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Author : Justin McDaniel,Lynn Ransom
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2015-11-03
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN : 9780812247367
Distributed for the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.
Author : Edward Shaughnessy
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 499 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2019-11-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9781501517105
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of documents of all sorts have been unearthed in China, opening whole new fields of study and transforming our modern understanding of ancient China. While these discoveries have necessarily taken place in China, Western scholars have also contributed to the study of these documents throughout this entire period. This book provides a comprehensive survey of the contributions of these Western scholars to the field of Chinese paleography, and especially to study of oracle-bone inscriptions, bronze and stone inscriptions, and manuscripts written on bamboo and silk. Each of these topics is provided with a comprehensive narrative history of studies by Western scholars, as well as an exhaustive bibliography and biographies of important scholars in the field. It is also supplied with a list of Chinese translations of these studies, as well as a complete index of authors and their works. Whether the reader is interested in the history of ancient China, ancient Chinese paleographic documents, or just in the history of the study of China as it has developed in the West, this book provides one of the most complete accounts available to date.
Author : Susan Whitfield
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 376 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2018-03-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9780520957664
Following her bestselling Life Along the Silk Road, Susan Whitfield widens her exploration of the great cultural highway with a new captivating portrait focusing on material things. Silk, Slaves, and Stupas tells the stories of ten very different objects, considering their interaction with the peoples and cultures of the Silk Road—those who made them, carried them, received them, used them, sold them, worshipped them, and, in more recent times, bought them, conserved them, and curated them. From a delicate pair of earrings from a steppe tomb to a massive stupa deep in Central Asia, a hoard of Kushan coins stored in an Ethiopian monastery to a Hellenistic glass bowl from a southern Chinese tomb, and a fragment of Byzantine silk wrapping the bones of a French saint to a Bactrian ewer depicting episodes from the Trojan War, these objects show us something of the cultural diversity and interaction along these trading routes of Afro-Eurasia. Exploring the labor, tools, materials, and rituals behind these various objects, Whitfield infuses her narrative with delightful details as the objects journey through time, space, and meaning. Silk, Slaves, and Stupas is a lively, visual, and tangible way to understand the Silk Road and the cultural, economic, and technical changes of the late antique and medieval worlds.
Author : San San May,Jana Igunma
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2018-05-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780295744490
Buddhist temples in Southeast Asia are centers for the preservation of local artistic traditions. Chief among these are manuscripts, a vital source for our understanding of Buddhist ideas and practices in the region. They are also a beautiful art form, too little understood in the West. The British Library has one of the richest collections of Southeast Asian manuscripts, principally from Thailand and Burma, anywhere in the world. It includes finely painted copies of Buddhist scriptures, literary works, historical narratives, and works on traditional medicine, law, cosmology, and fortune-telling. Buddhism Illuminated includes over one hundred examples of Buddhist art from the Library’s collection, relating each manuscript to Theravada tradition and beliefs, and introducing the historical, artistic, and religious contexts of their production. It is the first book in English to showcase the beauty and variety of Buddhist manuscript art and reproduces many works that have never before been photographed.
Author : Bryan D. Lowe
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2017-03-31
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780824859435
Ritualized Writing takes readers into the fascinating world of Japanese Buddhist manuscript cultures. Using archival sources that have received scant attention in English, primarily documents from an eighth-century Japanese scriptorium and colophons from sutra manuscripts, Bryan D. Lowe uncovers the ways in which the transcription of Buddhist scripture was a highly ritualized endeavor. He takes a ground-level approach by emphasizing the activities and beliefs of a wide range of individuals, including scribes, provincial patrons, and royals, to reassess the meaning of scripture and reevaluate scholarly narratives of Japanese Buddhist history. Copying scripture is a central Buddhist practice and one that thrived in East Asia. Despite this, there are no other books dedicated to the topic. This work demonstrates that patrons and scribes treated sutras differently from other modes of writing. Scribes purified their bodies prior to transcription. Patrons held dedicatory ceremonies on days of abstinence, when prayers were pronounced and sutras were recited. Transcribing sutras helped scribes and patrons alike realize this- and other-worldly ambitions and cultivate themselves in accord with Buddhist norms. Sutra copying thus functioned as a form of ritualized writing, a strategic practice that set apart scripture as uniquely efficacious and venerable. Lowe employs this notion of ritualized writing to challenge historical narratives about ancient Japan (late seventh through early ninth centuries), a period when sutra copying flourished. He contends that Buddhist practice fulfilled a variety of social, political, and spiritual roles beyond ideological justification. Moreover, he demonstrates the inadequacy of state-folk dichotomies for understanding the social groups, institutions, and individual beliefs and practices of ancient Japanese Buddhism, highlighting instead common organizations across social class and using models that reveal shared concerns among believers from diverse social backgrounds. Ritualized Writing makes broader contributions to the study of ritual and scripture by introducing the notion of scriptural cultures, an analytic tool that denotes a series of dynamic relationships and practices involving texts that have been strategically set apart or ritualized. Scripture, Lowe concludes, is at once a category created by humans and a body of texts that transforms individuals and social organizations who come into contact with it.
Author : Alexandra Green
Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2018-01-04
Category : Art
ISBN : 9789888390885
Step into a Burmese temple built between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries and you are surrounded by a riot of color and imagery. The majority of the highly detailed wall paintings displays Buddhist biographical narratives, inspiring the devotees to follow the Buddha’s teachings. Alexandra Green goes one step further to consider the temples and their contents as a whole, arguing that the wall paintings mediate the relationship between the architecture and the main Buddha statues in the temples. This forges a unified space for the devotees to interact with the Buddha and his community, with the aim of transforming the devotees’ current and future lives. These temples were a cohesively articulated and represented Burmese Buddhist world to which the devotees belonged. Green’s visits to more than 160 sites with identifiable subject matter form the basis of this richly illustrated volume, which draws upon art historical, anthropological, and religious studies methodologies to analyze the wall paintings and elucidate the contemporary religious, political, and social concepts that drove the creation of this lively art form. “Buddhist Visual Cultures, Rhetoric, and Narrative in Late Burmese Wall Paintings is truly a tour de force that allows us to see Burmese temple paintings of the Life of the Buddha and similar themes as an open-ended genre that, like literary discourse, participates in wider social, intellectual, and religious contexts.” —Juliane Schober, Arizona State University “Alexandra Green introduces this relatively unknown material and subjects it to sophisticated analysis. This study is major step towards creating a template that could be used for analyzing other late traditions of Buddhist painting.” —Janice Leoshko, University of Texas at Austin
Author : Florence Bretelle-Establet,Stéphane Schmitt
Publisher : Springer
Page : 355 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2018-06-01
Category : Science
ISBN : 9783319784670
This book starts from a first general observation: there are very diverse ways to frame and convey scientific knowledge in texts. It then analyzes texts on mathematics, astronomy, medicine and life sciences, produced in various parts of the globe and in different time periods, and examines the reasons behind the segmentation of texts and the consequences of such textual divisions. How can historians and philosophers of science approach this diversity, and what is at stake in dealing with it? The book addresses these questions, adopting a specific approach to do so. In order to shed light on the diversity of organizational patterns and rhetorical strategies in scientific texts, and to question the rationale behind the choices made to present such texts in one particular way, it focuses on the issue of text segmentation, offering answers to questions such as: What was the meaning of segmenting texts into paragraphs, chapters, sections and clusters? Was segmentation used to delimit self-contained units, or to mark breaks in the physical appearance of a text in order to aid reading and memorizing, or to cope with the constraints of the material supports? How, in these different settings and in different texts, were pieces and parts made visible?
Author : Vincenzo Vergiani,Daniele Cuneo,Camillo Alessio Formigatti
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 801 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2017-12-18
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9783110543124
This collection of essays explores the history of the book in pre-modern South Asia looking at the production, circulation, fruition and preservation of manuscripts in different areas and across time. Edited by the team of the Cambridge-based Sanskrit Manuscripts Project and including contributions of the researchers who collaborated with it, it covers a wide range of topics related to South Asian manuscript culture: from the material dimension (palaeography, layout, decoration) and the complicated interactions of manuscripts with printing in late medieval Tibet and in modern Tamil Nadu, to reading, writing, editing and educational practices, from manuscripts as sources for the study of religious, literary and intellectual traditions, to the creation of collections in medieval India and Cambodia (one major centre of the so-called Sanskrit cosmopolis), and the formation of the Cambridge collections in the colonial period. The contributions reflect the variety of idioms, literary genres, religious movements, and social actors (intellectuals, scribes, patrons) of ancient South Asia, as well as the variety of approaches, interests and specialisms of the authors, and their impassionate engagement with manuscripts.
Author : Alessandro Bausi,Michael Friedrich
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 441 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2023-08-07
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783111292311
The present volume contains twelve chapters authored by specialists of Asian, African and European manuscript cultures reflecting on the cohesion of written artefacts, particularly manuscripts. Assuming that ‘codicological units’ exist in every manuscript culture and that they are usually composed of discrete elements (such as clay tablets, papyrus sheets, bamboo slips, parchment bifolios, palm leaves), the issue of the cohesion of the constituents is a general one. The volume presents a series of case studies on devices and strategies adopted to achieve this cohesion by manuscript cultures distant in space (from China to West Africa) and time (from the third millennium bce to the present). This comparative view provides the frame for the understanding of a phenomenon that appears to be of essential importance for the study of the structure of written artefacts. Regardless of the way in which cohesion is realised, all strategies and devices that allow the constituents to be kept together are subsumed under the term ‘binding’. Thus, it is possible to highlight similarities, convergences, and unique physical and technical methods adopted by various manuscript cultures to face a common challenge.
Author : Alexandra Kaloyanides
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 198 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2023-06-20
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780231553315
In July 1813, a young American couple from Boston arrived in Rangoon to preach the gospel. Celebrated in the Protestant press, which ran dramatic accounts of exotic adventures, the attempt to convert the Burmese met with mixed results. Although Burmese Buddhists resisted Christian evangelism, people from minority communities were baptized in large numbers throughout the nineteenth century. American Baptist Christianity was itself transformed in the Buddhist kingdom. Missionaries who were initially horrified by what they saw as the idolatry of Buddha statues found themselves creating tree shrines and their converts hanging colorful Jesus paintings in their churches. Baptizing Burma explores the history of how the American Baptist mission to Burma failed to convert the country yet succeeded in transforming its religious landscape. Alexandra Kaloyanides examines how the Burmese majority positioned Buddhism to counter Christianity, how marginalized groups took on Baptist identities, and how Protestantism was reimagined as a Southeast Asian religion. She considers a series of holy objects to reveal the mechanics of religious practice in a period of entangled empires—British, Burmese, and American. By telling stories of four key things—the sacred book, the school house, the pagoda, and the portrait—this book illuminates the histories of Burma’s last kingdom and the unexpected consequences of America’s first overseas mission.
Author : Angela S. Chiu
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2017-03-31
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780824873127
For centuries, wherever Thai Buddhists have made their homes, statues of the Buddha have provided striking testament to the role of Buddhism in the lives of the people. The Buddha in Lanna offers the first in-depth historical study of the Thai tradition of donation of Buddha statues. Drawing on palm-leaf manuscripts and inscriptions, many never previously translated into English, the book reveals the key roles that Thai Buddha images have played in the social and economic worlds of their makers and devotees from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. Author Angela Chiu introduces stories from chronicles, histories, and legends written by monks in Lanna, a region centered in today’s northern Thailand. By examining the stories’ themes, structures, and motifs, she illuminates the complex conceptual and material aspects of Buddha images that influenced their functions in Lanna society. Buddha images were depicted as social agents and mediators, the focal points of pan-regional political-religious lineages and rivalries, indeed, as the very generators of history itself. In the chronicles, Buddha images also unified the Buddha with the northern Thai landscape, thereby integrating Buddhist and local conceptions of place. By comparing Thai Buddha statues with other representations of the Buddha, the author underscores the contribution of the Thai evidence to a broader understanding of how different types of Buddha representations were understood to mediate the “presence” of the Buddha. The Buddha in Lanna focuses on the Thai Buddha image as a part of the wider society and history of its creators and worshippers beyond monastery walls, shedding much needed light on the Buddha image in history. With its impressive range of primary sources, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Buddhism and Buddhist art history, Thai studies, and Southeast Asian religious studies.
Author : 王邦维，陈明
Publisher : BEIJING BOOK CO. INC.
Page : 566 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2021-11-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 8210379456XXX
本书分理论研究、中国文学图像研究、东方文学图像研究、海外传真、学术纵横5个模块，收录了《隋唐五代诗歌的图像化修辞》《鲁迅小说插图中的误读现象》等文章。
Author : Roslyn Lee Hammers
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2021-03-30
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781000339888
This book examines the agrarian labor genre paintings based on the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving that were commissioned by successive Chinese emperors. Furthermore, this book analyzes the genre’s imagery as well as the poems in their historical context and explains how the paintings contributed to distinctively cosmopolitan Qing imagery that also drew upon European visual styles. Roslyn Lee Hammers contends that technologically-informed imagery was not merely didactic imagery to teach viewers how to grow rice or produce silk. The Qing emperors invested in paintings of labor to substantiate the permanence of the dynasty and to promote the well-being of the people under Manchu governance. The book includes English translations of the poems of the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving as well as other documents that have not been brought together in translation. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Chinese history, Chinese studies, history of science and technology, book history, labor history, and Qing history.
Author : Sofi Thanhauser
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2022-01-25
Category : History
ISBN : 9781524748401
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A sweeping and captivatingly told history of clothing and the stuff it is made of—an unparalleled deep-dive into how everyday garments have transformed our lives, our societies, and our planet. “We learn that, if we were a bit more curious about our clothes, they would offer us rich, interesting and often surprising insights into human history...a deep and sustained inquiry into the origins of what we wear, and what we have worn for the past 500 years." —The Washington Post In this panoramic social history, Sofi Thanhauser brilliantly tells five stories—Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics, Wool—about the clothes we wear and where they come from, illuminating our world in unexpected ways. She takes us from the opulent court of Louis XIV to the labor camps in modern-day Chinese-occupied Xinjiang. We see how textiles were once dyed with lichen, shells, bark, saffron, and beetles, displaying distinctive regional weaves and knits, and how the modern Western garment industry has refashioned our attire into the homogenous and disposable uniforms popularized by fast-fashion brands. Thanhauser makes clear how the clothing industry has become one of the planet’s worst polluters and how it relies on chronically underpaid and exploited laborers. But she also shows us how micro-communities, textile companies, and clothing makers in every corner of the world are rediscovering ancestral and ethical methods for making what we wear. Drawn from years of intensive research and reporting from around the world, and brimming with fascinating stories, Worn reveals to us that our clothing comes not just from the countries listed on the tags or ready-made from our factories. It comes, as well, from deep in our histories.
Author : Joseph Needham,Dieter Kuhn
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 560 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 1988-06-09
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0521320216
This study, the first of two parts, gives a comprehensive account of Chinese textiles and textile technology and deals with the evolution of bast fibre spinning and silk-reeling in the history of China. These operations are the basic techniques in the production of yarn and thread, pre-requisite to weaving, and any study of Chinese textile technology must start with the raw material obtained from fibre plants such as hemp, ramie, jute, cotton, etc, and silk reeled off from cocoons of the domestic silkworm. The time-span covered runs from the neolithic to the nineteenth century. Archaeological and pictoral evidence, the bulk of it hitherto unpublished in the West, is brought together with Chinese textual sources (which are extensively translated and interpreted) to illustrate Chinese achievements in this field. Professor Kuhn's study reveals the way in which Chinese textile-technological inventiveness has influenced textile production in other regions of the world and in medieval Europe. It explains how textile technology reached its high point between the tenth and thirteenth centuries and attempts to indicate the reasons for its subsequent relative decline. The development of the textile industry in Europe was a key factor in the rise of capitalism. In the case of China after Sung times, textile technology and the organisation of textile labour may help indicate why such a development did not take place in China.