Ole Bruun

For well over a century, Chinese fengshui, or "geomancy," has interested Western laymen and scholars. Today, hundreds of popular manuals claim to use its principles in their advice on how people can increase their wealth, happiness, longevity, and so on. This study is quite different, approaching fengshui from an academic angle. The focus is on its significance in China, but the recent history of its reinterpretation in the West is also depicted. The author argues that fengshui serves as an alternative tradition of cosmological knowledge, which is used to explain a range of everyday occurrences in rural areas, such as disease, mental disorders, accidents, and common mischief. The study includes a historical account of fengshui over the last 150 years augmented by the results of anthropological fieldwork on contemporary practices in two Chinese rural areas.

Geomantic Divination between State Orthodoxy and Popular Religion

Fengshui in China

Li Narangoa

This volume examines the process of cultural change in Mongol societies since the early 20th century by considering the interaction of the basic structural features of pastoral nomadism in Mongolia with larger economies, both communist and capitalist; the effect of deliberate cultural reconstruction (ranging from changes to the education system to purges and outright cultural destruction) on the conduct of the pastoral economy; and the efforts of Mongols themselves to develop aspects of their own cultural identity under conditions of territorial partition, episodes of intense political repression, and (in the Russian and Chinese regions) very substantial immigration by non-Mongol groups. In particular, this volume will examine those modernization processes entailed in urbanization, secularization, industrialization, democratization and national identity formation. A central question is to what extent these take a different shape in a pastoral society as compared to an "ordinary" sedentary agricultural society.

Floating Boundaries, Pastoralism and City Life in the Mongol Lands

Mongols from Country to City

Arne Kalland

This highly acclaimed, 'bold and refreshing' collection of essays takes a critical look at Asians' perception of their natural environments as well as at Western views of Asia in this respect.

A Critical Approach

Asian Perceptions of Nature

An Ethnography of Private Business Households in Contemporary China

Business and Bureaucracy in a Chinese City

Ole Bruun's work depicts the life of a community of Mongolian livestock herders as they begin to adjust to life outside of their contained Soviet-style collectives. The author identifies and addresses the most essential conditions for their continued existence in the age of the market: the adaptability of their own culture and working strategies, government policy, and international attention.

Ole Bruun

Books

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