Order in Paradox: Myth, Ritual, and Exchange Among Nepal's Tamang

Holmberg, David H.

ISBN 10: 0801480558 / ISBN 13: 9780801480553

Published by Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A., 1992

About this Item

AS NEW softcover, no marks in text, tight uncreased spine, appears unread.

Seller Inventory # 115260

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Order in Paradox: Myth, Ritual, and Exchange Among Nepal's Tamang
• Publisher: Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A.
• Publication Date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801480558
• ISBN 13: 9780801480553
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: As New
• Book Type: Book

About this title

Synopsis

David H. Holmberg here examines the social forms, ritual practices, and history of a western Tamang community of Himalayan Nepal. Exploring the central question of ritual complexity, Order in Paradox demonstrates how a religious system that contains Buddhist, shamanic, and sacrificial practices may be understood as a whole.

Holmberg begins by recounting the history of the Tamang and reexamining the meaning of caste, tribe, and ethnicity in greater Nepal. Holmberg reveals how cultural patterns thought to be uniquely Tamang reflect this people's development of an "involuted" "tribal" form of Buddhist religious expression―an evolution he interprets as a result in part of the unification of the Nepalese state. Holmberg then offers descriptions of the culture, mythic imagination, and ritual field of the Tamang. Exploring both structural and historical dimensions of Tamang rituals, Holmberg shows how they form a system linked to a cultural logic of exchange upon which Tamang society is built. He also sheds light on the relationship between gender and ritual, considering in detail the close association between femaleness and the shamanic in Tamang culture.

About the Author

David H. Holmberg is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University.