Anthony R. Walker

The book includes contributions from anthropologists, sociologists, linguists and geographers, as well as from music, theatre and literary specialists. Twelve chapters focus on the Asian region (eight concerning Southeast Asia; two, South Asia and two, East Asia). There are contributions also on Oceania (two), North America (two and a part of a third), South America (one) and the Caribbean (one), as well as on Britain (one) and East Africa (one).

This book, the result of thirty-five years of research in field and library, seeks to explain the diverse ideological strands and associated liturgical practices that inform the world views of the Tibeto-Burman-speaking Lahu peoples of the Yunnan -Indochina Borderlands.

Collected essays on the Toda people of the Nilgiri Mountains in Tamil Nadu, South India. The first essay, "Toda Society Between Tradition and Modernity" provides the background for all that will follow. The second essay "A Thousand Out of Eight Hundred Million: Who Cares?" is an attempt to explain just why the Toda, despite being one of India's smallest communities, are yet among the best known in the ethnographic record, not only of India but of the whole world. The next two chapters deal with aspects of Toda ethnography, but in radically different ways. Chapter Three is a polemical essay, attacking some and supporting other modern secondary analyses of the Toda marriage and kinship systems. Chapter Four is a straightforward account of a famous Toda ritual: the giving by a man of a symbolic bow-and-arrow to a woman and thereby establishing paternity of her still-unborn child.

Festschrift in honor of William Robert Geddes, anthropological field worker.

An ethnographic study of the Toda people of South India with special reference to social organization, buffalo pastoralism and socio-cultural change

A general introduction to the northern Thai uplands, specific essays on six of the principal ethnic minority peoples that inhabit the region (Hmong, Yao, Karen,Lahu, Lisu and Akha) and two essays on contemporary matters: highland agriculture and Thai government strategies for upland development and administration.

The second volume of a two-volume terminal report to the Royal Thai Government of a four-year research project on the Lahu Nyi (Red Lahu) people of North Thailand. This volume details the agricultural cycle of a Lahu Nyi village in Phrao District, Chiang Mai Province.

Translations by Li Ping into Chinese of 64 of 131 English-language articles, published in the Borneo Bulletin newspaper (Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei) between 2004 and 2011, on the socio-cultural institutions of Lahu-speaking peoples, especially in north Thailand, but covering also Burma's Shan State and China's Yunnan Province. Following a foreword by Chen Gang, the author introduces the Lahu-speaking peoples (3 articles), Lahu Nyi (Red Lahu) village life in North Thailand (5 articles), swidden farming by Lahu (3 articles), village specialists (9 articles), merit-making ritual activities (6 articles), the New Year celebrations (9 articles), household-centered ritual activities (7 articles), family and household among the Lahu Nyi in North Thailand (5 articles), pregnancy, childbirth and childhood (3 articles), courtship and marriage (5 articles), old age and death (9 articles).

emphasized textstrong text Essays on religious beliefs and ritual practices of Southeast Asian ethnic minority peoples in North Thailand, Eastern Bangladesh, West Malaysia and Sarawak (East Malaysia)

Indian residents of the island republic of Singapore constitute a mere seven percent of the nation's population. But they are a very visible minority. Ornate Hindu temples and shrines, colourful public displays of Indian religiosity, diverse Indian culinary traditions, busy Indian shopkeepers, astute Indian politicians ...all these make Singapore culturally, socially, economically and politically the richer. Taken together, the five essays in this book offer an overview and a series of emotive vignettes of Indian life in Singapore. From them we may learn how peoples who are heirs to one of humankind's oldest surviving civilizations are able both to preserve and to adapt their Indian heritage within a new, mostly non-Indian, social environment. Thus we may come to appreciate something of the strength and adaptability of Indian culture, as well as the contributions it can make to the enrichment of a new, Southeast Asian, nation state.

Essays on the symbolic importance of rice in Southeast Asian myth and ritual.

Two essays on the impact of Mahayana Buddhism among Lahu (and Wa) highlanders of the southwest Yunnan-northern Southeast Asia borderlands. The first essay—on Lahu Nyi (Red Lahu) village temples and their likely Buddhist origins—had its beginnings in the author's four-year field research experience (1966-1970) among swidden-farming Lahu Nyi villagers in upland North Thailand. The second essay reports on the author's ongoing attempt to discover from library sources (mostly in Chinese) the story of the arrival and dissemination between the seventeenth and late nineteenth century of Mahayana Buddhism in the "Luohei Shan" (Lahu Mountains) of southwestern Yunnan. Should a single theoretical observation be highlighted on the basis of these two essays, it surely must be this: the student of these often quite remote highland communities who chooses, perhaps in search for an exotic "Other", to ignore what transpires—and for centuries has transpired—in the lowlands beneath them, seriously jeopardizes any attempt to grasp the complexity of the uplanders' socio-cultural institutions.