Sako Ma


Book Description

Sako Ma is an explorative look at the monkey as a sacred animal totem, ancestor, cult figure and religious icon in indigenous cultures in the East and West. Never before has a document looked at simian folklore and mythology cross-culturally.




Passive Constructions in Lithuanian


Book Description

This unique volume comprises a monograph and a set of articles by renowned typologist Emma Geniušienė which all focus on the topic of morphologically passive constructions in Lithuanian. It is the first translation into English of the author’s original work from the 1970s. It offers a rich treasury of data, a detailed structural description of all morphologically passive constructions, and an examination of the functions which these constructions have in the discourse. The addition of modern interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses to hundreds of linguistic examples and expert editorial work have turned the hard-to-access material into a timeless resource available for the first time to a broad international readership. The volume will be of value to descriptive linguists, typologists, morphologists and formal syntacticians, as well as to scholars of information structure and functional text analysis. It is an exciting addition to the linguistic literature and a fitting tribute to the author.




Blue Dragon and White Snake


Book Description

When war fire was burning over Chinese mainland around 1948 to 1949, tons of KMT soldiers forced to withdraw into Indochina; Lieutenant General Ho Pei-fu was the vice commander of the saying military corp; During that couple of years surviving in Vietnam, he met an Euroasian beauty hooker who became his seventh concubine after the troops returned and settled down on Taiwan Island in early1953. The Generals power faded and finally lost it but he still could go on maintaining his fortune also influence through his long time founded traitional Chinese black and white networks while the young high class hooker Black Rose also took advantage to use her mobster philosophy to run out of concubine birdcage and step by step rose herself into North American business jungle... Blue Dragon and White Snake is a fictionous story formed by authors immaginations also basing on that old times somehow facts, legends or unproofed rumers; the old time had been gone but people used to repeat their shits to presure empty fame, sex and money through power and blood; Life is a whore at the end........ During 1949 up to 1988 Taiwan had been under military marshal law ruling and the term White Terror used to mentioned along those years.....







Suspect Others


Book Description

Suspect Others explores how ideas of self-knowledge and identity arise from a unique set of rituals in Suriname, a postcolonial Caribbean nation rife with racial and religious suspicion. Amid competition for belonging, political power, and control over natural resources, Surinamese Ndyuka Maroons and Hindus look to spirit mediums to understand the causes of their successes and sufferings and to know the hidden minds of relatives and rivals alike. But although mediumship promises knowledge of others, interactions between mediums and their devotees also fundamentally challenge what devotees know about themselves, thereby turning interpersonal suspicion into doubts about the self. Through a rich ethnographic comparison of the different ways in which Ndyuka and Hindu spirit mediums and their devotees navigate suspicion, Suspect Others shows how present-day Caribbean peoples come to experience selves that defy concepts of personhood inflicted by the colonial past. Stuart Earle Strange investigates key questions about the nature of self-knowledge, religious revelation, and racial discourse in a hyper-diverse society. At a moment when exclusionary suspicions dominate global politics, Suspect Others elucidates self-identity as a social process that emerges from the paradoxical ways in which people must look to others to know themselves.







The Occult Sylvia Plath


Book Description

• Decodes the alchemical, Qabalistic, hermetic, spiritual, and Tarot-related references in many of Plath’s poems • Based on more than 15 years of research, including analysis of Plath’s unpublished personal writings from the Plath archives at Indiana University • Examines the influences of Plath’s parents, her early interests in Hermeticism, and her and husband Ted Hughes’s explorations in the supernatural and the occult Sharing her more than 15 years of compelling research—including analysis of Sylvia Plath’s unpublished calendars, notebooks, scrapbooks, book annotations, and underlinings, as well as published memoirs, biographies, letters, journals, and interviews with Plath and her husband, friends, and family—Plath scholar Julia Gordon-Bramer reveals Sylvia Plath’s enduring interest and active practice in mysticism and the occult from childhood until her tragic death in 1963. She examines Plath’s early years growing up in a transcendentalist Unitarian church under a brilliant, if stern, Freemason father and a mother who wrote her master’s dissertation on the famous alchemist Paracelsus. She reveals Plath’s early knowledge of Hermeticism, how she devoured books on the occult throughout her life, and how, since adolescence, Plath regularly wrote of premonitory dreams. Examining Plath’s tumultuous marriage with poet Ted Hughes, she looks at their explorations in the supernatural and Hughes’s mentoring of Plath in meditation, crystal-gazing, astrology, Qabalah, Tarot, automatic writing, magical workings, and use of the Ouija board. She also reveals how, at the end of her marriage, Plath used her husband’s hair and fingernails in rituals. Looking at Plath’s writing and her evolution as a person through mystical, political, personal, and historical lenses, Gordon-Bramer shows how her poems take on radically new, surprising, and universal meanings—explaining why Hughes perpetually denied that Plath was “a confessional poet.” Contrasting the versions in Letters Home with those held in the Plath archives at Indiana University, the author also shows how all occult influences have been rigorously excised from the letters approved for publication by the Plath and Hughes Estate. Revealing significant, previously undiscovered meanings in Sylvia Plath’s works, much broader than the narrow lens of her tragic autobiography, the author shows how Plath’s writings are deeply rooted in her mystical and occult endeavors.




Palms of Southern Asia


Book Description

Southern Asia is a vast and ecologically diverse region that extends from the deserts of Afghanistan to the rainforests of Thailand, and is home to a marvelously rich palm flora. Palms of Southern Asia is the only complete field guide to the 43 genera and 352 species of palms and rattans that occur in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. This attractive guide's handsome illustrations and succinct, authoritative, and jargon-free text make identification easy. Each species account includes the correct scientific and common names, and fully describes morphology, habitat, and uses. Featuring a distribution map for most species and 256 full-color photographs, this is also the only field guide to cover the extremely diverse palm flora of Vietnam, and the first to offer a taxonomic overview of the rattan species of Southern Asia. Palms of Southern Asia is a book of major importance for botanists and an invaluable aid for naturalists and conservationists, and it's the perfect field guide for ecotourists traveling in the region. Covers all 352 naturally occurring palms in Southern Asia Features full-color photographs of 256 species, many never before illustrated Includes a distribution map for most species Provides the first taxonomic overview of the rattans of Southern Asia




The New Generation in Chinese Animation


Book Description

In 1995 Chinese animated filmmaking ceased to be a state-run enterprise and was plunged into the free market. Using key animated films as his case studies, Shaopeng Chen examines new generation Chinese animation in its aesthetic and industrial contexts. He argues that, unlike its predecessors, this new generation does not have a distinctive national identity, but represents an important stage of diversity and exploration in the history of Chinese animation. Chen identifies distinct characteristics of new generation filmmaking, including an orientation towards young audiences and the recurring figure of the immortal monkey-like Sun Wukong. He explores how films such as Lotus Lantern/Baolian Deng (1999) responded to competition from American imports such as The Lion King (1994), retaining Chinese iconography while at the same time adopting Hollywood aesthetics and techniques. Addressing the series Boonie Bears/Xiong Chumo (2014-5), Chen focuses on the films' adaptation from the original TV series, and how the films were promoted across generations and by means of both online and offline channels. Discussing the series Kuiba/Kui Ba (2011, 2013, 2014), Chen examines Vasoon Animation Studio's ambitious attempt to create the first Chinese-style high fantasy fictional universe, and considers why the first film was a critical success but a failure at the box-office. He also explores the relationship between Japanese anime and new generation Chinese animation. Finally, Chen considers how word-of-mouth social media engagement lay behind the success of Monkey King: Hero is Back (2015).