tribaltextiles.info

Dear all,

with our friends Jamie Saul and Mark Johnson already logged on to this forum we wanted to also join and let people know about our humble efforts of documenting the cultures of Northeast India. So far we have written two books on the area - "The Seven Sisters of India - Tribal Worlds between Tibet and Burma" (Prestel 2000) and "The Hidden World of the Naga - Living Traditions in Northeast India and Burma" (Prestel July 2003).

For details please check out our website:

http://www.stirn-vanham.com

At the moment we are engaged with various European museums to get exhibitions of their never-seen-before collections off the ground and have just returned from Arunachal Pradesh where we were state guests and were granted access to ALL regions of this amazing country. The aim is to produce another book about Arunachal Pradesh within the next year.

We are happy about any queries and questions, should you have some.

Best regards

Peter van Ham and Aglaja Stirn

Peter,

Welcome as an active member of our forum from day one! As you will have found from the Books section of this forum you already have fans here and your books are on our bookshelves; are getting very positive recommendations and are listed on the tribaltextiles.info bibliographies section.

We look forward to your contributions on the various threads that appear and to being kept abreast of your work. It may be helpful if you keep the book-related info on that forum; the museum, website, exhibition info on that forum; specifically travel details on that one; and more general topics on this 'General' forum. You will find as you use the forum regularly that any new posts on any forum show up as new in bright orange flags as soon as you log in so it is not necessary to repeat the same message on all the forums. (Ask your computer to remember you when you first log in as a member and you will find that it knows what you have seen automatically and what is new to you as well as saving you having to log in again. You can do this on several computers at once and it still keeps track of what you have seen! )

Again, welcome to the forum and we look forward to keeping abreast of your activities and benefitting from your experience.

_________________
Pamela

http://www.tribaltextiles.info
on-line tribal textiles resource

Hi Peter,

The main focus of my collection is textiles from the Tai world. However, my husband Christopher Court is a linguist specialising in Tai languages and
Malay. One of his former students from Australia, Stephen Morrey, has been working with some Tai groups in Northeast India.

Do you have any information on the Pake, Aton, and Ahom (the Ahom no longer speak a Tai language, but the other minority groups have interest in returning to their roots)?

No big deal. Just let us know whats going on.

You can reach my husband at:

cafcourt@aol.com

Best wishes,

Sandie Shamis

Dear Sandra, dear Chris,

I'm afraid I can't help out with this one. We have been mostly concerned with the highlanders than the dwellers of the Assam plateau, although travelling there this year we been quite astonished by the Miri inhabiting the banks of the Brahmaputra - but theirs is a Tibeto-Burmese dialect not related to the Tai-languages, as far as I know...

Sorry

Peter

Hi Peter,

UCBerkeley is the heimat of all things Sino-tibetan. The STEDT (Sino-tibetan etomylogical dictionary project) has been going on now for over 10 years. Martine Mazaudon and her husband Boyd Michaelowski work on Tibeto-Burman in Nepal and surroundings, and are researchers at CNRS in Paris. Perhaps you've run into them.

My own area is psycho-linguistics, with emphasis on child psychosis. However, should you or anyone else come across a word-list or anything else regarding minority languages of India, send it on! Either Chris will check it out or we'll pass it on to Prof. James Matisoff, recently retired, but still the GREATEST! C's dissertation was a grammar of Mien (also known as Yao).

Needless to say, if you come across strange child rearing practices, or child and adult culture-bound syndromes, I would be glad to help analyse them for you. It's a great pleasure to have you on the forum.

Best wishes,
Sandie