Tracking the Weretiger

Author: Patrick Newman
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476600562
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
Drawing on dramatic accounts by European colonials, and on detailed studies by folklorists and anthropologists, this work explores intriguing age-old Asian beliefs and claims that man-eating tigers and "little tigers," or leopards alike, were in various ways supernatural. It is a serious work based on extensive research, written in a lively style. Fundamental to the book is the evocation of a long-vanished world. When a man-eater struck in colonial times, people typically said it was a demon sent by a deity, or even the deity itself in animal form, punishing transgressors and being guided by its victims' angry spirits. Colonials typically dismissed this as superstitious nonsense but given traditional ideas about the close links between people, tigers and the spirit world, it is quite understandable. Other man-eaters were said to be shapeshifting black magicians. The result is a rich fund of tales from India and the Malay world in particular, and while some people undoubtedly believed them, others took advantage of man-eaters to persecute minorities as the supposed true culprits. The book explores the prejudices behind these witch-hunts, and also considers Asian weretiger and wereleopard lore in a wider context, finding common features with the more familiar werewolves of medieval Europe in particular.

Encyclopedia of Beasts and Monsters in Myth, Legend and Folklore

Author: Theresa Bane
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147662268X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 428

Book Description
"Here there be dragons"--this notation was often made on ancient maps to indicate the edges of the known world and what lay beyond. Heroes who ventured there were only as great as the beasts they encountered. This encyclopedia contains more than 2,200 monsters of myth and folklore, who both made life difficult for humans and fought by their side. Entries describe the appearance, behavior, and cultural origin of mythic creatures well-known and obscure, collected from traditions around the world.

Beast

Author: S. R. Schwalb
Publisher: Skyhorse
ISBN: 163220780X
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Book Description
Using modern biology and history to investigate a series of grisly deaths in the countryside of 18th-century France. Something unimaginable occurred from 1764 to 1767 in the remote highlands of south-central France. For three years, a real-life monster, or monsters, ravaged the region, slaughtering by some accounts more than 100 people, mostly women and children, and inflicting severe injuries upon many others. Alarmed rural communities—and their economies—were virtually held hostage by the marauder, and local officials and Louis XV deployed dragoons and crack wolf hunters from far-off Normandy and the King’s own court to destroy the menace. And with the creature’s reign of terror occurring at the advent of the modern newspaper, it can be said the ferocious attacks in the Gévaudan region were one of the world's first media sensations. Despite extensive historical documentation about this awesome predator, no one seemed to know exactly what it was. Theories abounded: Was it an exotic animal, such as a hyena, that had escaped from a menagerie? A werewolf? A wolf-dog hybrid? A new species? Some kind of conspiracy? Or, as was proposed by the local bishop, was it a scourge of God? To this day, debates on the true nature of La Bête, “The Beast,” continue. With historical illustrations, composite sketches by the author, on-the-scene modern-day photographs, autopsy analysis, and fictionalized accounts, Beast takes a fascinating look at all the evidence, using a mix of history and modern biology to advance a theory that could solve one of the most bizarre and unexplained killing sprees of all time: France’s infamous Beast of the Gévaudan.

Alluring Monsters

Author: Rosalind Galt
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231554044
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Book Description
The pontianak, a terrifying female vampire ghost, is a powerful figure in Malay cultures, as loved and feared in Southeast Asia as Dracula is in the West. In animist tradition, she is a woman who has died in childbirth, and her vengeful return upsets gender norms and social hierarchies. The pontianak first appeared on screen in late colonial Singapore in a series of popular films that combine indigenous animism and transnational production with the cultural and political force of the horror genre. In Alluring Monsters, Rosalind Galt explores how and why the pontianak found new life in postcolonial Southeast Asian film and society. She argues that the figure speaks to a series of intersecting anxieties: about femininity and modernity, globalization and indigeneity, racial and national identities, the relationship of Islam to animism, and heritage and environmental destruction. The pontianak offers abundant feminist potential, but her disruptive gender politics also unsettle queer and feminist film theories by putting them in dialogue with Malay epistemologies. Reading the pontianak as a precolonial figure of disturbance within postcolonial cultures, Galt reveals the importance of cinema to histories and theories of decolonization. From the horror films made by Cathay Keris and Shaw Studios in the 1950s and 1960s to contemporary film, television, art, and fiction in Malaysia and Singapore, the pontianak in all her media forms sheds light on how postcolonial identities are both developed and contested. In tracing the entanglements of Malay feminist animisms with postcolonial visual cultures, Alluring Monsters reveals how a “pontianak theory” can reshape understandings of anticolonial aesthetics and world cinema.

Alcohol in Early Java

Author: Jiří Jákl
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004417036
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Book Description
In Alcohol in Early Java: Its Social and Cultural Significance, Jiří Jákl offers an account of the history of alcohol in pre-Islamic Java (9-15th C.E.).

Learning Love from a Tiger

Author: Daniel Capper
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520290410
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Book Description
Learning Love from a Tiger explores the vibrancy and variety of humansÕ sacred encounters with the natural world, gathering a range of stories culled from Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Mayan, Himalayan, Buddhist, and Chinese shamanic traditions. Readers will delight in tales of house cats who teach monks how to meditate, shamans who shape-shift into jaguars, crickets who perform Catholic mass, rivers that grant salvation, and many others. In addition to being a collection of wonderful stories, this book introduces important concepts and approaches that underlie much recent work in environmental ethics, religion, and ecology. Daniel CapperÕs light touch prompts readers to engage their own views of humanityÕs place in the natural world and question longstanding assumptions of human superiority.

Problematic Wildlife II

Author: Francesco Maria Angelici
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030423352
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 655

Book Description
In a world where habitats are constantly changing and the impact of anthropization on the environment is increasingly intense, interactions between human and wildlife are becoming more and more complex. Some species pose problems for human activities while many others need to be helped in order to continue to exist. This book follows the first volume called 'Problematic Wildlife', edited by F.M. Angelici and published by Springer in 2016, which has had considerable success with readers and critics. The volume includes 21 chapters divided into 7 parts devoted specific topics which are approached in a multidisciplinary way. There are both review chapters and specific cases, always bearing in mind the interest for an international audience. The book is useful both for scientists, wildlife specialists, conservationists, zoologists, ecologists, university students, nature managers, and for those who live in contact with wildlife and its problems, such as farmers, shepherds, hunters, urban planners, and staff of parks and nature reserves. Its ultimate goal is to offer scientific and pragmatic approaches to manage each categories of problematic species.

Tropical Conservation

Author: A. Alonso Aguirre
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199766983
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 521

Book Description
The tropics and subtropics are home to about 75% of the global human population. Cultural, economic, and political circumstances vary enormously across this vast geography of some 170 countries and territories. The regions not only harbor the world's poorest countries but their human populations are growing disproportionally faster than in temperate zones. Some countries are developing rapidly -- Brazil, China, India, and Mexico being obvious examples, while others still remain in the poverty trap. This region contains an astonishing proportion of global biodiversity; some 90% of plant and animal species by some measures. Its contribution to human well-being is astounding. It was the birthplace for our species; and it hosts a myriad of plant and animal species which products feed us, keep us healthy, and supply us with a variety of material goods. The tropics and subtropics are also a natural laboratory where some of humanity's most important scientific discoveries have been made. Such biodiversity has enormous implications for research priorities, capacity building, and policy to address the challenges of conserving this region. Tropical Conservation: Perspectives on Local and Global Priorities drew the majority of its contributors from this growing pool of scientists and practitioners working in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. It introduces important conservation concepts and illustrates their application as the authors directly capture real world experiences in their home countries in preventing biodiversity loss and sustaining ecological health. Today, no part of the world can be viewed in isolation, and we further codify and integrate a range of approaches for addressing global threats to nature and environmental sustainability, including climate change and emerging diseases. Five sections structure the major themes.

Environmental Resources, Uses And Management

Author: Dr. Deepa
Publisher: AG PUBLISHING HOUSE (AGPH Books)
ISBN: 9395936037
Category : Study Aids
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Book Description
A commodity, service, or piece of knowledge derived from the natural world that is beneficial to society is referred to as an environmental resource. This may refer to anything in a person's surrounds or surroundings that they believe to be beneficial. Environmental resources include things like food that comes from plants and animals, wood that can be used for cooking, heating, and construction, as well as metals, coal, and oil. The capacity of the land, air, and water to absorb waste products produced by civilization is a kind of environmental resource. Other types of environmental resources include clean land, air, and water. Environmental resources include things like the warmth of the sun, the ability to travel and enjoy recreational activities on rivers, lakes, and seas, breathtaking scenery, and the identification of previously unknown species. The management of the interactions and effects that human civilizations have on the environment is known as environmental resource management (ERM). The management of the environment itself is not what this refers to, despite what the term may lead one to believe. Environmental resource management has two primary goals: the first is to guarantee that ecosystem services are safeguarded and maintained for future generations of humans, and the second is to maintain the integrity of ecosystems by taking into account ethical, economic and scientific (ecological) aspects. The goal of environmental resource management is to identify the components that are impacted by the tensions that arise between satisfying requirements and safeguarding resources. After doing an extensive amount of research, all of the material that is presented in this book was included, and the writers made an effort to write the book in a way that is simple to comprehend. Students may also study and prepare for their assessments by using this book as a resource. People who wish to be knowledgeable about all that is essential to know about the management of the environment should read this book. Reading this book may help improve people's perspectives on the resources we have and how to make appropriate use of them. Because this book is such a valuable resource, reading it can be useful.

Worldly Spirits, Extra-Human Dimensions, and the Global Anglophone Novel

Author: Hilary Thompson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350373826
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Engaging a diverse range of contemporary anglophone literature from authors of the Asian, Middle Eastern and Caribbean diasporas, this book explores how such works turn to spirit forces, spirit realms and spirit beings - were-animals, mystical birds, and snake goddesses - as positive forces that assert perceptual dimensions beyond those of the human, and present a vision of Earth as agentive and animate. With previous scholarship downplaying these aspects of modern works as uncanny hauntings or symptoms of capitalism's or anthropocentrism's destructiveness, or within a blanket rubric of 'magical realism', Hilary Thompson rejects this partitioning of them as products of an exotic East or global South. By contrast, this book builds a new critical framework for analysis of worldly spirits, drawing on anthropological discussions of animism, the newly recovered 1930s boundary-crossing art movement Dimensionism, and multispecies theories of animals' diverse perceptual worlds. Taking stock of novels published from 2018-2020 by such writers as Amitav Ghosh, André Alexis, Yangsze Choo, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Zeyn Joukhadar, and Tanya Tagaq, Thompson illuminates how these works extend an ecological call to decentre the human and align with multidimensional theories of art and literature to provide ways to read for rather than reduce the extra-human dimensions emerging in contemporary fiction. A refreshing rejection of ecological apocalypticism, this book unsettles typical conceptualizations of both anglophone and Anthropocene literatures by invoking European art theory, philosophy, and non-Western ideas on animism and spirits to put forward perceptions of the extra-human as a form of dealing with the many uncertainties of today's different crises.