David H. Holmberg here examines the social forms, ritual practices, and history of a western Tamang community of Himalayan Nepal. Exploring the central question of ritual complexity, Order in Paradox demonstrates how a religious system that contains Buddhist, shamanic, and sacrificial practices may be understood as a whole.
Holmberg begins by recounting the history of the Tamang and reexamining the meaning of caste, tribe, and ethnicity in greater Nepal. Holmberg reveals how cultural patterns thought to be uniquely Tamang reflect this people's development of an "involuted" "tribal" form of Buddhist religious expression—an evolution he interprets as a result in part of the unification of the Nepalese state. Holmberg then offers descriptions of the culture, mythic imagination, and ritual field of the Tamang. Exploring both structural and historical dimensions of Tamang rituals, Holmberg shows how they form a system linked to a cultural logic of exchange upon which Tamang society is built. He also sheds light on the relationship between gender and ritual, considering in detail the close association between femaleness and the shamanic in Tamang culture.
目次
Front Matter i-vi Table of Contents vii-viii Maps, Figures, Table ix-ix [Map] x-x Preface xi-xiv Note on Transcription and Pronunciation xv-xviii 1 Introduction: Elementary Structures Ritual Life 1 2 Tamang Comparatively Reconstructed 11 3 A Culture of Exchange and Its Paradoxes 51 4 Panoramas of Cosmic and Temporal Orders 83 5 Sacrificial Ordination 116 6 Shamanic Soundings 142 7 An Amonastic Buddhism 175 8 Ritual Polarities, Mythic Imagination, and History 213 Glossary 237 Bibliography 243 Index 259 Back Matter 267
