Research Catalog

Title

Stone masters : power encounters in mainland Southeast Asia / edited by Holly High.

Publication

• Singapore : NUS Press, [2022]
• ©2022

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• High, Holly
• NUS Press, publisher.

Description

xix, 325 pages : illustrations; 23 cm

Summary

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--

Alternative Title

Power encounters in mainland Southeast Asia

Subject

• Animism > Southeast Asia
• Stone worship > Southeast Asia
• Ethnology > Southeast Asia
• Stone > Southeast Asia > Religious aspects
• Animisme > Asie du Sud-Est
• Pierre > Asie du Sud-Est > Aspect religieux
• Ethnologie > Asie du Sud-Est
• Pierre > Culte > Asie du Sud-Est
• Animism
• Ethnology
• Rocks > Religious aspects
• Stone > Religious aspects
• Southeast Asia > Religious life and customs
• Asie du Sud-Est > Vie religieuse
• Southeast Asia

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

An introduction to stone masters / Holly High -- Theorising "stone masters", revisiting Paul Mus / John Clifford Holt -- Living with new Gods, power encounters in Sekong Province, Lao PDR / Holly High -- The dance of life and death, social relationships with elemental power / Courtney Work -- The party-state has come, ritual rupture and cosmological continuity on a ridgetop in Laos / Paul-David Lutz -- Masters of the underground, termite mound worship and the mutuality of chthonic and human beings in Thailand's lower Northeast / Benjamin Baumann -- Lady luck of the city, myth and meaning at Vientiane's city pillar / Holly High -- Guardians of the kingdom / Sally Bamford -- From ritual traditions to spirit mediumship, the evolution of pillar worship in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand / Kazuo Fukuura -- Territory cults and power in the eastern Shan State of Myanmar / Klemens Karlsson -- The mountain, the masters and the nation, enduring power encounters at a temple in contemporary Vietnam / Hang T.D. Ngô.

ISBN

• 9789813251700
• 9813251700

LCCN

2022320188

OCLC

• on1287232314
• 1287232314
• SCSB-14715097

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries