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The paper examines Amdo Tibetan narratives of mountain gods and local spirits, analyzing their ritual, symbolic and socio-cultural functions within the oral tradition of the region.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the narratives and ritual contexts of mountain deities and local spirits in the Amdo region of Eastern Tibet, focusing on their significance in shaping communal identity and cultural memory. Mountain deities and local spirits, such as yul lha or gzhi bdag have long been central figures in the cosmological landscape of Amdo, serving not only as protectors of specific communities and natural sites, but also as agents mediating between humans and the environment. Through oral narratives, folk songs, and ritual texts, their stories preserve layers of myth, history, and social order. Drawing on both textual sources and fieldwork-based oral accounts, the study highlights how these narratives function within daily life and seasonal rituals. This paper seeks to examine select examples of mountain gods and spirits, manifested in the form of mountains, as they are depicted in Tibetan folk songs and folk tales. The mountain cult, which has been present in Tibet since pre-Buddhist times, constitutes a central element in several Tibetan folklore texts. As a key component of the Tibetan symbolic system, the veneration of mountain deities holds an essential and irreplaceable role in the preservation of Tibetan cultural identity.

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This presentation examines the story of Myanglung, the stone cat, a Limbu myth, through ecocritical frameworks, showing how it interweaves nature, environment, and the supernatural. Passed down orally, it highlights human–nonhuman relations and ecological–cultural interdependence.

Paper long abstract

Nepal’s oral traditions preserve rich narratives of myth, magic, and fantasy that shape cultural, spiritual, and environmental consciousness. Passed down through generations, these narratives serve as living repositories of indigenous knowledge, moral values, ecological and cultural understanding. Among them, the story of the stone cat, called Myanglung in the Limbu language, holds special significance. Limbu is one of Nepal’s indigenous communities. This myth not only entertains but also educates, reflecting deep connections between the human and supernatural worlds and illustrating how communities understand and negotiate their environment through narrative. Set in a time before roads were built, when transportation in the hill regions was scarce, the tale recounts the journey of three porters who encountered Myanglung, along their path. Over time, the nearby village came to be called Myanglung in eastern Nepal, where a statue of the cat still stands today as a living reminder of the myth. Through its blend of cultural norms and spiritual forces, the story exemplifies the inseparability of natural and supernatural realms and demonstrates how oral traditions weave together environment, culture, and belief. This presentation examines Myanglung through ecocritical frameworks, exploring how it interweaves nature, environment, and the supernatural while highlighting human–nonhuman relations and ecological ethics in indigenous storytelling. As a living myth, Myanglung continues to resonate with contemporary concerns such as environmental stewardship, cultural values, and communal vitality, demonstrating the enduring power of oral traditions in shaping human–environment–spirit relations and offering insights into the ecological and cultural relevance of myth today.

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The lords of the earth and water, take one of the central places in Mongolian mythology and vernacular beliefs. The presentation looks at the earlier and contemporary forms of these beliefs, their authority and manifestations.

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The lords of the earth and water, take one of the central places in mythology and vernacular beliefs of Mongolian peoples. Their ’presence’ can be traced from the early medieval times till nowadays. Gazaryn usny ezen (Mong.) or lus savdag (adopted from Tib.) – ambivalent and powerful, deviny and demonic entities, that represent the nature and landscape and are involved in diverse relations with humans. These relations are embodied in Mongolian emic concept nutag - the local unity of the land, spirits and humans - and characterise by mutual principals of responsibility and connectivity.

The beliefs about lords of the earth and water are reflected in various forms, historical sources, official documents, folk narratives, discursive, social and ritual practices. These supernatural entities and relations with them were involved in the customary and official regulations, relations between different ethnic groups and states, clans and social agents, local communities and outsiders, individual and collective behavioural models, traditions and rituals.

The lords of the earth and water are still very important and active actors nowadays, involved in various realms of Mongolian society and Mongolian communities, concerning local and global issues, national, cultural, religious, ecological, economic, social and (geo)political concerns.

This paper analyses the main features, functions and transformations of the gazaryn usny ezen in Mongolian traditional beliefs and contemporary practices.

The research is based on archive materials, fieldwork and media data.

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This paper will examines how attention to storyworlds can help tradition bearers and interested culture brokers to better support the sustainability of endangered cultures through an attention to the links between narratives, storyworlds, and natural environments..

Paper long abstract

The borders between the Tibetan story world and the natural world is porous. It is inhabited by a human, more than human, and more than natural beings with whom Tibetans interact on a daily basis. Understandings of this world and knowledge of it are passed down through narrative and ritual. But what happens to the storyworld when Tibetan language and Tibetan narratives fall silent? What happens when Tibetans move away from the land? This is a key concern that has been expressed to me in recent trips to Tibetan communities in Western China’s Qinghai Province?

Reflecting on over 16 years conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Tibetan communities of China, this paper will first examine Tibetan narratives of the (story)world across a range of formal and informal narrative genres including epic, proverbs, and personal experience narrative. Next, I examine Tibetan concerns over the loss of these stories and of environmental knowledge. Finally, I examine how findings from this research can help to give new thoughts about how attention to storyworlds can help tradition bearers and interested culture brokers to better support the sustainability of endangered cultures.

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This paper focuses on the world of storytelling of the shamanic practitioners among the Han Chinese in northeast China, exploring the agencies of the multidimensional nature and animal spirits in the belief narratives of historicization and mythologization.

Paper long abstract

Historicization in Chinese folk religions is a common process where the sanctified past lends authority to the present. In shamanic beliefs, historicization and mythologization are often intermingled and even identical to each other, as the historical and supernatural significations together form the sacred past, which derives the capacity of order and maintenance to the shamanic ritual practitioners. Nevertheless, the natural environment and landscapes, whether actual or imagined, are tightly embedded in the storytelling world of the northeast Chinese shamanic beliefs, serving as markers of locality and sites of the narrative of historicization and mythologization. The natural environment and landscapes depicted in these narratives are residing on several dimensions at the same time, embodying geographical sites, shamanic tradition, and cultural vernacularity.

This paper focuses on the belief narratives of the shamanic practitioners among the Han Chinese in northeast China. They worship animal spirits such as foxes, Siberian weasels, and snakes, channeling between spirits and human beings for the sake of divination and healing. In their storytelling world, nature is not only a prominent occasion where animal spirits act and interact but also very often constitutes entangled agencies mutually with the spirits. By exploring the agencies of nature in the belief narratives of historicization and mythologization, we can better understand the shaman’s perception of reality and imagination, past and present, and belief and disbelief.

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As examples of “myth-ways” and the “now-ness of myth,” Aku Wuwu invokes the “palmate ones,” and other creatures with defining features, from myth-epics of the Yi ethnic group, suggesting existential anxieties over cultural sustainability and evolving conceptions of ethnicity in China today.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary Chinese ethnic minority poet Aku Wuwu utilizes nature imagery drawn from the “story worlds” of traditional oral and oral-connected narratives in his poetic works. Recent poems invoke imagery of the “palmate ones” and other creatures with defining features that relate to traditional origin myth-epics of the Yi ethnic group and suggest existential anxieties, including cultural sustainability and evolving conceptions of ethnicity in China today. The poems, written in Northern Yi dialect (Nuosu) and meant to be orally performed, draw heavily on the Book of Origins of the Nuosu Yi, a key ritual narrative still strongly present in the local culture. This paper explores Aku’s intentional use traditional imagery that includes environmental (climactic and biospheric), eco-genealogical, interspecies relations and hybridity, and supernatural/mythical content in these poems, other of his contemporary poems, and related digital media. In particular, are passages of the epic about the creation of the “Twelve Snow Tribes,” of which five of the creatures “with blood” exhibit appendages (hands, paws, wings, etc.) that figure in traditional nature taxonomies, are invoked. The poems exemplify what Yoonhee Hong of Yonsei University calls the “now-ness” of traditional myths in contemporary mediums (2024). The paper further explores how the story worlds of myth-epics and folk narrative, with their rich environmental and folk cultural content, have imprinted ethnic poetry and other expressive mediums or “myth-ways” in Southwest China and adjacent borderlands today (Bender 2017).

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This paper examines the evolving iconography of the Queen Mother of the West’s (Xi Wangmu) three blue birds, from their origin in the Classic of Mountains and Seas to later traditions, tracing how human imagination and views of divine animals shaped their visual representation across history.

Paper long abstract

In the ancient Chinese text Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shan Hai Jing), three blue birds (san qingniao) appear as companion animals who bring food to the goddess Queen Mother of the West (Xi Wangmu). Over the centuries, these birds developed into rich cultural symbols. In classical poetry and fiction, they came to embody the arrival of spring, function as envoys of the immortal realm, and serve as messengers of love. Beyond literature, the blue birds were visualized in diverse artistic media—such as Han dynasty pictorial stones, traditional paintings, and woodblock prints—each rendering them with distinct stylistic and symbolic nuances. Their imagery did not remain confined to antiquity: across later dynasties, they were continually reinterpreted in both elite and popular art forms, shaping perceptions of divine intermediaries. Even today, the motif persists in East Asian art, publishing, and mass media, where it is reimagined in contemporary contexts and visual languages.

This paper examines the historical evolution of Queen Mother of the West and her three blue birds as a recurring iconographic theme. By tracing their transformations across text and image, it explores how human imagination has conceived of the divine companion animal—not only as mythological attendant but also as a symbolic mediator between the mortal and the transcendent realms.