» Details
Kind, Marietta
The Bon Landscape of Dolpo
Pilgrimages, Monasteries, Biographies and the Emergence of Bon
Series: Welten Süd- und Zentralasiens / Worlds of South and Inner Asia / Mondes de l'Asie du Sud et de L'Asie centrale - Volume 4
Year of Publication: 2012
Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2012. 568 pp., num. ill., 2 maps.
ISBN 978-3-0343-0690-4 hb.
(Hardcover)
Weight: 1.300 kg, 2.866 lbs
- Hardcover:
- SFR 91.00
- €* 74.90
- €** 77.00
- € 70.00
- £ 63.00
- US$ 97.95
- Hardcover
» Currency of invoice
* includes VAT – valid for Germany and EU customers without VAT Reg No
** includes VAT - only valid for Austria
Discipline
Book synopsis
The reader is taken on a journey to Dolpo, one of Nepal’s remotest Tibetan enclaves with a large community that follow the Bon religion. The present ethnography regards the landscape of Dolpo as the temporary result of an ongoing cumulative cultural process that emerges from the interaction of the natural environment and the communities that inhabit it and endow it with meaning. Pilgrimage provides the key to structuring the book, which is based on anthropological research and the study of the textual legacy. Along the extensive and richly illustrated Bon pilgrimages through Dolpo, the various strands of the written and the oral, the local and the general, the past and present are unrolled step by step and woven into a pattern that provides a first insight into the partial shift from a landscape inhabited by territorial deities to a Bon landscape. In addition, it presents an overview of the main protagonists who discovered the sacred sites, opened pilgrimages, founded monasteries and disseminated the crucial Bon teachings. A number of well-known Tibetan figures emerge among these players thanks to translations of biographies that have survived in rare and unpublished manuscripts. This book sheds light on how Bon religion emerged in Dolpo and has remained alive.
Contents
Contents: Landscape, mountain cult, conversion and pilgrimage – A Sketch of the religious and Historical Context – Bon, Zhangzhung, Tibet, Nepal and Dolpo – Opening Sacred Grounds – Bon Pilgrimages in Dolpo – Transformational Processes in the Bon pilgrimages – The main protagonists and the crucial teachings in the propagation of Bon in Dolpo.
About the author(s)/editor(s)
The anthropologist Marietta Kind gained her PhD at the Universities of Zurich and Oxford. She has worked as a lecturer and research fellow at the Ethnographic Museum of Zurich University. With her Tapriza NGO she supports a school in Dolpo and the cultural heritage of this region. Her latest research project at Bern University is concerned with second generation Tibetans in Switzerland and their relation to Buddhism.
Reviews
«Das Buch gibt einen lebendigen Einblick in das Leben der Menschen von Dolpo. Wer sich für Tibet und seine Geschichte interessiert, wird hier viel interessante Information finden, die sonst kaum zugänglich sind (sic).» (Peter Eisenegger, tibetfocus 117, 2012)
Series
Worlds of South and Inner Asia. Vol. 5
Edited by the Swiss Asia Society represented by Johannes Bronkhorst, Karénina Kollmar-Paulenz and Angelika Malinar