This edited collection offers a comprehensive overview of the different aspects of human-animal interactions in Asia throughout history. With twelve thematically-arranged chapters, this book examines the diverse roles that beasts, livestock, and fish — real and metaphorical– have played in Asian history, society, and culture. Ranging from prehistory to the present day, the authors address a wealth of topics including the domestication of animals, dietary practices and sacrifice, hunting, the use of animals in war, and the representation of animals in literature and art. Providing a unique perspective on human interaction with the environment, the volume is cross-disciplinary in its reach, offering enriching insights to the fields of animal ethics, Asian studies, world history and more.

This book examines the theme of human–animal interactions contextualized against the idea of the Anthropocene. Focused on China and its immediate Asian borderlands, this interdisciplinary collection provides a powerful and insightful analysis of the ecological challenges that mankind’s traditional activities have created. Through in-depth case studies, each focusing on a particular human–animal dynamic, the book contextualizes and advances the understanding of existing environmental and ecological problems faced by local communities in Asia. In particular, the book hopes to transcend the duality of the nature versus culture debate by locating animal-ecological problems in the behavior of human institutions, beliefs, and practices, which are often affected by prevailing cultural proclivities, political ideologies, economic interests, and scientific agendas. Through interrogation of theoretical concepts of Anthropocene and human–animal binary, the volume highlights the controversial debates that follow their usage as well as their empirical utility understanding human– animal interactions historically, thereby engaging a broader interdisciplinary conversation increasingly links these two fields together. Providing a platform for discussion and dialogue for a wide audience, this book will appeal to students and scholars of environmental history and politics, anthropology, political science and policy studies, China studies, and Asian studies more generally.

The Roman foundation myth has been the subject of classical scholarship for centuries. But much in the story of Romulus and Remus remains unexplained. This is the first English language book-length study of the Lupercalia, a religious festival central to understanding both the Roman foundation myth and the history of Rome. The festival of the Lupercalia was a male initiation ritual and shares a number of traits with similar rituals across the world. The agonistic elements in the story of Romulus and Remus and the Lupercalia can be compared to a number of Vedic rituals and traced back to a common Indo-European prehistory. The Lupercalia celebration remained a central annual event throughout the history of Rome and reflected political and social life in the city. Caesar used it to stage a refusal of kingship and Augustus restored its initiatory aspect, which continued in the period of the Empire. It survived all attempts of Christian prohibition to appear in the form of a carnival that criticized the pope in the late 5th century. In sum, the book offers a new interpretation of the Roman foundation myth and the Lupercalia. It follows the transformation of a unique ritual from its Indo-European roots through Roman history to late antiquity.

A book like no other in the field of veterinary medicine with pertinent information every student and practitioner will find beneficial. Veterinaries have access to a great variety of texts, journals, and continuing education opportunities to keep them on top of the tremendous technological advances in clinical care and preventive medicine. Outside of the technical realm, however, there are many global trends, which exert profound effects on how the veterinary profession serves society and how veterinary professionals define their role in a rapidly changing world. This new and unrivaled book delves into these influences in impressive detail, identifying new challenges and opportunities for the veterinary profession in a global context. Unique topics covered include: The important global trends with implications for veterinary medicine. Different cultural attitudes towards the human use of animals, their impact on the human-animal relationship, and the challenges this poses for veterinarians. The role of livestock in food security, rural development, and sustainable agriculture and the opportunities for veterinarians to improve the lives of people who depend on animals around the world. The relationship of global environmental change to animal health and production. The emerging field of conservation medicine and the important role of veterinarians in protecting biodiversity and conserving wildlife. A global perspective on veterinary service delivery and the opportunities and challenges for improving animal health care worldwide. The growth of international trade, its relation to food safety and animal health, and its impact on animal agricultural and veterinary medicine. The growing risk of foreign animal disease, the national and international institutions involved in animal disease control, and the role of the private practitioner in controlling foreign animal disease. Nontraditional career paths for veterinarians interested in working internationally and how to identify and prepare for such international career opportunities.

To date, philosophical discussions of animal ethics and Critical Animal Studies have been dominated by Western perspectives and Western thinkers. This book makes a novel contribution to animal ethics in showing the range and richness of ideas offered to these fields by diverse Asian traditions. Asian Perspectives on Animal Ethics is the first of its kind to include the intersection of Asian and European traditions with respect to human and nonhuman relations. Presenting a series of studies focusing on specific Asian traditions, as well as studies that put those traditions in dialogue with Western thinkers, this book looks at Asian philosophical doctrines concerning compassion and nonviolence as these apply to nonhuman animals, as well as the moral rights and status of nonhuman animals in Asian traditions. Using Asian perspectives to explore ontological, ethical and political questions, contributors analyze humanism and post-humanism in Asian and comparative traditions and offer insight into the special ethical relations between humans and other particular species of animals. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian religion and philosophy, as well as to those interested in animal ethics and Critical Animal Studies.

Analyzes Asian perspectives on human rights in terms of cultural traditions, grassroots and regional organizations, and economic constraints on the expression of rights. The book asks: are human rights western in their inception, are they universal or do they differ by region and culture.

Asia will redraw the map of economic progress over the next twenty-five years. Growth is necessary to solve economic and social problems, but harder to achieve as the age of plenty gives way to the age of scarcities. The challenge opens the doors for an Asian economic model based on shifting of productivity for the individual to groups, ecological productivity instead of economic productivity, and a reversal to traditional Asian values - less materialistic than Western values. A new paradigm for economic thinking emerges to replace the one launched in the West 200 years ago.

This volume studies the reception of the works of the acclaimed post-colonial philosopher Michel Foucault by South Asian scholars.

Explores the ways in which the character of tribal societies relate to the Malay kingdoms that have held power in the region for many centuries past, as well as to the modern nation-states of the region. It brings together researchers committed to comparative analysis of the tribal groups living on either side of the Malacca Straits.

Frank Palmeri sees the conjectural histories of Rousseau, Hume, Herder, and other Enlightenment philosophers as a template for the development of the social sciences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without documents or memorials, these thinkers, he argues, employed conjecture to formulate a naturalistic account of society's commercial and secular progression. Palmeri finds evidence of speculative frameworks in the political economy of Malthus, Martineau, Mill, and Marx. He traces the influence of speculative thought in the development of anthropology and ethnography in the 1860s, the foundational sociology of Comte and Spencer, and the sociology of religion pioneered by Weber, Durkheim, and Freud. Conjectural histories reveal a surprising ambivalence toward progress, modernity, and secularization among leading thinkers of the time, an attitude that affected texts as varied as Darwin's Descent of Man, Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality, and the novels of Walter Scott, George Eliot, and H.G. Wells. Establishing the critical value of conjectural thinking in the study of modern forms of knowledge, Palmeri concludes his investigation with its return in the work of Foucault and in recent histories on early religion, political organization, and material life.