Stories Old and New is the first complete translation of Feng Menglong�s Gujin xiaoshuo (also known as Yushi mingyan, Illustrious Words to Instruct the World), a collection of 40 short stories first published in 1620 in China. This is considered the best of Feng�s three such collections and was a pivotal work in the development of vernacular fiction. The stories are valuable as examples of early fiction and for their detail ...
In Memory Eternal, Sergei Kan combines anthropology and history, anecdote and theory to portray the encounter between the Tlingit Indians and the Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska in the late 1700s and to analyze the indigenous Orthodoxy that developed over the next 200 years. As a native speaker of Russian with eighteen years of fieldwork experience among the Tlingit, Kan is uniquely qualified to relate little-known material from the archives o ...
Two very different ethnic minority communities—the Naxi of the Lijiang area in northern Yunnan and the Tai (Dai) of Sipsong Panna (Xishuangbanna), along Yunnan’s border with Burma and Laos—are featured in this comparative study of the implementation and reception of state minority education policy in the People’s Republic of China. Based on field research and historical sources, Lessons in Being Chinese argues that state policy, which is inten ...
Reading the Fire engages America�s �first literatures,� traditional Native American tales and legends, as literary art and part of our collective imaginative heritage. This revised edition of a book first published to critical acclaim in 1983 includes four new essays.Drawing on ethnographic data and regional folklore, Jarold Ramsey moves from origin and trickster narratives and Indian ceremonial texts, into inter ...
Baskets made of baleen, the fibrous substance found in the mouths of plankton-eating whales�a malleable and durable material that once had commercial uses equivalent to those of plastics today�were first created by Alaska Natives in the early years of the twentieth century. Because they were made for the tourist trade, they were initially disdained by scholars and collectors, but today they have joined other art forms as a ...
The Chinese-speaking Muslims have for centuries been an inseperable but anomalous part of Chinese society–Sinophone yet incomprehensible, local yet outsiders, normal but different. Long regarded by the Chinese government as prone to violence, they have challenged fundamental Chinese conceptiosn of Self and Other and denied the totally transforming power of Chinese civilization by tenaciously maintaining connectios with Central and West Asia as w ...
