scholarly journals Animal Release and the Sacrificial Ethos in Inner Asia

Inner Asia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-216
Author(s):  
Katherine Swancutt
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Southwest China ◽  
Human Consumption ◽  
Inner Asia ◽  
Human Animal

Abstract Animal release is often understood as the practice of freeing an animal from human consumption or the burden of labour. Typically associated with various Buddhist or Daoist cosmologies in which liberating an animal is a merit-making act, animal release tends to be conceptualised in altruistic terms. Yet the diverse forms that sacrifice and animal release take across Inner Asia suggest that the focus of analysis sometimes shifts from a concern with freeing animals to protecting the human imperative to live. Introducing new ethnography on the ethical underpinnings of sacrifice among Buryats in northeast Mongolia and the Nuosu of southwest China, I propose that animal release can be an act of restrained violence that evokes the mythopoetic contours of human–animal relations, animal sentience and human self-preservation. Offering case studies on scapegoats, deferred sacrifice, and contingent forms of slaughter, I show how Buryats and Nuosu manage the ethical tensions posed by sacrifice.

Prince Henri d'Orleans (1867–1901): geographical and botanical exploration between inner Asia and southwest China

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 399-399
Author(s):  
WILLIAM GARDENER
Keyword(s):  
Southwest China ◽  
Western China ◽  
Left Bank ◽  
Inner Asia ◽  
Botanical Exploration ◽  
Western Yunnan ◽  
Westerly Direction ◽  
Chinese Province ◽  
The Right ◽  
North Western

Prince Henri d'Orleans, precluded by French law from serving his country in the profession of arms, had his attention turned early towards exploration. In 1889, accompanied by the experienced traveller Gabriel Bonvalet, he set out from Paris to reach Indo-China overland by way of Central Asia, Tibet and western and south western China. The journey made contributions in the problems of the whereabouts of Lap Nor and the configuration of the then unexplored northern plateau of Tibet; and in botany it produced some species new to science. The party reached Indo-China in 1890. In 1895, having organised an expedition better equipped for topographical survey and for investigations in the fields of natural history and ethnography, Prince Henri set out from Hanoi with the intention of exploring the Mekong through the Chinese province of Yunnan. After proceeding up the left bank of the Salween for a brief part of its course and then alternating between the right and left banks of the Mekong as far up as Tzeku, the party found it advisable to enter Tibet in a north westerly direction through the province of Chamdo and instead crossed the south eastern extremity of the country, the Zayul, by a difficult track which led them to the country of the Hkamti Shans in present day Upper Burma, and thence to India completing a journey of 2000 miles, "1500 of which had been previously untrodden" (Prince Henri). West of the Mekong, the journey established that the Salween, which some geographers had claimed took its rise in or near north western Yunnan, in fact rose well north in Tibet, and that, contrary to previous opinions, the principal headwater of the Irrawaddy rose no further north than latitude 28°30'. Botanical collections were confined to Yunnan, where the tracks permitted mule transport, and they produced a number of species new to science and extended the range of distribution of species already known.

Contingent Efficacies in Buryat Tibetan Medicine

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 249-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatiana Chudakova
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Tibetan Medicine ◽  
Medical Pluralism ◽  
Therapeutic Action ◽  
Eastern Siberia ◽  
Clinical Protocols ◽  
Inner Asia ◽  
Regulatory Frameworks ◽  
Multiple Regimes

Focusing on sites of encounter between post-socialist biomedicine and Tibetan medicine in Eastern Siberia, this article explores overlapping ideologies of efficacy at work. In the absence of a single framework for determining its potencies, Tibetan medicine is caught between multiple regimes of legitimacy necessitated by scientific research, clinical protocols, and state regulatory frameworks. Through an exploration of three ethnographic case studies, this article tracks how those working with Tibetan medicine highlight instead the conditional nature of its therapeutic action. By adopting the frame ofcontingent efficacies, the article explores how practitioners of Tibetan medicine in Russia conceive of the medicines and techniques they deploy as always already situated extensions of specific social relations, political formations, forms of practice, and epistemological commitments. By pointing to the failures at commensuration with different regimes of abstraction these accounts offer a lens into the cultural politics of medical pluralism in Inner Asia.

Bestiarium Judaicum

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Geller
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Heinrich Heine ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Human Animal

Given the vast inventory of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals (pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes, etc.) disseminated for millennia to debase and bestialize Jews (the Bestiarium Judaicum), this work asks: What is at play when Jewish-identified writers employ such figures in their narratives and poems? Bringing together Jewish cultural studies (examining how Jews have negotiated Jew-Gentile difference) and critical animal studies (analyzing the functions served by asserting human-animal difference), this monograph focuses on the writings of primarily Germanophone authors, including Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Gertrud Kolmar, H. Leivick, Felix Salten, and Curt Siodmak. It ferrets out of their nonhuman-animal constructions their responses to the bestial answers upon which the Jewish and animal questions converged and by which varieties of the species “Jew” were depicted. Along with close textual analysis, it examines both personal and social contexts of each work. It explores how several writers attempted to subvert the identification of the Jew-animal by rendering indeterminable the human-animal “Great Divide” being played out on actual Jewish bodies and in Jewish-Gentile relations as well as how others endeavored to work-through identifications with those bestial figures differently: e.g., Salten’s Bambi novels posed the question of “whether a doe is sometimes just a female deer,” while Freud, in his case studies, manifestly disaggregated Jews and animals even as he, perhaps, animalized the human. This work also critically engages new-historical (M. Schmidt), postcolonial (J. Butler and J. Hanssen), and continental philosophic (G. Agamben) appropriations of the conjunction of Jew and animal.

Two Sides of Court Mediation in Today’s Southwest Grassroots China: an Empirical Study in T Court, Yunnan Province

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
XIONG Hao
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Yunnan Province ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Southwest China ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
Court Mediation

AbstractCourt mediation is now playing a crucial role in the Chinese legal system. Based on two case studies in Yunnan Province, this paper examines how court mediation works in Southwest China. It finds that court mediation can expand the capacity of the court concerning case acceptance, and is capable of fixing multicentre disputes and complicated social problems. However, the paper also points out that when encountering some ill-suited cases, justice may be undermined and the judge’s role may be confused. Therefore, it is necessary to pass some law to exclude the ill-suited cases from the mediation track when promoting court mediation in Southwest China.

scholarly journals Post-socialist animism: personhood, necro-personas and public past in Inner Asia

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zbigniew Szmyt
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Political Subjectivity ◽  
Inner Asia ◽  
The Past ◽  
Key Features ◽  
The Relationship

This paper investigates the relationship between animism and public past in post-socialist Inner Asia. The analysis was based on three case studies highlighting key features of the relationship between local conceptions of personhood, non-human agency, and their role in structuring native visions of the past: (1) negotiations between families and the spirits  of their ancestors – victims of communist purges in Mongolia, (2) a powerful necro-persona that allows local communities to gain political subjectivity and undermine conventional post-Soviet historical narratives, and (3) the return of the undead lama Itigilov that caused Buddhist revival in Buryatia. Posthuman agents have been involved in mythopraxis,  through which native regimes of historicity are established.

scholarly journals “My Responsibility, My Food”

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-76
Author(s):  
Andreas Backa
Keyword(s):  
Animal Husbandry ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Industrial Agriculture ◽  
Human Consumption ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Point Of Departure

This article examines views on meat, slaughter and human-animal relations in the contemporary self-sufficiency trend. The point of departure of the analysis is ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with individuals striving towards becoming more self-sufficient in the region of Ostrobothnia, Finland. The focus is on the interviewees’ narration of their practices and experiences of animal husbandry, and more specifically on the role of affect and body in the killing of animals for human consumption. The material is analysed utilising cultural analysis inspired by phenomenology, and the findings are discussed from the perspective of post-domesticity. The analysis shows how the interviewees negotiate and justify their choices regarding meat, and why they prefer self-sufficiency farming and home slaughter to industrial agriculture and slaughter. This form of small-scale animal husbandry is characterised by affective relationships between bodies, which counteract the processes of post-domestic modernity that generate disconnectedness between animal and human, food and origin, producer and consumer.  

Wildlife in the Digital Anthropocene: Examining human-animal relations through surveillance technologies

2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862110617
Author(s):  
Erica von Essen ◽  
Jonathon Turnbull ◽  
Adam Searle ◽  
Finn Arne Jørgensen ◽  
Tim R. Hofmeester ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Digital Devices ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
Digital Surveillance ◽  
Home Computers ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
And Control ◽  
Digital Human

Digital surveillance technologies enable a range of publics to observe the private lives of wild animals. Publics can now encounter wildlife from their smartphones, home computers, and other digital devices. These technologies generate public-wildlife relations that produce digital intimacy, but also summon wildlife into relations of care, commodification, and control. Via three case studies, this paper examines the biopolitical implications of such technologically mediated human-animal relations, which are becoming increasingly common and complex in the Digital Anthropocene. Each of our case studies involves a different biopolitical rationale deployed by a scientific-managerial regime: (1) clampdown (wild boar); (2) care (golden eagle); and (3) control (moose). Each of these modalities of biopower, however, is entangled with the other, inaugurating complex relations between publics, scientists, and wildlife. We show how digital technologies can predetermine certain representations of wildlife by encouraging particular gazes, which can have negative repercussions for public-wildlife relations in both digital and offline spaces. However, there remains work to be done to understand the positive public-wildlife relations inaugurated by digital mediation. Here, departing from much extant literature on digital human-animal relations, we highlight some of these positive potentials, notably: voice, immediacy, and agency.

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