This edited volume takes an original approach to the rich architectural heritage of the Himalayas and Tibetan plateau by focusing on the people, skills, materials, and processes involved in constructing and maintaining it. By placing building craft traditions centre stage, the book complements existing literature on the history, design, and symbolism of buildings, while also encouraging new perspectives. Drawing upon architecture, anthropology, sociology, material science, art history, and...

Mongolia has faced rapid ideological shifts towards global cosmopolitan perspectives since the collapse of state socialism in the 1990s. Contemporary Mongolian music and the performing arts are dynamic and market-oriented, and these new artistic practices contrast with existing institutional patterns and social settings inherited from the previous regime. In the field of artistic practices, there is a conflict between the old state structure, which was left intact as a vessel, and new...

This book considers aspects of nomads’ culture and craft traditions in Tibetan cultural areas with a research focus on Damzhung in Central Tibet from a range of scientific perspectives, including technical, spatial, environmental, economic, and social dimensions. The book also looks beyond the Tibetan plateau to compare nomadic craft traditions across other regions, including Mongolia, Iran, and Turkey, as well as furtherly selected regions of West Asia and North Africa, setting a focus on the...

This volume contains eight contributions belonging to the field of early Tibetan studies with a strong social anthropological and historical perspective. The thematic focus is related to the social and the religious in the making of Tibetan societies primarily between the 7th and 17th century. This includes studies of the conception of the rulers of early (7th–9th century) Tibet and their burial customs, the socio-political topography, the adoption of Buddhism as state religion in the 8th...

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...