Falling Off The Roof Of The World

This is the fascinating autobiography of the Venerable Lama Dudjom Dorjee. In it are entertaining tales of his Tibetan childhood, his escape from Tibet and his subsequent journey into lama-hood.

Vols. for 1911-13 contain the Proceedings of the Helminothological Society of Washington, ISSN 0018-0120, 1st-15th meeting.

A compact, intermediate-level dictionary covering over 90,000 words and phrases, and 120,000 translations ideal for the home, office, or school.

The Vaqueiros de Alzada, a cattle-herding people in the Asturian mountains of Spain, have one of the highest suicide rates in Europe—and an attitude toward death that gives this statistic unusual meaning. This World, Other Worlds considers death among the Vaqueiros as a central cultural fact which reveals local ideas about the origin and destiny of humans, the relations of humans and animals, the configuration of the universe, and the nature of society. Interested chiefly in the conceptual and meaningful aspects of death, María Cátedra focuses on the cultural resources with which the Vaqueiros confront their own mortality—how they experience death and what this reveals about the way they see this world and other worlds. Applying sensitive ethnographic insight to a rich body of oral testimony, Cátedra discloses an unsuspected symbolic universe native to the Vaqueiros. Death is seen here in close, coherent relation to pain, age, and suffering; sickness and suicide, one must understand the cultural valuation of different ways of dying and the conditions under which suicides take place. To understand what it means to be a Vaqueiro is to understand how suicide can be perceived by a people as acceptable. A groundbreaking work in European ethnography, This World, Other Worlds takes symbolic analysis to a new level. In its illumination of local conceptions of death, grace, and sainthood, the book also makes a substantial contribution to the anthropology of religion.

Capturing the essence of life in great civilizations of the past, each volume in the

Anthropologist and filmmaker Chapman (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris) describes the distinctive tales and beliefs of a native people who have maintained their traditional life in the tropical forests of central Honduras, as related by one member. Accessible to general readers. Translated from Enfants de la Mort (1978). Paper edition (unseen), $17. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Book by Karen Lindsey.