Bøker av Ole Bruun

Provides easily accessible information for developers, planners, consultants, scholars, students and others with an interest in contemporary Mongolia. Prefaced by a general overview of the land and society. Chapters, all written by international experts, cover a wide range of topics.

For well over a century, Chinese fengshui, or "geomancy," has interested Western laymen and scholars. Today, hundreds of popular manuals claim to use its principles in their advice on how people can increase their wealth, happiness, longevity, and so on. This study is quite different, approaching fengshui from an academic angle. The focus is on its significance in China, but the recent history of its reinterpretation in the West is also depicted. The author argues that fengshui serves as an alternative tradition of cosmological knowledge, which is used to explain a range of everyday occurrences in rural areas, such as disease, mental disorders, accidents, and common mischief. The study includes a historical account of fengshui over the last 150 years augmented by the results of anthropological fieldwork on contemporary practices in two Chinese rural areas.

Mongols from Country to City examines the process of cultural change in Mongol societies since the early twentieth century by considering: the interaction of the basic structural features of pastoral nomadism in Mongolia with larger economies, both communist and capitalist; the effect of deliberate cultural reconstruction (ranging from changes to the education system to purges and outright cultural destruction) on the conduct of the pastoral economy; and the efforts of Mongols themselves to develop aspects of their own cultural identity under conditions of territorial partition, episodes of intense political repression, and (in the Russian and Chinese regions) very substantial immigration by non-Mongol groups.

Taking a stand for universal rights, both theoretically and empirically, this text analyzes social and political processes in a number of East and Southeast Asian countries.

Ole Bruun focuses on a community of nomadic livestock herders in present-day Mongolia. He depicts their transition from a contained, Soviet-era collective to modern times and addresses the most essential conditions for their continued survival and prosperity in the age of the market: the adaptability of their own culture and working strategies, government policy, and international attention. By studying the nomadic practice of animal husbandry in the context of family farms, Bruun points out the similarity to the peasant economy defined by the Russian agricultural economist Alexander Chayanov nearly a century ago. In both economies, the labor-consumer balance and life-cycle variations commonly set the term for economic strategies, yet the pastoral economy involves a highly specialized form of agriculture in which the scale of exchange determines wealth and lifestyle. In a vast territory such as Mongolia, infrastructure, social benefits, and other means of state support are crucial to prevent herders from sliding into a subsistence orientation, eventually leading to poverty.

Feng Shui has been known in the West for the last 150 years but has mostly been regarded as a primitive superstition. During the modern period successive regimes in China have suppressed its practice. However, in the last few decades Feng Shui has become a global spiritual movement with professional associations, thousands of titles published on the subject, countless websites devoted to it and millions of users. In this book Ole Bruun explains Feng Shui's Chinese origins and meanings as well as its more recent Western interpretations and global appeal. Unlike the abundance of popular manuals, his Introduction treats Chinese Feng Shui as an academic subject, bridging religion, history and sociology. Individual chapters explain the Chinese religious-philosophical background, Chinese uses in rural and urban areas, the history of Feng Shui's reinterpretation in the West, and environmental perspectives and other issues.