The present volume offers a dozen studies of manuscripts of the Tibetan Bon and Naxi Dongba traditions across time and space. While some of the contributions focus on particular features of manuscripts from either tradition, others explicitly bridge the two by considering common codicological and material aspects of selected examples or common themes in the content of the texts. This is the first primarily object-based study to deal with the cultural history and technology of books from the two traditions. It discusses collections of Bon and Naxi manuscripts, the concepts and history of both traditions, the science and technology of book studies as it relates to these collections, the relationship between text and image, writing materials, and the historical and archaeological context of the manuscripts' places of origin. The authors are specialists in different fields including philology, anthropology, art history, codicology and archaeometry. The contributions shed light on trade routes, materials and technologies as well as on reading practices and ritual usage of Bon and Naxi manuscripts.

This collective volume offers an insight into the Bon and Naxi manuscript cultures and their possible interconnections. This is the first primarily object-based study to deal with Bon and Naxi cultural history, book technology, collections of Bon and Naxi manuscripts, the relationship between text and image, writing materials, and the historical and archaeological context of the manuscripts' places of origin.

This book is a study of European-language translations of Naxi ritual manuscripts, the ritual literature of a small ethnic group living in southwest China’s Yunnan Province. The author discusses the translations into European languages (in English, French and German) from the late nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century, revealing a history of fragmentary yet interconnected translation efforts in the West. By exploring this network, he shows how translation can be understood as a metonymic “recreation” of textual worlds. As Naxi manuscripts are semi-oral texts representing an oral-formulaic tradition, their translation involves a metonymic relay of partial incorporations from manuscript/image to reading/spoken language. Therefore, the book engages in a series of textual excavations to uncover the previously occluded contemporaneous readings that would have led to the translations we can consult today, particularly in an attempt to understand how the Naxi literature came to be part of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Scholars in the field of ethnic minority literature in China and translation studies will find this book beneficial, and it will make new contributions to comparative literature between the East and West.

Asian Horizons is published in honour of the great scholar of Asia, Professor Giuseppe Tucci (1894–1984). Through the work of present-day scholars, both senior and emerging, this volume represents their efforts to maintain the impetus of the profound legacy Tucci left. Renowned to this day as a founding scholar in an extraordinarily wide variety of disciplines, as well as being an explorer of hitherto largely unknown lands, such as Tibet, Tucci gained a deep knowledge of Asia through a familiarity with its people, places and literature. His contribution to modern scholarship is nothing less than remarkable. The volume reflects the broad variety of topics in which Tucci himself displayed deep interest and serves as an homage to his work.

The Tibetan Gesar epic has known countless retellings, translations, and academic studies. The Many Faces of Ling Gesar, presents its historical, cultural, and literary aspects for the first time in a single volume for both general readers and specialists.

This guide to the languages of the world details more than 400 languages in a clear A-Z style.

In recent years, the Sino-Tibetan frontier regions have attracted increasing scholarly interest. The region of Rebkong in Qinghai province is of particular significance because of its unique location on the Sino-Tibetan borderland, its multi-ethnic population and its complex religious history, which incorporates both large Geluk monasteries and significant Nyingma and Bonpo lay tantric communities. Covering the nineteenth century to the present, this volume brings together ten papers that explore the relationship between religion and culture in Rebkong. Using insights from anthropology, history and religious studies, the contributors offer new research and fresh interpretations of this important region on China’s periphery, discussing issues of ethnicity and identity, the role of public institutions, and the role of religion and rituals.