Veröffentlichungen zur Sozialanthropologie

This edited volume with 16 original contributions is devoted to early, 10th–13th-century Buddhist monuments of historical Western Tibet. The results are, on the one hand, based on in-depth interdisciplinary field studies in Ladakh, Spiti, Kinnaur, Tsamda und Purang (today partly on Chinese, partly on Indian territory), and on the other hand on the critical edition and analysis of hitherto unknown or inaccessible historiographical texts, including works by Guge Paṇḍita Drakpa Gyaltsen...

In the second half of the 19th century, European interest in research in western Asia increasingly expanded to the areas inhabited by the Kurds. From the modern perspective, these studies contributed not only to the study of still little-known regions, but also to the introduction of Kurdish Studies. Initially the focus of the research was almost entirely dictated by British, Russian and French colonial interests, which have been subjected to a critical reappraisal over the last three decades...

This publication of 1739 pages in three volumes with 42 contributions is focused on anthropology from Vienna during the Nazi years, inside the „Third Reich“ and in exile. Institutional and biographic networks as well as aspects of intellectual history are at the core of these investigations. They systematically present the history of an academic discipline within the general socio-political Central European and wider international contexts of those times. Beyond “Völkerkunde”/socio-cultural...

The manual production of objects and buildings significantly shapes the material culture of societies. Knowledge concerning the ideal properties of materials obtained from nature, techniques of processing raw materials, and the skills needed to manufacture certain products have been passed down from generation to generation over the centuries. Many buildings, as well as objects in daily use, which we consider cultural heritage today, have their origin in the skills of crafts(wo)men and the...

This map created by Karel Kriz and Guntram Hazod is the result of a cooperation between the Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Department of Geography and Regional Research of the University of Vienna. It illustrates the position of the more than 600 burial mound fields of the Central Tibetan region that have been registered so far by the project “The Burial Mounds of Central Tibet” at ISA. The entries, historically related to the time of the...

In this work three new inquiries into little-known highland populations of the extended Eastern Himalayas are presented. The central concern is ethnographic documentation of peoples’ proactive quest for life, in terms of fertility, virility, procreation and revitalisation by way of practicing their ritual cultures. The work also provides fresh perspectives for understanding ‘bon’-identified cultural phenomena in Himalayan and Tibetan societies. The final inquiry explores new hypotheses about...

Als einer der wichtigsten Ethnologen des 20. Jahrhunderts hat Paul Schebesta (1887–1967) sechs Forschungsreisen unternommen, die ihn zwischen 1924 und 1955 einerseits zu den Semang in Malaysia und den Aeta auf den Philippinen und andererseits zu den Bambuti (Efe, Bacwa u. a.) in Zentralafrika führten. Schebesta hat seine Forschungen und Erfahrungen in zahlreichen Reiseberichten ausführlich beschrieben und in wissenschaftlichen Werken umfassend behandelt. Doch wer war er selbst, wie verlief und...

The proceedings of the Third International SEECHAC Colloquium, held in Vienna in 2013, are devoted to the topic “Interaction in the Himalayas and Central Asia”. Divided into three parts – I. Transfer and Interaction in Central Asia and Tibet; II. Translation and Adoption of Art and Architecture in the Western Himalayas; III. Patterns of Transformation in Tibet, Nepal, Mongolia and Central Asia – and preceded by an introduction by Christian Jahoda, past and current transformation processes of...

This study reconstructs for the first time the development of society in Spiti and in Upper Kinnaur (Himachal Pradesh, India) over a long historical period on the basis of one of its central structures, that is, socio-economic organisation. The focus of this study is the peasantry of Tabo village in Spiti Valley and the adjacent Tibetan-speaking areas in the northwestern Himalayas. From a methodological perspective this book is primarily the result of a combination of social anthropological...

The present work is devoted to a significant period of medieval history of Tibet, during a crucial spell when the noble house of the Phag mo gru pa dominated Central Tibet. On the basis of a great variety of Tibetan sources, this present study investigates the entire period from the mythical beginnings of the Rlangs Phag mo gru pa clan until the end when the noble house played no political role anymore. Maintaining a strictly chronological approach, a comprehensive study of the political and...

Turkmenen treten in der Literatur zu Zentralasien konsequent als archetypische Nomaden, Räuber und Sklavenhändler in Erscheinung – die Frage nach dem Ursprung dieser Bilder steht im Mittelpunkt der Untersuchung zur Darstellung von Turkmenen in Reiseberichten aus dem 19. Jahrhundert. Die Relevanz derselben als Quelle wird hinterfragt, wobei die Zusammenhänge zwischen dem Generieren und dem Austausch von Information, der Rezeption und dem Perpetuieren von Stereotypisierungen nachgezeichnet...