Other Worldly

Traditional Chinese medicine is often portrayed as an enduring system of therapeutic knowledge that has become globalized in recent decades. In Other-Worldly, Mei Zhan argues that the discourses and practices called “traditional Chinese medicine” are made through, rather than prior to, translocal encounters and entanglements. Zhan spent a decade following practitioners, teachers, and advocates of Chinese medicine through clinics, hospitals, schools, and grassroots organizations in Shanghai and the San Francisco Bay Area. Drawing on that ethnographic research, she demonstrates that the everyday practice of Chinese medicine is about much more than writing herbal prescriptions and inserting acupuncture needles. “Traditional Chinese medicine” is also made and remade through efforts to create a preventive medicine for the “proletariat world,” reinvent it for cosmopolitan middle-class aspirations, produce clinical “miracles,” translate knowledge and authority, and negotiate marketing strategies and medical ethics. Whether discussing the presentation of Chinese medicine at a health fair sponsored by a Silicon Valley corporation, or how the inclusion of a traditional Chinese medicine clinic authenticates the “California” appeal of an upscale residential neighborhood in Shanghai, Zhan emphasizes that unexpected encounters and interactions are not anomalies in the structure of Chinese medicine. Instead, they are constitutive of its irreducibly complex and open-ended worlds. Zhan proposes an ethnography of “worlding” as an analytic for engaging and illuminating emergent cultural processes such as those she describes. Rather than taking “cultural difference” as the starting point for anthropological inquiries, this analytic reveals how various terms of difference—for example, “traditional,” “Chinese,” and “medicine”—are invented, negotiated, and deployed translocally. Other-Worldly is a theoretically innovative and ethnographically rich account of the worlding of Chinese medicine.

Buddhist Nuns, Monks, and Other Worldly Matters: Recent Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India is the fourth in a series of collected essays by one of today’s most distinguished scholars of Indian Buddhism. In these articles Gregory Schopen once again displays the erudition and originality that have contributed to a major shift in the way that Indian Buddhism is perceived, understood, and studied.

Discover words to surprise, delight, and enamor. Learn terms for the sunlight that filters through the leaves of trees, for dancing awkwardly but with relish, and for the look shared by two people who each wish the other would speak first. Other-Wordly is an irresistible ebook for lovers of words and those lost for words alike.

From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright brings together elegies written by many of Wright's most important contemporaries, including Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, W.S. Merwin, and C.K Williams. Interspersed with these are poems by a newer generation of writers inspired by Wright. This unique collection attests to the continuing stature of James Wright on the American literary landscape.

"Otherworldly, avant-garde fashion and style. Fashion from another planet. Unwearable, subversive, radically post-human, alien. Otherworldly presents avant-garde garments, styling, fashion photography, and young designers who are a whole galaxy away from the mainstream.Other rules apply to the fashion of the future. New technologies and materials make things possible today that couldnt have even been imagined in the past. High-tech fabrics and melting forms are no longer science fiction but reality. Inspired by the odd, mutant, and deformed, many designers and stylists are now redefining clothing to expand the body and speculate on the evolution of identity, from wearables to the utter transfiguration of the human silhouette. Other worldly showcases a fashion avant-garde between futurism and fetish. Featuring work by emerging talents and established designers such as Alexander McQueen, Martin Margiela, Lucy McRae, Peter Popps, Iris van Herpen, and others, it not only explores groundbreaking developments but also their fruitful interplay with photography"-- Publisher's description.

Elmira Bayrasli’s worldview was turned upside down when a woman in Bosnia told her, “thanks for the help. But we need work and jobs, not foreign aid.” That prompted Bayrasli to embark on a worldwide quest to find how talented people have overcome insurmountable obstacles to build high-growth businesses that are driving wealth and building communities, regions and countries. Through seven remarkable stories, Elmira Bayrasli shows why the next Steve Jobs and the next Apple, Google or Facebook is as likely to come from Nigeria, Pakistan or Mexico as Silicon Valley. She discovers that what distinguishes techies in Silicon Valley from women selling bamboo stools in Bangladesh isn’t their sophistication but simply the conditions that are necessary to sustain and scale business ideas. In the absence of these obstacles, global entrepreneurship can flourish. Bayrasli paints compelling stories of extraordinary entrepreneurs creatively battling corruption, lack of infrastructure, capital shortages and underdeveloped supplier and customer networks. She offers solutions that can be utilized by entrepreneurs everywhere, and shows why micro-finance, social entrepreneurship, and foreign aid are not enough. Most importantly, she shows how the key to building successful entrepreneurial ecosystems is to provide the framework that enables start-ups to scale.

Belief in a spirit world, and a blissful or agonizing afterlife, is one of the most pervasive and deeply-rooted characteristics of religion. This volume offers a wide-ranging exploration of this basic religious theme. Most of the case studies are drawn from Jewish and Christian tradition, providing in-depth coverage of Judaism and Christianity from late Antiquity through the Medieval period. There are also examples from Islamic, Japanese, and Chinese traditions for a comparative perspective with Western traditions. Several chapters deal with the formative period of Jewish and Christian apocalypticism, which is concerned not only with the end of the physical world but also with the eternal heavenly world. These chapters are also important for illustrating the development of mysticism in Western traditions. The most distinctive aspect of this book is that it does not deal with antiquity alone, but juxtaposes the historical essays with a survey of modern day, near-death experiences. It raises issues of fundamental importance for the psychology of religion as well as for its history The most distinctive aspect of this book is that it does not deal with antiquity alone, but juxtaposes the historical essays with a survey of modern day, near-death experiences. It raises issues of fundamental importance for the psychology of religion as well as for its history.

Reminding readers of John Dryden’s persistent use of occult rhetoric, Armistead argues that Dryden’s otherworldliness involves more than Christian apologetics, biblical typology, or intermittent borrowings from the supernatural materials in classical literature. Otherworldly John Dryden engages with a wide range of the writer’s poetry and plays, enhancing our understanding of Dryden’s works and tracing the writer’s attitudes about Providence and the ability of the poet to perceive a hidden design in earthly events.