Search results for ""author piers vitebsky""

Just one generation ago, the Sora tribe in India lived in a world populated by the spirits of their dead, who spoke to them through shamans in trance. Every day, they negotiated their wellbeing in heated arguments or in quiet reflections on their feelings of love, anger, and guilt. Today, young Sora are rejecting the worldview of their ancestors and switching their allegiance to warring sects of fundamentalist Christianity or Hinduism. Communion with ancestors is banned as sacred sites are demolished, female shamans are replaced by male priests, and debate with the dead gives way to prayer to gods. For some, this shift means liberation from jungle spirits through literacy, employment, and democratic politics; others despair for fear of being forgotten after death. How can a society abandon one understanding of reality so suddenly and see the world in a totally different way? Over forty years, anthropologist Piers Vitebsky has shared the lives of shamans, pastors, ancestors, gods, policemen, missionaries, and alphabet worshippers, seeking explanations from social theory, psychoanalysis, and theology. Living without the Dead lays bare today’s crisis of indigenous religions and shows how historical reform can bring new fulfillments—but also new torments and uncertainties. Vitebsky explores the loss of the Sora tradition as one for greater humanity: just as we have been losing our wildernesses, so we have been losing a diverse range of cultural and spiritual possibilities, tribe by tribe. From the award-winning author of The Reindeer People, this is a heartbreaking story of cultural change and the extinction of an irreplaceable world, even while new religious forms come into being to take its place.

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A career-to-date retrospective of a unique creative talent. Hyperborea presents unforgettable visual tales of life in the Siberian Arctic that photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva knew when she was growing up in Tiksi, a town on the shore of the Laptev Sea in the Republic of Yakutia. Her work discloses both the fragility and beautiful desolation of the land and those who inhabit it, and her rigorously composed photographs glow with rich otherworldly colour, bristle with the raw vibrancy of the climate and exhibit the quiet intensity of lives borne out in seclusion and extremes. This beautifully produced photobook contains a decade of work, with photographs selected from across the full range of Arbugaeva’s series and extensive travels across the Russian Arctic coast and to connect with people living in these remote and inhospitable places. The photographs that she brings back from her long-term visits convey a world where everything seems connected: humans and nature, the sky and the land. An elemental space of deep solitude and slower pace of life. Her images invite us to contemplate a territory that has been a place of longing and imagination for many, which is now under existential threat from a multitude of environmental changes. With an introduction by Piers Vitebsky, four texts by Arbugaeva to supplement the images, and a specially commissioned map to provide a sense of where Arbugaeva’s work is located, Hyperborea is a future collectible for all photobook fans and an introduction to a global audience of a very special talent in the world of photography.

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