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What does it mean to live a life that is knotted with other lives for better or worse? This ethnography of everyday multispecies relationships in the mountain villages of India’s Central Himalayan region traces how human pasts, presents, and futures come to be bound up with those of the many nonhuman animals who share this world with them, creating ties of relatedness between them that trouble the “naturalness” of categories such as human and animal, nature and culture, kinship and biology. This multispecies relatedness does not erase the differences and hierarchies that exist between different animals in the social world of the Central Himalayas, but leads individuals to constantly and carefully negotiate their difference from one another through shifting turns to love, care, neglect, avoidance, and violence. Questions of interspecies ethics and justice, the book argues, are not imagined as transcendental, but are situated in this complicated world of everyday relatedness across difference. The book traces how such everyday forms of relatedness are shaped by and engage the broader political, religious, and environmental currents at work in contemporary India. At a time when people’s relationships with animals have become the subject of strident political and cultural debate in India, this book demonstrates how through their everyday encounters, people and animals create intense knots of relatedness that complicate and enrich our understandings of the nature of mutuality, ethics, and love.

In the early 2000s, the government of China encouraged the nation’s 55 registered minority nationalities to “salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate” ethnic medical knowledge in an effort to create health care systems comparable to the nationally supported institutions of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Gathering Medicines bears witness to this remarkable moment of state-led knowledge development while appreciating local therapeutic practices scattered through rural southern China. The nationalities highlighted are the Achang, Li, Lisu, Qiang, Tujia, Yao, and Zhuang groups. Chapter 1 focuses ethnographically on grass-roots institution-building, and recounts the short but rich history of some relatively successful institutions of nationality medicine. In Chapter 2, medical knowledge sorted into textbooks is shown to result from survey and conceptual work by scholar-activists, and certain openings of formal knowledge to wild expertise and folk authority are noted. Chapter 3 turns to embodiment, reading through textbooks, an explanatory sketch, and the hands-on techniques of local practitioners to discern specific bodies and herbal agents. Herbals are the central topic of Chapter 4, which tracks the love life of humans and plants, and explores other intimacies between human healers and their favored forest products. Chapter 5 dwells on a series of encounters between state agents and nationality healers as well as between official knowledge and earthbound lore, survey researchers and local activists, and anthropologists and their allies and interlocutors. This study draws inspiration from philosophers ranging from Heidegger to Zhuangzi, Deleuze to Mao Zedong, but above all it attends to local knowledge in China’s mountain south.

Speaking in tongues is a worldwide phenomenon that dates back to the early Christian church. Commonly referred to as “glossolalia,” it has been the subject of curiosity and vigorous debate for the past two centuries. Glossolalia is both celebrated as supernatural gift and condemned as semiotic alchemy. For some it is mystical speech that exceeds what words can do, and for others it is mere gibberish, empty of meaning. At the heart of these differences is glossolalia’s puzzling relationship to language. Glossolalia and the Problem of Language investigates speaking in tongues in South Korea, where it is practiced widely across denominations and congregations. Nicholas Harkness shows how the popularity of glossolalia in Korea lies at the intersection of numerous, often competing social forces, interwoven religious legacies, and spiritual desires that have been amplified by Christianity’s massive institutionalization. As evangelicalism continues to spread worldwide, Glossolalia and the Problem of Language analyzes one of its most enigmatic practices while marking a major advancement in our understanding of the power of language and its limits

Inheritance of Loss explores how contemporary generations come to terms with losses inflicted by imperialism, colonialism, and war that happened decades ago, and how descendants of perpetrators and victims establish new relations in today’s globalized economy. Approaching these questions through the lens of inheritance, rather than memory, it focuses on Northeast China, the former site of the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo. As China transitions to a market-oriented society, this region is restoring long-neglected colonial-era structures to boost tourism while inviting former colonial industries to invest, all while inadvertently unearthing chemical weapons abandoned by the Imperial Japanese Army at the end of World War II. This book explores how long neglected colonial remnants are transformed into newly minted capital through the rhetoric of “inheritance.” It chronicles sites of colonial inheritance––tourist destinations, corporate zones, and mustard gas exposure sites––to illustrate entangled attempts by ordinary Chinese and Japanese to reckon with their shared yet contested pasts. It identifies the political economy of redemption as a new mode of generational transmission of the past that makes visible the entangled processes of “after empire,” which points to the often invisible, displaced, or seemingly separate postcolonial and postimperial processes that shape the afterlife of losses and their redemptions, to envisioning present and future relations to what remains, and to renewed desires for going after empire. Inheritance of Loss shows how structures of violence and injustice after the demise of the Japanese Empire compound the losses that later generations must account for, and inevitably inherit.

Death has become the central salient topic in many parts of rural China. Transformations in economic life, social structure, political ideology, and spiritual aspirations have occurred at dizzying speed. The socialist rituals that once gave people narrative structures to comprehend historical change have disappeared. Elderly people have lived through repeated radical social transformations from the socialist revolution forward: their deaths are now the sole site where these events can be reprised and evaluated. These deaths are opportunities to reassess how individual lives articulate with history, what social persons are, and what they might become. Practices of death are at the center of relations with a population that socialism disregarded: immaterial animate beings like ancestors, ghosts, and spirits. Death frames historical time with questions of embodiment and disembodiment: of the materialization of immaterial beings in bodies, effigies, and stones, and their dematerialization through fire, consumption, or corruption. This book investigates death in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, where Lòlop’ò people, officially Yi, speak a Tibeto-Burman language called Lòloŋo and are heir to an extraordinary range of resources for working on the dead: techniques to give the dead material form; exchanges to give substance to relations among the living and with the dead; laments and ritual chants used to communicate with the dead. Ultimately the aim of the book is to understand the questions Lòlop’ò ask and answer about these mysterious others at the center of their social world.

When state socialism collapsed in Mongolia and the chaos of neoliberal “shock therapy” took hold, like most other herders throughout the country, the ethnic nomadic Buryats were left without means of livelihood on the edge of an impoverished state. Attributing their misfortunes to their ancestral origin spirits, who were suppressed during socialism but now returned to take revenge for forgetting, the Buryats sponsor shamanic rituals in hope of taming these spirits. What results is a gradually unfolding and constantly shifting history of their tragic past. This history is incomplete and unsettling as well as unsettled; acknowledging the spirits seems to allow more to erupt and provoke. Both shamans and clients seek knowledge of how to placate these spirits, much of which was lost to the socialist state’s disruption of the transmission of shamanic practice. As clients search for the most reliable shamans, shamans hustle for recognition through flamboyant rituals of spirit possession. Together they perpetuate the very practices that they aim to tame. Despite the ambiguity of shamanic powers and reality of spirits, the narratives of origin spirits assume life of their own as shamans pitch them simultaneously as communal histories and individual memories. Yet many spirits remain unknown -- with identities and voice lost -- due to centuries of violence. More, revealing the link between gender and memory, female ancestors—absent from genealogical record and forgotten --are prone to turn avaricious and haunt their descendents. Tragic Spirits documents this shamanic proliferation and its context, economics, and gendered politics.