This detailed study on the Sunuwar people, one of the many indigenous peoples of Nepal, is based on more than twenty years of ethnographic research. The book starts with an account of the Sunuwar's indigenous notion of culture (mukdum) as expressed in social practice. With reference to specific social fields, a model of the Sunuwar person, mainly used to grasp deviations from the ideal way of life, is analyzed from the perspective of cultural psychology and the anthropology of the senses. The study concludes with an analysis of healing rituals, showing that their effect simultaneously results from the ancestral atmosphere produced by the shaman and a kind of domination-free discussion among the ritual participants mainly taking place in the pauses of the ritual. Thus, the shamanic ritual is interpreted as a kind of mediation. (Series: LIT Studies on Asia / Asien: Forschung und Wissenschaft - Vol. 6) [Subject: Asian Studies, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Psychology, Religious Studies]

This book traces the cultural proximity and the similar destinies of three Kirata communities living in the eastern Himalayas the Limbu, the Rai and the Yakkha. The author reconstructs the story of these communities on the basis of historical as well as ethnographic data and explains their need to reconstruct today an identity for themselves despite the time and cultural resources they have lost.

A discussion of the implications of the emergence of love-letter correspondences for social relations in Nepal

Study of Athpahariya Rais, Nepalese people in Dhankuta District.