Songs for Dead Parents


Book Description

In a society that has seen epochal change over a few generations, what remains to hold people together and offer them a sense of continuity and meaning? In Songs for Dead Parents, Erik Mueggler shows how in contemporary China death and the practices surrounding it have become central to maintaining a connection with the world of ancestors, ghosts, and spirits that socialism explicitly disavowed. Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, Songs for Dead Parents shows how people view the dead as both material and immaterial, as effigies replace corpses, tombstones replace effigies, and texts eventually replace tombstones in a long process of disentangling the dead from the shared world of matter and memory. It is through these processes that people envision the cosmological underpinnings of the world and assess the social relations that make up their community. Thus, state interventions aimed at reforming death practices have been deeply consequential, and Mueggler traces the transformations they have wrought and their lasting effects.




Songs for Dead Parents


Book Description

A community's rituals and practices surrounding death are one of its foremost ways of making sense of itself and its relationship to the passage of time. Historical time, in particular, with its attendant social and political shifts, is most directly experienced and reckoned with through those whom time leaves behind, the men and women whose lives come to form that community's past. In Songs for Dead Parents, distinguished anthropologist Erik Mueggler investigates death in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, which he studied over a period spanning two decades. Through evocative analyses of the community's rituals, exchanges, laments, and chants, Mueggler shows how their way of thinking and feeling the passage of time and the loss of life is rooted in the landscape surrounding them and the raw materials it provides. These materials give new substance to the dead, as they transform from body to effigy to stone to text in a cycle of degeneration and regeneration that gives shape to the ongoing life of the community. In the wake of the disappearance of the socialist rituals that once gave people narrative structures with which to understand historical change, death rituals have become ways of coming to terms with that socialist past as well as ways of moving forward from it and creating new forms of meaning. What emerges from Mueggler's book is a powerful analysis of a praxis and poetics of grief, one whose personal and historical dimensions are profoundly intertwined. Written in an accessible language for multiple audiences, Songs for Dead Parents will appeal to anthropologists, historians, scholars of modern China, and any reader interested in how a community grieves, mourns, and endures.




Hand to Hold


Book Description

This heartwarming picture book reassures children that a parent’s love never lets go—based on the poignant lyrics of JJ Heller’s beloved lullaby “Hand to Hold.” “May the living light inside you be the compass as you go / May you always know you have my hand to hold.” With delightful illustrations and an engaging rhyme scheme, this book offers the promise of security and love every child’s heart longs to know. From skipping stones and counting stars to climbing trees and telling stories, every moment is wrapped snugly in the certain warmth of a parent’s presence and God’s blessing. With poignancy and joy, this bedtime read captures the unconditional love parents want their children to know but so often fail to express amid the chaos of daily life.




Music in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Encyclopedic History


Book Description

The music of the peoples of South and Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean has never received a comprehensive treatment in English until this multi-volume work. Taking a sociocultural and human-centered approach, Music in Latin America and the Caribbean gathers the best scholarship from writers all over the world to cover in depth the musical legacies of indigenous peoples, creoles, African descendants, Iberian colonizers, and other immigrant groups that met and mixed in the New World. Within a history marked by cultural encounters and dislocations, music emerges as the powerful tool that negotiates identities, enacts resistance, performs belief, and challenges received aesthetics. This work, more than two decades in the making, was conceived as part of "The Universe of Music: A History" project, initiated by and developed in cooperation with the International Music Council, with the goals of empowering Latin Americans and Caribbeans to shape their own musical history and emphasizing the role that music plays in human life. The four volumes that constitute this work are structured as parts of a single conception and gather 150 contributions by more than 100 distinguished scholars representing 36 countries. Volume 1, Performing Beliefs: Indigenous Peoples of South America, Central America, and Mexico, focuses on the inextricable relationships between worldviews and musical experience in the current practices of indigenous groups. Worldviews are built into, among other things, how music is organized and performed, how musical instruments are constructed and when they are played, choreographic formations, the structure of songs, the assignment of gender to instruments, and ritual patterns. Two CDs with 44 recorded examples illustrate the contributions to this rich volume.




Rest in Plastic


Book Description

In Peki, an Ewe town in the Ghanaian Volta Region, death is a matter of public concern. By means of funeral banners printed with synthetic ink on PVC, public lyings in state, cemented graves and wreaths made from plastic, death occupies a prominent place in the world of the living. Rest in Plastic gives an insight into local entanglements of death, synthetic materials and power in Ewe community. It shows how different materials and things that come to shape power relations, exist in a delicate balance between state and local governance, kin and outsiders, death and life, the invisible and the visible, movement and containment.




The Therapist's Notebook for Integrating Spirituality in Counseling II


Book Description

More activities to tap into the strength of your clients’ spiritual beliefs to achieve therapeutic goals. The Therapist’s Notebook for Integrating Spirituality in Counseling II is the second volume of a comprehensive two-volume resource that provides practical interventions from respected experts from a wide range of backgrounds and theoretical perspectives. This volume includes several practical strategies and techniques to easily incorporate spirituality into psychotherapy. You’ll find in-session activities, homework assignments, and client and therapist handouts that utilize a variety of therapeutic models and techniques and address a broad range of topics and problems. The chapters of The Therapist’s Notebook for Integrating Spirituality in Counseling II are grouped into four sections: Models of Therapy Used in Integrating Spirituality; Integrating Spirituality with Age-Specific Populations: Children, Adolescents, and the Elderly; Integrating Spirituality with Specific Multicultural Populations; and Involving Spirituality when Dealing with Illness, Loss, and Trauma. As in Volume One, each clinician-friendly chapter also includes sections on resources where the counselor can learn more about the topic or technique used in the chapter—as well as suggested books, articles, chapters, videos, and Web sites to recommend to clients. Every chapter follows the same easy-to-follow format: objectives, rationale for use, instructions, brief vignette, suggestions for follow-up, contraindications, references, professional readings and resources, and bibliotherapy sources for the client. The Therapist’s Notebook for Integrating Spirituality in Counseling II adds more useful activities and homework counselors can use in their practice, such as: using religion or spirituality in solution-oriented brief therapy “Cast of Character” counseling using early memories to explore adolescent and adult spirituality cognitive behavioral treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder age-specific clients such as children or the elderly multicultural populations and spirituality dealing with illness, loss, and trauma recovering from fetal loss creative art techniques with caregivers in group counseling and much more! The Therapist’s Notebook for Integrating Spirituality in Counseling II provides even more creative and helpful homework and activities that are perfect for pastoral counselors, clergy, social workers, marriage and family therapists, counselors, psychologists, Christian counselors, educators who teach professional issues, ethics, counseling, and multicultural issues, and students.







The Songs of the Russian People


Book Description




Holman Old Testament Commentary Volume 14 - Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs


Book Description

One in a series of twenty Old Testament verse-by-verse commentary books edited by Max Anders. Includes discussion starters, teaching plan, and more. Great for lay teachers and pastors alike.




Ukrainian Epic and Historical Song


Book Description

Ukrainian epic, or dumy, were first recorded from blind mendicant minstrels in the nineteenth century, yet they reflect events dating back to as early as the 1300s. Ukrainian Epic and Historical Song provides new translations in contemporary English of these songs of family strife, war, and human dignity. It also explains the historical events celebrated in epic and other historical songs: fierce battles, rebellion against tyranny, the struggles of captivity, the joys of escape from slavery. Natalie Kononenko's expert translation and analysis of Ukrainian epics provides a sweeping social history of folklore that is vital to Ukrainian identity. A translation of at least one variant of every known epic is included. Whereas earlier trends in folklore scholarship emphasized genre purity and compartmentalization, Kononenko critically examines the events about which songs were sung. Her emphasis on the lives of ordinary people rather than on leaders reshapes our understanding of how epics were composed and performed. Kononenko's ground-breaking analysis also illuminates Ukrainian self-understanding and explains how songs preserve and perpetuate historical memory. Scholars interested in epic song, history, and general folklore will benefit from this work. Members of the Ukrainian diaspora will find new appreciation of Ukrainian folklore.