Description

Description from Directory of Open Access Books

Whispering winds, speeding trains, wandering balloons, and swirling snowflakes—these are the living entities that humans find themselves enmeshed with in their ecological co-flourishing in contemporary East Asian cinema. Pao-chen Tang theorizes and analyzes this animist imagination—a new mode of filmmaking that delves into both the definition of the cinematic medium and how to live with the nonhuman. Moving images are animate beings and the animism of cinema further compels an eye-opening vision to examine East Asian history and ecological anxieties of our times. The shamanic protagonists of the animist imagination transform the worldly and medial figurations onscreen into thought experiments on human-nonhuman relationality, modelling for the viewers anti-anthropocentric forms of existence and action. The book distills this form of agency through a systematic analysis of narrative structures, stylistic devices, and cultural implications in a stunning demonstration of a world viewed and enacted otherwise.

Provenance

Why this book is in the catalog

Included because retained bibliographic metadata links this work to Afterlife, reincarnation, and near-death experiences, Consciousness, mysticism, and metaphysics, Occultism and esotericism, Ritual magic and grimoires, and Shamanism and spirit practice.

Occultism and esotericism
Retained metadata contains “occult” in the subject metadata.
- “occult”· in subject
Ritual magic and grimoires
Retained metadata contains “Magic” in the subject metadata.
- “Magic”· in subject
Afterlife, reincarnation, and near-death experiences
Controlled discovery queries from doab and oapen matched “reincarnation”. Retained metadata contains “afterlife” in the subject metadata and “Reincarnation” in the subject metadata.
- “reincarnation”· via Directory of Open Access Books
- “reincarnation”· via OAPEN Library
- “afterlife”· in subject
- “Reincarnation”· in subject
Shamanism and spirit practice
Controlled discovery queries from doab and oapen matched “shamanism”. Retained metadata contains “Shamanism” in the subject metadata.
- “shamanism”· via Directory of Open Access Books
- “shamanism”· via OAPEN Library
- “Shamanism”· in subject
Consciousness, mysticism, and metaphysics
Retained metadata contains “Mysticism” in the subject metadata.
- “Mysticism”· in subject

Membership records how this book met the catalog’s discovery criteria — relevance to a tradition, not a judgment of the book’s claims.

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Open-access license: CC-BY-NC-ND

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Editions

One edition cataloged here.

Edition	Date	Publisher	Language	ISBN	Access	Links
Directory of Open Access Books edition 246; Amsterdam	2025	Amsterdam University Press	English	9789048564002 9789048571840	Open access	Directory of Open Access Books (opens in a new tab) OAPEN Library (opens in a new tab)