How do shape-shifting shamans, a giant cannibalistic bumblebee, and human marriage with animals speak to Canadian Inuit and Siberian indigenous peoples today? How can artists present ancient legend in live performance and film with sensitivity to the source? Why are long multi-layered stories essential for adults and children in an age of commercial television?
leading to an overall decrease in the world's forest cover. The forests of Asia, in particular, have been strongly impacted. A number of initiatives have suggested forest policy reforms, and the need for the sustainable management of forests has been widely recognized and encouraged. But because implementation of reforms at the local level has been insufficient, it is imperative that local people begin to effectively participate in forest planning and management as well as in protected-area management. The Forest Conservation Project, launched in April 1998 by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), has carried out research activities on forest strategies, including policy analysis and on-site surveys. This book gives an overview of the project's research activities in its first three-year phase (April1998-March 2001). Since viable forest strategies work best when based on the involvement of local people, this report is addressed to stakeholders in the communities of the relevant countries, including local people and authorities, community-based organizations, experts, national agencies, and international institutions.
This book is a collection of fairy tales in Udeghe (Udihe), an endangered Tungus language spoken by approximately 100 people in the southern part of the Russian Far East. It provides the first fairly representative sample of folklore in the Southern dialect of Udeghe. The twenty-five texts were recorded from Udeghe speakers in the Primorje region of Russia between 1984 and 1997. They are published in phonological transcription and supplied with morpheme-by-morpheme glosses and English translations. The footnotes clarify certain Udeghe words, expressions, objects and customs, and provide information on when and how the texts were recorded, as well as about similar motifs that appear in other published sources on the folklore of the Udeghe, and other Tungus people. The book also contains a preface which explains the conventions used in rendering the texts, and gives a brief introduction to Udeghe language and culture.
This collection of papers explores the facets of gender and sex in history, language and society of Altaic cultures, reflecting the unique interdisciplinary approach of the PIAC. It examines the position of women in contemporary Central Asia at large, the expression of gender in linguistic terms in Mongolian, Manju, Tibetan and Turkic languages, and gender aspects presented in historical literary monuments as well as in contemporary sources.
Across North Asia, complex sentence formation patterns display an unusually high prevalence of suffixed relational morphemes used to convey subordination. Suffixal subordinators occur in a variety of genetic groupings, most notably Samoyedic, Turkic, and Tungusic, but also in some of the region’s language isolates, such as Ket and Ainu. No general study has surveyed complex sentences across Northern Eurasia and the Pacific Rim, an area noted both for its complicated web of language contact phenomena and its long-established genetic divisions. The 14 chapters in this volume survey synthetic and analytic methods of subordination and coordination. Much of the data reflect original fieldwork, and several chapters focus on critically endangered languages. Nearly every family or isolate in North Asia is taken into consideration, as are all major formal and functional types of complex sentence formation.
Studien zur Sprache, Geschichte und Kultur der Turkvölker was founded in 1980 by the Hungarian Turkologist György Hazai. The series deals with all aspects of Turkic language, culture and history, and has a broad temporal and regional scope. It welcomes manuscripts on Central, Northern, Western and Eastern Asia as well as parts of Europe, and allows for a wide time span from the first mention in the 6th century to modernity and present.
Volume 4 includes unique records of Orok (Uilta), a Tungusic language (dictionaries, texts, grammatical comments) noted down by Pilsudski directly from native informants at the beginning of the 20th century on Sakhalin. The original source material is identified with the help of - and confronted against - all the existing contemporary dictionaries with the assistance of leading specialists in the field (the Novosibirsk Avrorin group, also called the school of Manchu-Tungusologists). Abundant comparative data are quoted. All necessary introductory information and commentaries of ethnographic, historical, and linguistic nature are provided. Archival photos taken by Pilsudski are juxtaposed with related contemporary photos especially taken for this purpose. In addition, samples of original manuscript pages are reproduced. Bibliographical data and indices are provided in conformity with the previous volumes.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A gripping story of man pitted against nature’s most fearsome and efficient predator. This "travelogue about tiger poaching in Russia’s far east opens up a new genre ... [the] conservation thriller" (Nature). Outside a remote village in Russia’s Far East a man-eating tiger is on the prowl. The tiger isn’t just killing people, it’s murdering them, almost as if it has a vendetta. A team of trackers is dispatched to hunt down the tiger before it strikes again. They know the creature is cunning, injured, and starving, making it even more dangerous. As John Vaillant re-creates these extraordinary events, he gives us an unforgettable and masterful work of narrative nonfiction that combines a riveting portrait of a stark and mysterious region of the world and its people, with the natural history of nature’s most deadly predator.
