Dolpo is a culturally Tibetan enclave in one of Nepal's most remote regions. The Dolpo-pa, or people of Dolpo, share language, religious and cultural practices, history, and a way of life. Agro-pastoralists who live in some of the highest villages in the world, the Dolpo-pa wrest survival from this inhospitable landscape through a creative combination of farming, animal husbandry, and trade. High Frontiers is an ethnography and ecological history of Dolpo tracing the dramatic transformations in the region's socioeconomic patterns. Once these traders passed freely between Tibet and Nepal with their caravans of yak to exchange salt and grains; they relied on winter pastures in Tibet to maintain their herds. After 1959, China assumed full control over Tibet and the border was closed, restricting livestock migrations and sharply curtailing trade. At the same time, increasing supplies of Indian salt reduced the value of Tibetan salt, undermining Dolpo's economic niche. Dolpo's agro-pastoralists were forced to reinvent their lives by changing their migration patterns, adopting new economic partnerships, and adapting to external agents of change. The region has been transformed as a result of the creation of Nepal's largest national park, the making of Himalaya, a major motion picture filmed on location, the increasing presence of nongovernmental organizations, and a booming trade in medicinal products. High Frontiers examines these transformations at the local level and speculates on the future of pastoralism in this region and across the Himalayas.

This is an ethnographic and ecological history of Dolpo, a culturally Tibetan region in western Nepal. Bauer describes Dolpo since the 1950s and traces how pastoralists living in the trans-Himalaya have adapted to sweeping changes in their economic, political and cultural circumstances.

"Abbott offers a fruitful new way to read science fiction, one that also greatly enriches our understanding of western history and its impact on our collective imagination. Detailing the overlap of science fiction and western fiction - especially relating to their mutual interest in and concerns about frontier expansionism - he reveals an unsuspected common ground that informs the writings of both camps." "Reviewing the work of many Hugo and Nebula Award winners, as well as drawing upon popular film and television series (like the Buck Rogers serials), Abbott's study journeys across the far reaches of science fiction's universe."

From the concert stage to the dressing room, from the recording studio to the digital realm, SPIN surveys the modern musical landscape and the culture around it with authoritative reporting, provocative interviews, and a discerning critical ear. With dynamic photography, bold graphic design, and informed irreverence, the pages of SPIN pulsate with the energy of today's most innovative sounds. Whether covering what's new or what's next, SPIN is your monthly VIP pass to all that rocks.

Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America uncovers a hidden history of the biggest psychedelic distribution and belief system the world has ever known. Through a collection of fast-paced interlocking narratives, it animates the tale of an alternate America and its wide-eyed citizens: the LSD-slinging graffiti writers of Central Park, the Dead-loving AI scientists of Stanford, utopian Whole Earth homesteaders, black market chemists, government-wanted Anonymous hackers, rogue explorers, East Village bluegrass pickers, spiritual seekers, Internet pioneers, entrepreneurs, pranksters, pioneering DJs, and a nation of Deadheads. WFMU DJ and veteran music writer Jesse Jarnow draws on extensive new firsthand accounts from many never-before-interviewed subjects and a wealth of deep archival research to create a comic-book-colored and panoramic American landscape, taking readers for a guided tour of the hippie highway filled with lit-up explorers, peak trips, big busts, and scenic vistas, from Vermont to the Pacific Northwest, from the old world head capitals of San Francisco and New York to the geodesic dome-dotted valleys of Colorado and New Mexico. And with the psychedelic research moving into the mainstream for the first time in decades, Heads also recounts the story of the quiet entheogenic revolution that for years has been brewing resiliently in the Dead's Technicolor shadow. Featuring over four dozen images, many never before seen-including pop artist Keith Haring's first publicly sold work-Heads weaves one of the 20th and 21st centuries' most misunderstood subcultures into the fabric of the nation's history. Written for anyone who wondered what happened to the heads after the Acid Tests, through the '70s, during the Drug War, and on to the psychedelic present, Heads collects the essential history of how LSD, Deadheads, tie-dye, and the occasional bad trip have become familiar features of the American experience.

Religions of Modernity challenges the social-scientific orthodoxy that, once unleashed, the modern forces of individualism, science and technology inevitably erode the sacred and evoke the profane. The book's chapters, some by established scholars, others by junior researchers, document instead in rich empirical detail how modernity relocates the sacred to the deeper layers of the self and the domain of digital technology. Rather than destroying the sacred tout court, then, the cultural logic of modernization spawns its own religious meanings, unacknowledged spiritualities and magical enchantments. The editors argue in the introductory chapter that the classical theoretical accounts of modernity by Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and others already hinted at the future emergence of these religions of modernity

The essays and memoirs collected in Seek! trace Rudy Rucker's trajectory through the final decade of the second millennium. His topics include artificial life, chaos, the big bang, Pieter Brueghel, the church of the subgenius, live sex, mathematics, science fiction, and TV evangelism. A computer scientist and programmer, Rucker is an articulate, engaging guide to the world on either side of the computer screen.

During the last twenty years, digital technology has begun to touch on almost every aspect of our lives. Nowadays most forms of mass media, television, recorded music and film are produced and even distributed digitally; and these media are beginning to converge with digital forms, such as the internet, the World Wide Web, and video games, to produce a seamless digital mediascape. At work we are surrounded by technology, whether in offices or in supermarkets and factories, where almost every aspect of planning, design, marketing, production and distribution is monitored or controlled digitally. In Digital Culture Charlie Gere articulates the degree to which our everyday lives are becoming dominated by digital technology, whether in terms of leisure, work or bureaucracy. This dominance is reflected in other areas, including the worlds of finance, technology, scientific research, media and telecommunications. Out of this situation a particular set of cultural responses has emerged, for example, in art, music, design, film, literature and elsewhere. This book offers a new perspective on digital culture by examining its development, and reveals that, despite appearances, it is neither radically new, nor ultimately technologically driven. The author traces its roots to the late 18th century, and shows how it sprang from a number of impulses, including the information needs of industrial capitalism and contemporary warfare, avant-garde artistic practice, counter-cultural experimentation, radical philosophy and sub-cultural style. It is these conditions that produced both digital technology and digital culture, and which have determined how they develop.

The Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia is the first comprehensive and critical overview of the ethnographic and anthropological work in Highland Asia over the past half a century. Opening up a grand new space for critical engagement, the handbook presents Highland Asia as a world-region that cuts across the traditional divides inherited from colonial and Cold War area divisions - the Indian Subcontinent/South Asia, Southeast Asia, China/East Asia, and Central Asia. Thirty-two chapters assess the history of research, identify ethnographic trends, and evaluate a range of analytical themes that developed in particular settings of Highland Asia. They cover varied landscapes and communities, from Kyrgyzstan to India, from Bhutan to Vietnam and bring local voices and narratives relating trade and tribute, ritual and resistance, pilgrimage and prophecy, modernity and marginalization, capital and cosmos to the fore. The handbook shows that for millennia, Highland Asians have connected far-flung regions through movements of peoples, goods and ideas, and at all times have been the enactors, repositories, and mediators of world-historical processes. Taken together, the contributors and chapters subvert dominant lowland narratives by privileging primarily highland vantages that reveal Highland Asia as an ecumune and prism that refracts and generates global history, social theory, and human imagination. In the currently unfolding Asian Century, this compels us to reorient and re-envision Highland Asia, in ethnography, in theory, and in the connections between this world-region, made of hills, highlands and mountains, and a planetary context. The handbook reveals both regional commonalities and diversities, generalities and specificities, and a broad orientation to key themes in the region. An indispensable reference work, this handbook fills a significant gap in the literature and will be of interest to academics, researchers and students interested in Highland Asia, Zomia Studies, Anthropology, Comparative Politics, Conceptual History and Sociology, Southeast Asian Studies, Central Asian Studies and South Asian Studies as well as Asian Studies in general.