Yamada, Takako
Description
This volume is compiled from the author's selected works, made on field trips, which she has done since the 1980s from ethnoscientific and cognitive a
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nthropological viewpoints among the Ladakhi in Western Tibet, the Ainu in Hokkaido, and the Sakha-Yakut in Eastern Siberia. She attempts to reformulate the basic significance of animism and shamanism, considering them as a part of comprehensive cognitive system of the phenomenal world including the universe, soul and spirits, and nature. During her first fieldwork among the Ladakhi in 1983-84, she studied their shamanism, medicine and worldview. Learning am-chi medicine (a derivative of Tibetan medicine), the author noticed that shamanism, medicine and Tibetan Buddhism were thoroughly interwoven to form their comprehensive view of the world. This was the very start of her study on animism and shamanism. Further fieldworks were done in 1988, 1989 and 1990. The first part of this book represents the author's field experience among the Ladakhi. From 1984 she gradually became interested in Ainu culture. She was surprised that there had been little systematic or analytic studies of a belief system such as this. The deep structure of the Ainu cognition of the world (i.e. worldview) in which they recognized kamui in nature had not been clarified in previous Ainu studies, although they had been a lot done. Later, in 1994 she had a good opportunity to make a field trip to Yakutia in Eastern Siberia which, for a Japanese, had been a country so distant during the Soviet era. This field trip gave her further insight into issues on animism and shamanism.
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