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Stone Masters

Name: Stone Masters
Brand: NUS PRESS
SKU: 9789813251700
Price: 82.99 AUD
Availability: InStock

NUS PRESSISBN: 9789813251700

Power Encounters in Mainland Southeast Asia

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Edited by Holly High
Imprint: NUS PRESS
Release Date: August 29, 2022
Format: PAPERBACK
Pages: 440

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A new analytical perspective on stones and stone masters across Southeast Asia that extends and deepens the recent literature on animism. Stones and stone masters are an important focus of animist religious practice in Southeast Asia. Recent studies on animism see animist rituals not as a mere metaphor for community or shared values, but as a way of forming and maintaining relationships with occult presences. This book features city pillars, statues, megaliths, termite mounds, mountains, rocks found in forests, and stones that have been moved to shrines, as well as the territorial cults which can form around them. The contributors extend and deepen the recent literature on animism to form a new analytical perspective on these cults across mainland Southeast Asia. Not just a collection of exemplary ethnographies, Stone Masters is also a deeply comparative volume that develops its ideas through a meshwork of regional entanglements, parallels, and differences, before entering into a dialogue with debates on power, mastery, and the social theory of animism globally.

Holly High is an anthropologist and associate professor at the University of Sydney.

List of figures and tables Section I: Stone Theory Chapter 1: Holly High: An introduction to Stone Masters Chapter 2: John Clifford Holt: Theorizing 'Stone Masters': Revisiting Paul Mus Chapter 3: Holly High: "They can see us but we can't see them": Power, deities, and presences of places in Sekong, Lao PDR Chapter 4: Courtney Work: 'The Dance of Life and Death: Social relationships with elemental power Chapter 5: Paul-David Lutz: The State Has Come Chapter 6: Benjamin Baumann: Masters of the Underground: Termite Mound Worship and the Mutuality of Chthonic and Human Beings in Thailand's Lower Northeast Chapter 7: Holly High: Lady Luck of the City: Myth and meaning at Vientiane's city pillar Chapter 9: Kazuo Fukurra: From Ritual Traditions to Spirit Mediumship: The Evolution of Pillar Worship in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand Chapter 10: Klemens Karlsson: Territory Cults and Power in the Eastern Shan State of Myanmar Chapter 11: H?ng T. D. Ngo: The Mountain, the Masters and the Nation: Enduring Power Encounters at a Temple in Contemporary Vietnam? Chapter 12: Penny Van Esterik: Afterword

"The substantive descriptions, anthropological arguments, and theoretical reflections of the case studies in Stone Masters resonate with each other across multiple dimensions--myth and ritual, ethnographic detail and cultural history, cosmologies and social organization, popular efflorescence and elite appropriation, social dynamics and political conflicts.... As an exercise in comparative regional ethnology, therefore, the volume is a thought-provoking success."-- "Southeast Asian Studies" "[Stone Masters] is best seen as an exercise in comparative ethnology of regional similarities in cosmology, ritual practices, materiality, and myth across the region. The book helps in identifying universal patterns as well as unique cultural traits across mainland Southeast Asia, by examining cases from Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam."-- "Rising Asia Journal" "A rare book: an organically integrated collection, with a strong theme. While is unapologetically ethnological, Stone Masters engages cosmopolitan anthropological theories with great effect. It has a depth which anthropologists of other areas, working on analogous themes, can feed on."-- "Luiz Costa, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro"

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