The 1720 Imperial Circumcision Celebrations in Istanbul offers the first holistic examination of an Ottoman public festival through an in-depth inquiry into different components of the 1720 event. Through a critical and combined analysis of the hitherto unknown archival sources along with the textual and pictorial narratives on the topic, the book vividly illustrates the festival's organizational details and preparations, its complex rites (related to consumption, exchange, competition), and its representation in court-commissioned illustrated festival books (surnames). To analyze all these phases in a holistic manner, the book employs an interdisciplinary approach by using the methodological tools of history, art history, and performance studies and thus, provides a new methodological and conceptual framework for the study of Ottoman celebrations.

The Sung Home tells the story of Kurdish singer-poets (dengbejs) in Kurdistan in Turkey, who are specialized in the recital singing of historical songs. After a long period of silence, they returned to public life in the 2000s and are presented as guardians of history and culture. Their lyrics, life stories, and live performances offer fascinating insights into cultural practices, local politics and the contingencies of state borders. Decades of oppression have deeply politicized and moralized cultural and musical production. Through in-depth ethnographic analysis Hamelink highlights the variety of personal and social narratives within a society in turmoil. Set within the larger global stories of modernity, nationalism, and Orientalism, this study reflects on different ideas about what it means to create a Kurdish home.

This book deals with the life and pioneering work of Georg Buhler in the various fields of Indology. It argues that Buhler's interactions with the 19th c. India influenced his approach as a researcher and in turn his methodology which then followed his self-developed path of Ethno-Indology. The work is a result of study for the doctoral degree of the Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, India. Along with source materials available in India, the author consulted those in Germany and Austria.

The thirteenth-century cookbook Fidalat al-khiwan fi tayyibat al-ta'am wa-l-alwan by the Andalusi scholar Ibn Razin al-Tujibi showcases 475 exquisite recipes. This edition was meticulously translated into English based on a newly discovered manuscript containing the complete text. It includes an introduction, glossary, 218 color illustrations, and 24 modernized recipes.

Japan at Nature's Edge is a timely collection of essays that explores the relationship between Japan's history, culture, and physical environment. It greatly expands the focus of previous work on Japanese modernization by examining Japan's role in global environmental transformation and how Japanese ideas have shaped bodies and landscapes over the centuries. The immediacy of Earth's environmental crisis, a predicament highlighted by Japan's March 2011 disaster, brings a sense of urgency to the study of Japan and its global connections. The work is an environmental history in the broadest sense of the term because it contains writing by environmental anthropologists, a legendary Japanese economist, and scholars of Japanese literature and culture. The editors have brought together an unparalleled assemblage of some of the finest scholars in the field who, rather than treat it in isolation or as a unique cultural community, seek to connect Japan to global environmental currents such as whaling, world fisheries, mountaineering and science, mining and industrial pollution, and relations with nonhuman animals. The contributors assert the importance of the environment in understanding Japan's history and propose a new balance between nature and culture, one weighted much more heavily on the side of natural legacies. This approach does not discount culture. Instead, it suggests that the Japanese experience of nature, like that of all human beings, is a complex and intimate negotiation between the physical and cultural worlds. Contributors: Daniel P. Aldrich, Jakobina Arch, Andrew Bernstein, Philip C. Brown, Timothy S. George, Jeffrey E. Hanes, David L. Howell, Federico Marcon, Christine L. Marran, Ian Jared Miller, Micah Muscolino, Ken'ichi Miyamoto, Sara B. Pritchard, Julia Adeney Thomas, Karen Thornber, William M. Tsutsui, Brett L. Walker, Takehiro Watanabe.

Living continuously in Iran for over 2700 years, Jews have played an integral role in the history of the country. Frequently understood as a passive minority group, and often marginalized by the Zoroastrian and succeeding Muslim hegemony,, the Jews of Iran are instead portrayed in this book as having had an active role in the development of Iranian history, society, and culture. Examining ancient texts, objects, and art from a wide range of times and places throughout Iranian history, as well as the medieval trade routes along which these would have travelled, The Jews of Iran offers in-depth analysis of the material and visual culture of this community. Additionally, an exploration of modern novels and accounts of Jewish-Iranian women's experiences sheds light on the social history and transformations of the Jews of Iran from the rule of Cyrus the Great (c. 600-530 BCE) to the Iranian Revolution of 1978/9 and onto the present day. By using the examples of women writers such as Gina Barkhordar Nahai and Dalia Sofer, the implications of fictional representation of the history of the Jews of Iran and the vital importance of communal memory and tradition to this community are drawn out. By examining the representation of identity construction through lenses of religion, gender, and ethnicity, the analysis of these writers' work highlights how the writers undermine the popular imagining and imaging of the Jewish 'other' in an attempt to create a new narrative integrating the Jews of Iran into the idea of what it means to be Iranian. This long view of the Jewish cultural influence on Iran's social, economic, political, and cultural development makes this book a unique contribution to the field of Judeo-Iranian studies and to the study of Iranian history more broadly.

The string of military defeats during 1942 marked the end of British hegemony in Southeast Asia, finally destroying the myth of British imperial invincibility. The Japanese attack on Burma led to a hurried and often poorly organized evacuation of Indian and European civilians from the country. The evacuation was a public humiliation for the British and marked the end of their role in Burma."The Evacuation of Civilians from Burma" investigates the social and political background to the evacuation, and the consequences of its failure. Utilizing unpublished letters, diaries, memoirs and official reports, Michael Leigh provides the first comprehensive account of the evacuation, analyzing its source in the structures of colonial society, fractured race relations and in the turbulent politics of colonial Burma.

In Patriotic Cooperation, Diana Junio offers an account of a cooperative venture between the Nationalist government and the Church of Christ in China, known as the Border Service Department, that carried out substantial social programs from 1939 to 1955 in China's Southwestern border areas. Numerous scholars have argued that Chinese state-religion relations have been characterized primarily by conflict and antagonism. By examining the history of cooperation seen in the Border Service Department case, Diana Junio contends that these relations have not always been antagonistic; on the contrary, under certain conditions the state and the church could achieve a mutually beneficial goal through successful cooperation, with a strong degree of sincerity on both sides.

India has one of the world's largest tribal populations. According to the 2011 census, the total tribal population was estimated at 8.6 percent in India. In Tamil Nadu, the tribal population is about 1.1 percent spread among six major primitive tribal communities. Consumption expenditure is one of the indicators of wellbeing and standard of living in households. This book focuses on the Malaiyali Tribe, which inhabits the Jawadhu hills. This tribal group lives below the poverty line, deriving main sources of income from seasonal agricultural and agricultural labor work. It also depends on secondary sources of income from gathering and selling forest-based products. The major objectives of the study are i) to identify factors influencing household income and expenditure patterns, and ii) to analyze income and expenditure patterns of scheduled tribe households. An appropriate study area will be chosen in the State of Tamil Nadu. The book aims to help understand tribal income and expenditure patterns, and it would be useful for designing further tribal livelihood programs in India and elsewhere.

The aim idea of this study is to examine, quantify and critically assess the settlement history of the northern Oman Peninsula from the Hafit period (late 4th - early 3rd millennium BC) to recent times.

Citizenship and Democratization in Southeast Asia redirects the largely western-oriented study of citizenship to postcolonial states. Providing various fascinating first-hand accounts of how citizens interpret and realize the recognition of their property, identity, security and welfare in the context of a weak rule of law and clientelistic politics, this study highlights the importance of studying citizenship for understanding democratization processes in Southeast Asia. With case studies from Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Cambodia, this book provides a unique bottom-up perspective on the character of public life in Southeast Asia. Contributors are: Mary Austin, Laurens Bakker, Ward Berenschot, Sheri Lynn Gibbings, Takeshi Ito, David Kloos, Merlyna Lim, Astrid Noren-Nilsson, Oona Pardedes, Emma Porio, Apichat Satitniramai, Wolfram Schaffer and Henk Schulte Nordholt.

Prince, Pen, and Sword offers a synoptic interpretation of rulers and elites in Eurasia from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. Four core chapters zoom in on the tensions and connections at court, on the nexus between rulers and religious authority, on the status, function, and self-perceptions of military and administrative elites respectively. Two additional concise chapters provide a focused analysis of the construction of specific dynasties (the Golden Horde and the Habsburgs) and narratives of kingship found in fiction throughout Eurasia. The contributors and editors, authorities in their fields, systematically bring together specialised literature on numerous Eurasian kingdoms and empires. This book is a careful and thought-provoking experiment in the global, comparative and connected history of rulers and elites.

The Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences - established in 1826 - houses many small and still hidden collections. One of these, the most comprehensive Hungarian collection of Arabic manuscripts, is brought to light by the present catalogue. These codices are described for the first time in a detailed and systematic way. A substantial part of the manuscripts is either dated to or preserved from the 150 year period of Ottoman occupation in Hungary. The highlights of the collection are from the Mamluk era, and the manuscripts as a whole present a clear picture of the curriculum of Islamic education. The descriptions also give an overview of the many additional Turkish and Persian texts thereby adding to our knowledge about the history of these volumes.

Tributaries and Peripheries of the Ottoman Empire offers thirteen studies on the relationship between Ottoman tributaries with each other in the imperial framework, as well as with neighboring border provinces of the empire's core territories from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. A variety of surveys related to the Cossack Ukraine, the Crimean Khanate, Dagestan, Moldavia, Ragusa, Transylvania, Upper Hungary and Wallachia allow the reader to see hitherto less known subtleties of the Ottoman administration's hierarchic structures and the liberties and restrictions of the office-holders' power. They also shed light upon the strategies of coalition-building among the elites of the tributaries as well as the core provinces of the border zones, which determined their cooperation, but also the competition between them. Contributors include: Janos B. Szabo, Ovidiu Cristea, Tetiana Grygorieva, Klara Jako, Gabor Karman, Dariusz Kolodziejczyk, Natalia Krolikowska-Jedlinska, Erica Mezzoli, Viorel Panaite, Radu G. Paun, Ruza Rados Curic, Balazs Sudar, Michal Wasiucionek.