Historic Migration in China: Chang Tang, from Wilderness to Inhabited Frontier Society

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-110
Author(s):  
Tone Bleie ◽  
Dawa Tsering
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cumulative Effects ◽  
Western Himalayas ◽  
Sacred Landscape ◽  
Skill Sets ◽  
Mountain Landscape ◽  
High Plateau ◽  
Eastern Tibet ◽  
Sacred Mountain ◽  
Customary Practices

This article addresses migration in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century from Eastern Tibet to Chang Tang, the enormous high-plateau in Western Tibet. Evidence is presented about the rise of an intriguingly well-regulated nomadic society, questioning the dominant, environmentally framed narrative of Chang Tang as an uninhabited wilderness. The article examines why people started migrating, sheds light on specific migratory events and their cumulative effects. The article examines nomads’ adaptation to a sacred mountain landscape, an inhospitable climate, established customary practices and contending centralised sources of religious and political authority, while drawing on their own martial ethos and diverse skill sets. In order to explain causes and outcomes of specific events, the article employs an interdisciplinary theoretical approach. This approach unravels Chang Tang as pastoral realm, sacred landscape and contested frontier – sought controlled by the lords of distant Lhasa and empires of the Western Himalayas and Central Asia.

Sacred Mountain, Landscape, and Afterlife

2021 ◽  
pp. 151-171
Author(s):  
Gideon Fujiwara
Keyword(s):  
Meaningful Life ◽  
Mountain Landscape ◽  
Sacred Mountain ◽  
Imperial Japan ◽  
The Impact

This chapter examines the imagining of the dual “countries” of Tsugaru and Imperial Japan in Tsuruya Ariyo's poetry and prose about the sacred Mount Iwaki and the gods who preside over the peaks. It presents Ariyo's emphasis on the reality of the spirit realm by citing a case of a local samurai facing divine abduction while on the mountain. The chapter introduces Ariyo's Enjoyment Visible and Invisible in which he validated Hirata Atsutane's view that souls of the deceased were active and served “Imperial deity” Ōkuninushi in the spirit realm. It also emphasizes enjoyment as the key to living a meaningful life extending from this world to the afterlife, while his norito reflects his reverence for gods and ancestors. Ultimately, the chapter investigates the impact of Ariyo and Hirao Rosen's works about spirits and the spirit realm on more politically urgent matters in the late-Tokugawa to Restoration years.

Out of Tibet: Pliocene Woolly Rhino Suggests High-Plateau Origin of Ice Age Megaherbivores

Science ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 333 (6047) ◽  
pp. 1285-1288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tao Deng ◽  
Xiaoming Wang ◽  
Mikael Fortelius ◽  
Qiang Li ◽  
Yang Wang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Body Size ◽  
High Altitude ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Ice Sheet ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Western Himalayas ◽  
Large Body Size ◽  
Cold Environments ◽  
High Plateau ◽  
Global Cooling

Ice Age megafauna have long been known to be associated with global cooling during the Pleistocene, and their adaptations to cold environments, such as large body size, long hair, and snow-sweeping structures, are best exemplified by the woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos. These traits were assumed to have evolved as a response to the ice sheet expansion. We report a new Pliocene mammal assemblage from a high-altitude basin in the western Himalayas, including a primitive woolly rhino. These new Tibetan fossils suggest that some megaherbivores first evolved in Tibet before the beginning of the Ice Age. The cold winters in high Tibet served as a habituation ground for the megaherbivores, which became preadapted for the Ice Age, successfully expanding to the Eurasian mammoth steppe.

scholarly journals The Sacred Landscape of the Northern Selcups: The Losyl-Lakka Sanctuary on Lozyl-to Lake

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-27
Author(s):  
Olga Borisovna Stepanova
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Traditional Culture ◽  
Data Bank ◽  
Sacred Landscape ◽  
Strict Adherence ◽  
Natural Place ◽  
Sacred Mountain ◽  
Summary Data ◽  
Comprehensive Study

The article is devoted to the most famous ancient sanctuary of the northern Selkups – Shaman Mountain Lozyl-lakka on Lozyl-to Lake. The purpose of the study is to combine the information available about it in the scientific literature and in the author's field archive and to find out what this object of the sacred landscape is. The research methods were description, semantic analysis and fieldwork. The result of the study was the conclusion that Lozyl-lakka is a family sanctuary, where sacrifices were made to the spirits-masters of the ancestral fishing grounds, on which the success of members of the clan in the trade "depended". The memory of the sanctuary has survived to this day due to its location in a remarkable natural place. It was also found that the sacred mountain serves as an indicator of the state of the modern ethnic identity of the Selkups. It is characterized by the preservation of faith in spirits and strict adherence to a number of traditions that this belief dictates, therefore, the process of transformation of traditional culture into new modern forms among the Selkups, which is ongoing among the northern peoples today, is hampered by the vitality of some elements of this very traditional culture. A separate comprehensive study of the Lozyl-Lakka sanctuary, including the standpoint of the attitude of modern Selkups, constitutes the scientific novelty of the study. The publication of summary data on the sanctuary preserves it as part of the cultural heritage for future generations of Selkups and replenishes the data bank of ethnographic science.

scholarly journals MOUNTAINS AND CAVES IN THE ANDIS’ RITES OF THE SUN AND RAIN MAKING

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 120-124
Author(s):  
Z B Ramazanova ◽  
M R Seferbekov
Keyword(s):  
Folk Medicine ◽  
The Sun ◽  
North Caucasus ◽  
Traditional Beliefs ◽  
Sacred Landscape ◽  
Sick People ◽  
Counterclockwise Direction ◽  
The North ◽  
Spiritual Culture ◽  
Sacred Mountain

Mod and Bakhargan were the most revered mountains for the Andis. According to the authors, the Andis used mountains and caves, as parts of the sacred landscape, on calendar holidays and in the rites of meteorological and healing magic. Thus, rites of the sun and rain making were held here. On the mountain of Bakhargan, there was a spring with healing water. The mountain of Bakhargan was used in the ceremonies of folk medicine: praying for healing, sick people described three circles round the rocks of the sacred mountain in the counterclockwise direction. In the mythology of the Andis, the tops of the mountains were the habitat of the supreme god and mountain angels. The Andis associated mountains with legends, containing the motifs of the biblical legend of the Flood. After converting to Islam, the most revered mountains were turned into places of worship, where the rite of dhikr was conducted and alms were dealt out during the prayers. Many of the rites for changing weather were led by local religious authorities or elders. Besides the use of mountains and caves in the rites of the sun and rain making, the Andis also had other rites of meteorological magic. The most common of them was the rite with a mummer. There were also rites with the use of the skull of a stallion and a snake, probably related to zoolatry. Analysis of orolatry, meteorological and healing magic of the Andis testifies to the syncretism of their spiritual culture. This confusion of traditional beliefs and Muslim religious prescriptions is peculiar to the so-called “everyday Islam”. This syncretism was common to other peoples of Dagestan and the North Caucasus.

The Frontier of China and Assam: Background to the Fighting

1962 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 203-206
Author(s):  
G. F. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The South ◽  
South Eastern ◽  
The People ◽  
Eastern Tibet

Early in the eighteenth century the European traveller Desideri who made a journey through Tibet and visited Lhasa wrote of the Cong-bo region of south-eastern Tibet that “all the Congo-bo provinces lying to the south of the river [the Tsangpo] march with the people called Lhoba which means Southern People… Not even the Tibetans, who are close neighbours and have many dealings with them, are allowed to enter their country but are obliged to stop on the frontier to barter their goods.”

scholarly journals Krkonoše jako ideální horská krajina na konci 18. a počátku 19. století

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 83-92
Author(s):  
Veronika Faktorová
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Mountain Range ◽  
Central European ◽  
Mountain Landscape ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Aesthetic Concepts

At the end of the 18th century, the new idea of the mountain landscape as an ideal and beautiful landscape emerged in Central Europe. This cultural process was conditioned by the contemporary aesthetic concepts of the Sublime and the Picturesque, related to the development of a new cultural and social practice of education of the eye (described in the book of Peter De Bolla The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth Century Britain, 2003). In a Central European context, the model of the mountain landscape was found in the Krkonoše mountain range, and travelogues, analysed in our case study, have contributed to its establishment.

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