Stone Masters: Power Encounters in Mainland Southeast Asia - Softcover

Holly High (editor)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9813251700 ISBN 13: 9789813251700

Publisher: NUS Press, 2022

Synopsis

A new analytical perspective on stones and stone masters across Southeast Asia that extends and deepens the recent literature on animism.

Stones and stone masters are an important focus of animist religious practice in Southeast Asia. Recent studies on animism see animist rituals not as a mere metaphor for community or shared values, but as a way of forming and maintaining relationships with occult presences. This book features city pillars, statues, megaliths, termite mounds, mountains, rocks found in forests, and stones that have been moved to shrines, as well as the territorial cults which can form around them. The contributors extend and deepen the recent literature on animism to form a new analytical perspective on these cults across mainland Southeast Asia. Not just a collection of exemplary ethnographies, Stone Masters is also a deeply comparative volume that develops its ideas through a meshwork of regional entanglements, parallels, and differences, before entering into a dialogue with debates on power, mastery, and the social theory of animism globally.

About this title

About the Author

Holly High is an anthropologist and associate professor at the University of Sydney.

Edition details

• Publisher: NUS Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9813251700
• ISBN 13: 9789813251700
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 440