here the first archeological reports in the history of the International Association for Tibetan Studies.  Aldenderfer  has done in-situ excavations at  Dindun, a site located on a high terrace overlooking the river between the modern villages of Phyi yang and Dung dkar in Mnga’ ris. Testing in 1999 and more extensive excavation in 2001  revealed the presence of residential architecture dating to approximately ca. 85 BC.  This excavation revealed several residences and differentiated living environments. Huo Wei, after initial archeological investigations of Tibetan tombs in central Tibet and the Lha rtse district,  has recently concentrated his efforts on excavations and site-reports of Tibetan caves and mchod rten in the vicinity of Dung dkar,  in Mnga’ ris. He discusses here the recently rediscovered wall paintings of the caves of Byang rtse Mkhar phug, north of Dung dkar, which may be dated to the flourishing of Buddhism in Mnga’ ris during the bstan pa phyi dar due to the content of the mural paintings and maṇḍala of the liturgical cycles of Vairocana.
The volume proceeds with two articles on architecture. Kozicz investigated with Prof. Heusgen of Graz and measured several sites, including Nyar ma in Ladakh, whose foundation is attributed to Rin chen bzang po, according to his biography written shortly after his death in 1055. As the results of their measurements illustrate some basic aspects of the architectural practices, Kozicz has studied the architecture of this former monastic enclave, working towards  a comparison with A lci (Ladakh) and Ta bo (Spiti) and the analysis of the criteria for the architectural design of Nyar ma. Di Mattia does not study the entire architecture of  monastic buildings, but instead concentrates on the development and differentiated usage of  architectural frames in the facades and interior decoration of monasteries in western Himalaya and Tibet.
The analysis of religious literature, in the context of the historical development of these regions,  is the focus of the studies of Orofino, Heller  and De Rossi Filibeck.
Orofino presents here the background of the Khor chags restoration project with the finding of a collection of manuscript texts, hidden in three walled hollow rooms  in the ‘dus khang. One of the buried manuscripts, the well known canonical text, Mañjuśrīnāmasaṃgiti has proved to be, on the base of critical textual analysis, very near to the Rin chen bzang po’s translation archetype, tracing back,  with great probability,  to the first phases of the foundation of the Khor chags settlement, before the 12th century. The critical analysis of the text proves, once again, the importance of the western Tibet literary collections in the study of the formation of the Tibetan canons.
Heller and De Rossi Filibeck  both analyze the prefaces of manuscript copies of volumes of the Tibetan Buddhist canon.  In the context of a restoration project in a village of Dolpo, Nepal, Heller discusses here the history of Gnas sar dgon pa and analyses the prefaces of several manuscripts from a corpus of more than 600 volumes conserved in this Dolpo temple. These prefaces range from  mid-14th to late 15th century, corresponding respectively to periods of Khas Malla and Glo bo patronage of Buddhism in Dolpo. The Gnas gsar prefaces show literary and organizational similarities with those analysed by De Rossi Filibeck in her previous studies of  several prefaces of 17th century manuscripts, collected by Giuseppe Tucci in his travels near Ta bo and Mtho gling and now preserved in the IsIAO library.  Here  De Rossi Filibeck presents a new study  on the contents and the formal aspects of this very interesting  literary material.   
The history of the monastery is the topic of Lo Bue who here presents his study of Guru lha khang in Ladakh . Lo Bue reviews previous analysis of the chronology and content of this monastery’s mural paintings as a prelude to a new analyis and definitive dating for Guru lha khang to the 15th century. Geshe Wangyel’s abstract on Bsam gling, the principal Bonpo monastery in Dolpo, is a useful summary of the history of this monastic foundation. The history of a Bonpo pilgrimage in Dolpo and the synchronic development of its sacred geography is presented in the research by Kind.  Jahoda also studies the history of a monastery, however his study of the Ta bo monastery is specific to the economic history of Ta bo village and monastery brought to light by documents pertaining to the economic relationships between the monastery and the lay population of Ta bo and other villages in Spiti valley during the third quarter of the 20th century, and examined through the 19th century  antecedents of these relations.
Spanning secular, religious and economic history, literature, art and archaeology from pre-historical period to the 20th century, the articles presented here show  the importance of  research on west Tibet and western Himalaya and demonstrate the fruitful exchange of interdisciplinary research within  this geographical context.  The editors wish to thank  all of the contributors for their patience and cooperative attitude.  We are grateful to Dr Charles Ramble, as convenor of the conference, for his hospitality, congeniality and encouragement of this publication, and Mr Anthony Aris, of the Aris Trust, which facilitated the organization of the Oxford IATS seminar and publication of this volume. To honour the memory of our dear friend and colleague Dr Michael Aris, historian of Tibet and of the Himalayas, this volume is humbly dedicated.

[From the introduction].
The Reb gong Vale  is a densely populated high-altitude agricultural oasis that runs north-to-south for approximately twenty kilometers through the northeastern Tibetan Plateau, surrounded by barren pastoral hills that rise to rocky snow-capped peaks. The majority of the vale's residents self-identify as Tibetan, but this population contains considerable diversity along religious, sectarian, and linguistic lines. We explore how the linguistic diversity of the region might have been maintained despite communities sharing a common identity, being engaged in inter-communal ritual networks, sharing common trade and pilgrimage sites, and living in close proximity in the absence of geographical barriers. Given their contiguity and interconnectedness, what enabled certain communities to remain distinct from nearby populations? Under such circumstances, how did relatively small communities maintain distinct languages? What prevented them from being linguistically assimilated into the Tibetan population?

Should be cited: Rafal Beszterda, The Shipki la and its Place in Crossborder Trade between India and Tibet, “Tibet Journal" (Dharamsala, India), vol. XL, No.2, Autumn/Winter 2015, pp. 239-259, /ISSN 0970-5368/.

Please mind that in original TJ volume the page numbers are +2. Means in the correct citation you should add 2 to the page number (seen in the uploaded proofreading version).

This paper takes as its starting point the conflicting claims about the present condition of Tibetan culture. While the Dalai Lama argues that a "cultural genocide" is going on in Tibet, the Chinese Party State emphasises its efforts to safeguard and promote Tibetan cultural heritage. Regardless of the different meanings the notion of " culture" adopts and the different agendas it serves, both sets of claims rely on a remarkably similar rhetoric, which couches cultural heritage not only in political or economic but also in moral terms. Both the " cultural genocide " thesis and the Party State's alleged efforts to safeguard Tibetan culture are thereby enmeshed in the larger " ethico-politics" surrounding the " Tibet question " and the rise of China in the world. How to understand the fusion of the economic, the political, and the moral? What happens when the political economy of cultural identity (development, tourism, property and benefits) meets with the ethico-politics of cultural survival? I argue that a new form of moral economy has emerged at the conjuncture of "cultural survival " and "safeguarding cultural heritage" – a moral economy of cultural identity, similar in structure but different in form and style from the classical cases of moral economies.

This paper describes the arrival of a man-eating leopard in a small Himalayan town in India and the local state's subsequent struggle to control the big cat. By focusing on what went on within the apparatus of the state during this period, this paper attempts to contribute to the study of modern time in bureaucracy. It argues that the startling inefficiencies in the effective governance and regulation of the big cat stemmed from a clash of various social times that were unfolding simultaneously. It outlines five distinct forms of social time that were in play during this period, which led to long periods of waiting and allowed for the articulation of a searing critique of the Indian state by town residents. Ultimately this paper contributes a rethinking of current theories of bureaucratic time that focus on the production of disempowered waiting, risk analysis, and anticipation. Instead it argues that a study of low-level bureaucrats and citizens shows that a central task of bureaucracy is to attempt to mediate conflicting forms of social time. Moving away from accounts of bureaucratic indifference, this paper depicts failure as an impasse arising out of attempts to bring incommensurable forms and representations of time into congruence. These failures importantly imperil the legitimacy of bureaucrats and can lead to a radical critique of the state.

A  Namuyi person falls accidentally and is panicked. The soul leaves the body and the person becomes lethargic. It is nearly always the patient's mother who calls the soul back, if she knows the correct chant. Five thousand Namuyi Tibetans live mostly in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, PR China with Han and Nuosu (Yi). The ritual is commonly done for children less than ten years of age, though anyone may lose their soul. The chant is presented along with a brief discussion of Namuyi cosmology and beliefs concerning the soul.

Nestled in the Himalayan foothills of Northeast India, Darjeeling is synonymous with some of the finest and most expensive tea in the world. It is also home to a violent movement for regional autonomy that, like the tea industry, dates back to the days of colonial rule.

In this nuanced ethnography, Sarah Besky narrates the lives of tea workers in Darjeeling. She explores how notions of fairness, value, and justice shifted with the rise of fair-trade practices and postcolonial separatist politics in the region. This is the first book to explore how fair-trade operates in the context of large-scale plantations.

Readers in a variety of disciplines—anthropology, sociology, geography, environmental studies, and food studies—will gain a critical perspective on how plantation life is changing as Darjeeling struggles to reinvent its signature commodity for twenty-first-century consumers. The Darjeeling Distinction challenges fair-trade policy and practice, exposing how trade initiatives often fail to consider the larger environmental, historical, and sociopolitical forces that shape the lives of the people they intended to support.

Regional geopolitical processes have turned the Himalayan region of Ladakh, in northwest India, into a strategic border area with an increasing military presence that has decentered the traditional agropastoralist economy. This in turn has led to social fragmentation, the growing isolation of elders, and ethical dilemmas for those who strive to maintain traditional subsistence activities.

ln the high Indian Himalayas of Himachal Pradesh, Lahaul is a major centre of pilgrim-
age renowned throughout North India and Tibet. It has been a magnet for legendary
mahasiddhas, yogis and pilgrims for thousands of years and is still venerated by Buddhists and also by Hindus. In the folds of the impressive landscape, the
most profound spiritual transmission is preserved.
For the first time, a guide book introduces to the public the sacredness of the valley, traditionally called "Garsha, the Land of the Dakinis." This booklet also reveals little known stories based on local traditions and ancient scriptures.
With a foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and a foreword by His Holiness
the Gyalwang Drukpa.

https://www.tibshelf.org/theguidebooktothehiddenlandofpemoko
The Guidebook to the Hidden Land of Pemoko is a revealed treasure text included in the Jatson Nyinpo’s Embodiment of the Precious Ones, the Konchok Chidu. It is a prediction text about the future degenerate times and purportedly the first guidebook to the hidden land of Pemoko.

The Moravian Church ran a missionary station in Poo (Kinnaur) near the India’s border with Tibet from 1865 to 1924. This paper discusses the origins of the mission, its contacts with Tibet, Buddhist reactions to Christianity, and the social pressures on Christian converts.

Dans le bouddhisme tantrique, le « lignage » est un réseau diachronique de religieux réunis autour d’un transfert de connaissance ou d’autorité, ayant une identité et un nom spécifique. En adoptant une approche historique et ethnographique, cet article examine les facteurs favorisant le développement ou l’extinction d’un lignage religieux, en prenant l’exemple du lignage Ngokpa Kagyü, associé au clan Ngok, qui a joui d’une grande
renommée au Tibet du XIe au XVe siècle.

Violence occupies a paradoxical place in Tibetan tantric Buddhism. Although the ethical imperative of not harming beings is absolutely central, there is also a darker face to tantric ritual activity, a face of power and violence: the repelling and destruction of harmful agents. An entire ritual machinery is deployed to ward off or kill hostile demons, or sometimes "enemies" of indeterminate nature — agressive magic is not absent. Wrathful protective deities are summoned to kill, to beat, to reduce to pieces... How can we understand that this violent modality can occupy quite an important place in certain Buddhist contexts?

The question is all the more intriguing that there exists a type of Tibetan religious specialist that (beyond a substantial overlap with the monk in terms of religious profile and activity) is quite strongly associated with this ethically problematic side of ritual activity: the ngakpa (sngags-pa), or tantrist. As opposed to the monk, this specialist of tantric rituals does not take monastic vows, and lives as a householder. Tantrists typically constitute patrilineal family lineages, with descent, not renunciation, as a key structuring feature of their socioreligious universe. How are we to understand that a Buddhist religious specialist is associated with a specialization in violent rituals? In order to answer this question, this book takes us to a village community of tantrists situated in the Himalayan borderlands of the Tibetan cultural area, in a high valley of northern Nepal. The anthropological examination of these specialists and their society, of their rituals and their moral dilemmas, and of the contrasts between tantrists and their monastic counterparts, enables to identify elements of larger (social, religious, moral) coherence underlying the association of tantrists with rituals of violence. This substantial contribution to the anthropology of Tibetan Buddhism brings new insights to our thinking on ritual violence and exorcism. Through the analysis of the duality of the monk and the tantrist, and of the associated polarity of moral purity vs. ritual power, it also contributes to the anthropology of complex religious fields marked by the coexistence of different forms of religious specialization. Finally, it also engages in a sustained reflection on a properly anthropological approach to the textual component (such as the ritual manuals) of this local religious sphere.

Note:
- The attached PDF contains the front matter, Introduction, Index and Table of Contents.
- The book's illustrations are in black and white, but the color plates can be downloaded here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/320225/Sihle_Rituels_Color-Plates.pdf
- The publisher's webpage for book orders is here: http://www.brepols.net/Pages/ShowProduct.aspx?prod_id=IS-9782503544700-1

The heart of Turrell’s work is the Roden Crater, out in Arizona. François Jonquet met the artist at his ranch, in the Painted Desert, and visited the Crater, this work which he is constantly sculpting and developing. He reports on this vertiginous experience

This book provides an ethno-historical study of the trade system in Ladakh (India), a busy entrepôt for Silk Route trade between Central and South Asia. Previously a part of global networks, Ladakh became an isolated border area as national boundaries were defined and enforced in the mid-20th century. As trade with Central Asia ended, social life in Ladakh was irrevocably altered.

The author's research combines anthropological, historical, and archaeological methods of investigation, using data from primary documents, ethnographic interviews and participation-observation fieldwork. The result is a cultural history of South and Central Asia, detailing the social lives of historical Ladakhi traders and identifying their community as a cosmopolitan social group. The relationship between the historical narratives and the modern ethnographic context illustrates how social issues in modern communities are related to those of the past. It is demonstrated that this relationship depends on both memories, narratives about the past constructed within present social contexts, and legacies, ways in which the past continues to shape present social interactions.

This book will be of particular interest to anthropologists, historians and specialists in South and Central Asian studies, as well as those interested in historical archaeology, science, sociology, political science and economics.

In Nepal this spring, I spent a pleasant hour on a guesthouse rooftop in conversation with Dan Hirshberg, a Harvard PhD candidate. Dan has been studying the earliest biographies of Nyang ral, the great Nyingma master of the 12th century. Based on his reading of these biographies, Dan is developing the theory that the very earliest Buddhist termas (gter ma), the revealed 'treasure texts' for which the Nyingma school is so famous, could sometimes be based on the simple concrete recovery of actual old manuscripts. By contrast, Dan remarked, subsequent terma discovery depends more heavily on the more complex mystical processes of 'remembering' a teaching from a past life with which all students of terma are familiar. Unfortunately there was not time for me to hear at length how Dan himself sought to support his hypothesis, but I was able to briefly tell him that we had already found some possibly supporting evidence. Last year, Cathy Cantwell established that a substantial component text from one of the most important early terma collections, Nyang ral's famous Deshek Dupa (bde gshegs 'dus pa), corresponds exactly to the Dunhuang manuscript IOL TibJ 331.III.[1] While the Dunhuang version is anonymous, Nyang ral claimed the original author of his terma was Vimalamitra, a famous Indian scholar traditionally associated with the Dzogchen teachings and held to have come to Tibet in the late 8th century, at the time of Padmasambhava and Emperor Trisongdetsen.

Tarangpurians exchange their way out of isolation through economic and cultural ties from Tibet to India. Surplus as an essential to the complex networks of exchange carried out outside the village. Two essential trade circuits prevail: the grain-salt-rice circuit and increasingly preferred commodities circuit: good-cash-good circuit. Tarangpurians engage in impression management; they have adopted themselves as cultural chameleons. This is the reason why their culture has been influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism. Within the village, social status is calculated by an ideology of equality, the practices of equalizing, unbalanced reciprocity and a disguised hierarchy. Most recently, politics fed by cash wealth has increasingly motivated Tarangpurians towards innovation and progress. Tarangpur maintains ties and networks of exchange over a huge geographic area, building its world view out of complex transactional activity.

The fi xed fi gures of kingship expressed in the rituals, and the fl exible event-and actor-based depictions presented in the " royal " narratives off er two contrasting portrayals of kingship in Nepal. We aim at outlining their internal dynamics, starting with the centralisation of the state (late-18th–mid-19th centuries), through the examination of the major royal ritual and the analysis of a royal chronicle. At the centre of these two realities of the kingdom stands the person of the king. In each confi guration, his puzzling position at the crossroads of several identities raises questions about the agency of this polymorphous personage in the functioning of the kingdom. This exploration will lead us to fi nally address the gradual simplifi cation of the fi gure of the king over time, which culminated in the straightforward and opposite statements foreshadowing his end, as either an incarnation of Vishnu or as an anachronistic authoritarian and demonic being.

The most significant aspect of the British imperialist policy practiced in the first half of the 20th century was the formula of ‘Chinese suzerainty – Tibetan autonomy’. This strategic hypocrisy, while nurturing an ambiguity in Tibet’s status was linked closely to the imperialist interest of Britain.

«L’âme est le seul oiseau qui soutienne sa cage.»
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Beaucoup de choses ont déjà été dites en général sur la culture Gurung et plus particulièrement sur leur pratique funéraire, dans les quatre livres de référence de Bernard Pignède, Alan Macfarlane, Stan r. Mumford, D.A. Messerschmidt et S.S Strickland. Ces œuvres abordent un grand nombre de sujets, de la vie profane aux mythes et des origines à leur foi. Nous avons néanmoins pu faire certaines observations pour la cérémonie rhiteba du deuxième enterrement, effectuée au cours du rituel posthume appelé pae. Dans cet article, après un bref rappel sur ce groupe ethnique, nous présenterons de nouveaux éléments qui serviront, en complément avec les œuvres citées ci-dessus, à préciser le déroulement de la cérémonie funéraire.

As the dualistic analyses in the social sciences began to be discredited with new research in the academy, it became apparent that the nature–culture dualism earlier posited was not an encompassing structure everywhere. This ethnographic study about the Gaddi people in the Indian Himalayas exhorts us to redescribe human–environment relations by arguing that ‘not all societies juxtapose nature and culture’ (11). Drawing insights from the foundational works of Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, and Tim Ingold, the author of this book makes a definite contribution towards recognising how the opposition between nature and culture is specifically a line of thought that is Western in origin and that the case of Gaddi requires a distinctive imagination. Building her argument around the phenomenological turn in practice theory and drawing primarily from the insights of Tim Ingold's original research, Wagner chooses to focus her attention on the practical activity and sensory perceptions of the Gaddi to describe how the Himalayan environment that is lived by them is an enacted landscape and not an objective reality. Her analysis moves away from the usual trappings of studying the environmental knowledge embodied in the local meanings and aims to discover environment through an active framework of a human–environment nexus. Deriving her intellectual insights from Latour's symmetric anthropology, Wagner's analysis claims to understand and represent humans and non-humans in tandem.

The Last Dragon Banquet? provides details on an Amdo Tibetan community's history, population, education, economy, religion, language, housing, treatment of death, divination, conflict, and clothing. This is followed by a detailed ethnographic study of village weddings focusing on marriage norms, the spouse selection process, spouse trial period, pre-wedding activities, preparation of the bride's clothing, negotiations, abducting the bride, the bridewealth and dowry, speeches, orations, songs, rituals, the bride's mother's instructions to her daughter, and the actual wedding rituals. With English translations of songs, summaries of speeches, and over 250 photographs, this book provides a detailed and compelling wealth of information that will benefit those interested in Tibetan Studies.

Le chamane est un guérisseur et un guerrier. Lors des séances de cures, il s’applique pour le bien de sa com- munauté à renverser l’emprise des entités malfaisantes sur les humains, afin de rétablir la protection du groupe. Pour ce faire, le guerrier-guérisseur part à la recherche d’un diagnostic, d’une âme ou d’une bataille à livrer, évo- luant dans un monde sauvage, peuplé d’aïeux et d’esprits bienfaiteurs, de créatures démoniaques et de fantômes sournois. Afin de devenir le réceptacle des êtres invisibles et de montrer sa force d’intervention, le chamane se pare d’accessoires et de vêtements rituels. Ce couple d’attributs élabore le costume du chamane, véritable ar- mure, où réside dans chaque élément qui le compose le pouvoir des ancêtres. Et c’est ce rattachement transgéné- rationnel du costume à une lignée de chamanes qui anime le guérisseur d’un concentré de force, accumulé à travers les âges.