A richly illustrated tapestry of interwoven studies spanning some six thousand years of history, Daemons Are Forever is at once a record of archaic contacts and transactions between humans and protean spirit beings-daemons-and an account of exchanges, among human populations, of the science of spirit beings: daemonology.
In the years since the end of apartheid, South Africans have enjoyed a progressive constitution, considerable access to social services for the poor and sick, and a booming economy that has made their nation into one of the wealthiest on the continent.
Building Histories offers innovative accounts of five medieval monuments in Delhi-the Red Fort, Rasul Numa Dargah, Jama Masjid, Purana Qila, and the Qutb complex-tracing their modern lives from the nineteenth century into the twentieth.
We tend to think that the Buddha has always been seen as the compassionate sage admired around the world today, but until the nineteenth century, Europeans often regarded him as a nefarious figure, an idol worshipped by the pagans of the Orient.
Few topics in South Asian history are as contentious as that of the Turkic conquest of the Indian subcontinent that began in the twelfth century and led to a long period of Muslim rule.
Though Jesuits assumed a variety of roles as missionaries in late imperial China, their most memorable guise was that of scientific expert, whose maps, clocks, astrolabes, and armillaries reportedly astonished the Chinese.
The promotion and vernacularization of Hebrew, traditionally a language of Jewish liturgy and study, was a central accomplishment of the Zionist movement in Palestine.
In the decades following World War II, municipal leaders and ordinary citizens embraced San Francisco's identity as the "e;Gateway to the Pacific,"e; using it to reimagine and rebuild the city.
One of the most violent episodes of Chinas Boxer Uprising was the Taiyuan Massacre of 1900, in which rebels killed foreign missionaries and thousands of Chinese Christians.
Personal reflections by one of the makers of modern JapanOzaki Yukio, who was returned to his seat in the Japanese Diet twenty-five times, served in that body from its inception in 1890 to 1953.
Throughout the War of Resistance against Japan (19311945), the Chinese Nationalist government punished collaborators with harsh measures, labeling the enemies from within hanjian (literally, traitors to the Han Chinese).
In the early 2000s, the central government of China encouraged all of the nation's registered minorities to "e;salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate"e; folk medical knowledges in an effort to create local health care systems comparable to the nationally supported institutions of traditional Chinese medicine.
Shanghai, a dynamic world metropolis, is home to a multitude of religions, from Buddhism and Islam, to Christianity and Bahaism, to Hinduism and Daoism, and many more.
A chapter-by-chapter explanation of the Book of Exodus, revealing its wisdom about nation building and people formation"e;Kass draws from Exodus' record of the founding of Judaism timely even urgent universal lessons about twenty-first-century preconditions for human flourishing in any community.
Previous studies of the practice of footbinding in imperial China have theorized that it expressed ethnic identity or that it served an economic function.
A controversial examination of the internal Israeli debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a best-selling Israeli author Since the Six-Day War, Israelis have been entrenched in a national debate over whether to keep the land they conquered or to return some, if not all, of the territories to Palestinians.
During the first half of the twentieth century, representatives of the French colonial health services actively strove to expand the practice of Western medicine in the frontier colony of Cambodia.
In Excavating the Afterlife, Guolong Lai explores the dialectical relationship between sociopolitical change and mortuary religion from an archaeological perspective.
The first full-scale biography of one of the most important—and enigmatic—leaders in Israeli history Menachem Begin, father of Israel's right wing and sixth prime minister of the nation, was known for his unflinchingly hawkish ideology.
By studying the early splits within Korean nationalism, Michael Robinson shows that the issues faced by Korean nationalists during the Japanese colonial period were complex and enduring.
According to conventional interpretations, the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 destroyed a budding native capitalist economy on the peninsula and blocked the development of a Korean capitalist class until 1945.
In this eagerly awaited book, political theorist Michael Walzer reports his findings after decades of reading and thinking about the politics of the Hebrew Bible.
Going beyond the stereotypes of Kalashnikov-wielding Afghan mujahideen and black-turbaned Taliban fundamentalists, Larry Goodson explains in this concise analysis of the Afghan war what has really been happening in Afghanistan in the last twenty years.
The Art of Resistance surveys the lives of seven paintersDing Cong (19162009), Feng Zikai (18981975), Li Keran (190789), Li Kuchan (18981983), Huang Yongyu (b.
A new understanding of rural-urban migration and inequality in contemporary ChinaMany of the millions of workers streaming in from rural China to jobs at urban factories soon find themselves in new kinds of poverty and oppression.
The residents of the three northern provinces of Korea have long had cultural and linguistic characteristics that have marked them as distinct from their brethren in the central area near the capital and in the southern provinces.
A knowledgeable insider provides the first clear view of what has happened in the Arab world and why This important book is not about immediate events or policies or responses to the Arab Spring.
A beautifully written exploration of religion's role in a secular, modern politics, by an accomplished scholar of critical theoryMigrants in the Profane takes its title from an intriguing remark by Theodor W.
A powerful account of life and loss in the Great War, as told by British soldiers in their letters home This book was inspired by the author’s discovery of an extraordinary cache of letters from a soldier who was killed on the Western Front during the First World War.
A short and thoughtful introduction to traditional Chinese medicine that looks beyond the conventional boundaries of Western modernism and biomedical science Traditional Chinese medicine is often viewed as mystical or superstitious, with outcomes requiring naïve faith.
A history of capitalism in nineteenth' and twentieth'century China and India that explores the competition between their tea industries Tea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India.
Winner of the 2009 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Asian StudiesThe medieval Rajput queen Padmini - believed to have been pursued by Alauddin Khalji, the Sultan of Delhi - has been the focus of numerous South Asian narratives, ranging from a Sufi mystical romance in the sixteenth century to nationalist histories in the late nineteenth century.
How American conflicts about religion have always symbolized our foundational political values When Americans fight about “religion,” we are also fighting about our conflicting identities, interests, and commitments.
This lively survey of the peoples, cultures, and societies of Southeast Asia introduces a region of tremendous geographic, linguistic, historical, and religious diversity.
