Performative Reflections Of Indian Traditions

Author : D. Venkat Rao
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2021-09-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789811623912

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Performative Reflections of Indian Traditions by D. Venkat Rao Pdf

This book focuses on the cohering elements across various texts and traditions of India. It engages with several significant works from the Sanskrit tradition and emphasizes the need to move beyond colonial and postcolonial engagements with the enduring cultural pasts of India. The chapters are grouped in three main parts: accented rhythms, dispersed mnemoscapes and inventive iterations. It addresses questions such as: what enabled cultural communication across very divergent geographical, temporal, locational contexts and among different cultural formations of India over millennia? What is this shareable impulse that pulsates across the domains of dance, sculpture, painting, poetry, dharma, music, medicine, the lore of rivers and the epics? It explains how modern Indian languages and especially their creative and reflective nodes are unthinkable without the intricately woven textures of these interfaces and their responsive receptions. This book is of interest to philosophers, humanities students, researchers and professors as well as people interested in exploring alternatives to European traditions of thought without an alibi.

Author : D. Venkat Rao
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 189 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2021-07-29
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781000422375

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India, Europe and the Question of Cultural Difference by D. Venkat Rao Pdf

This volume critically engages with the question of cultural difference and the idea of living with diversity in the context of India and Europe. It looks at certain essential European categories of learning such as art, nature, the human, literature, relation, philosophy, and the humanities and analyses texts from Sanskrit language (through Telugu resources) to argue that categories like prakriti, loka, jati, dharma, karma, sahitya, kala,etc. cannot be conflated with conceptual formations such as nature, world, caste, religion, (sanctioned) action, literature and art respectively. The book questions and unravels the efficacy of European concepts, theories and interpretive frames in understanding Indian reflective traditions and cultural forms. It also lays the groundwork for reorienting teaching and research in universities in the humanities on the basis of key cultural differences. By focusing on major themes in the humanities discourse and their limitations, the work engages with the writings of Heidegger, Derrida and Agamben, among others, from radically new vantage points of Sanskrit-Indian reflective traditions, and challenges prevailing ideas about Indian art, literature and culture. Part of the Critical Humanities Across Cultures series, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of Indian languages and literature, comparative literature, art and aesthetics, postcolonial studies, cultural and heritage studies, philosophy, political philosophy, comparative philosophy, Sanskrit studies, India studies, South Asian studies, Global South studies, and for those working on education in the humanities/human sciences.

Author : Raminder Kaur
Publisher : Anthem Press
Page : 168 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781843311386

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Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism by Raminder Kaur Pdf

'Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism' focuses on one of the major festivals of western India, the Ganapati Utsava, dedicated to the elephant-headed god. Raminder Kaur uses this occasion as the central anthropological and historiographical site within which to examine the dynamic relationship between spectacle, religion and nationalist politics.

Author : Sreecheta Mukherjee
Publisher : Chitrolekha International Magazine on Art and Design
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2015-06-01
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Visual Culture in the Indian Subcontinent by Sreecheta Mukherjee Pdf

Author : Stephen W. Littlejohn,Karen A. Foss
Publisher : SAGE Publications
Page : 1193 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2009-08-18
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781452265797

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Encyclopedia of Communication Theory by Stephen W. Littlejohn,Karen A. Foss Pdf

With more than 300 entries, these two volumes provide a one-stop source for a comprehensive overview of communication theory, offering current descriptions of theories as well as the background issues and concepts that comprise these theories. This is the first resource to summarize, in one place, the diversity of theory in the communication field. Key Themes Applications and Contexts Critical Orientations Cultural Orientations Cybernetic and Systems Orientations Feminist Orientations Group and Organizational Concepts Information, Media, and Communication Technology International and Global Concepts Interpersonal Concepts Non-Western Orientations Paradigms, Traditions, and Schools Philosophical Orientations Psycho-Cognitive Orientations Rhetorical Orientations Semiotic, Linguistic, and Discursive Orientations Social/Interactional Orientations Theory, Metatheory, Methodology, and Inquiry

Author : D. Venkat Rao
Publisher : Springer Science & Business
Page : 346 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2014-05-02
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9788132216988

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Cultures of Memory in South Asia by D. Venkat Rao Pdf

Culture of Memory in South Asia reconfigures European representations of India as a paradigmatic extension of a classical reading, which posits the relation between text and context in a determined way. It explores the South Asian cultural response to European “textual” inheritances. The main argument of this work is that the reflective and generative nodes of Indian cultural formations are located in the configurations of memory, the body and idiom (verbal and visual), where the body or the body complex becomes the performative effect and medium of articulated memories. This work advances its arguments by engaging with mnemocultures-cultures of memory that survive and proliferate in speech and gesture. Drawing on Sanskrit and Telugu reflective sources, this work emphasizes the need to engage with cultural memory and the compositional modes of Indian reflective traditions. This important and original work focuses on the ruptured and stigmatised resources of heterogeneous Indian traditions and calls for critical humanities that move beyond the colonially configured received traditions. Cultures of Memory suggests the possibilities of transcultural critical humanities research and teaching initiatives from the Indian context in today’s academy.

Author : Vinay Lal
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 404 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2019-07-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9780190990411

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India and Civilizational Futures by Vinay Lal Pdf

This second volume based on the deliberations of the Backwaters Collective puts into serious question the most familiar categories that have informed humanistic inquiry and social science research until now. The contributors probe how the intellectual and cultural resources of Indic civilization might be deployed to introduce greater plurality into the world of modern knowledge systems and reinitiate metaphysics into the discourses of politics, with the hope that similar inquiries will in future be extended across the Global South. The chapters offer newer perspectives on India’s past and intellectual traditions and suggest how we might liberate ourselves from the straightjackets of history, development, normal politics, the nation-state, and what globally passes for ‘common sense’ in various spheres of life and thought. While some contributors engage with a few figures who have been critical in shaping India’s intellectual life, such as Kabir, Narayana Guru, Ambedkar, Tagore, and Gandhi, others bring into the limelight equally compelling if somewhat neglected figures such as Rahul Sankrityayan, Ranade, and T.R.V. Murti. Conceptual papers on intercommunality, South Asian ideas of hospitality, and mnemocultural modes of learning complete the volume.

Author : Vinay Lal
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 433 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2024-02-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9780198887164

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India and Its Intellectual Traditions: of Love, Advaita, Power, and Other Things by Vinay Lal Pdf

The book, the third volume to emerge from the enterprise known as 'The Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics', attempts to further the collective's ambition to put into question the certitudes of conventional social science discourse, decolonize the dominant knowledge frameworks, and understand how the intellectual and cultural resources of Indian civilization may be deployed to think both, about some problems in contemporary politics and culture, and to introduce greater plurality into the world of modern knowledge systems. Some of the collective's members remain deeply committed to reinitiating metaphysics into politics, and similarly, the collective's enduring interest in Narayana Guru is reflected in at least three chapters. Although engagement with Gandhi and Ambedkar is a familiar part of the Indian intellectual landscape, other chapters on offer pivot around histories of power, performative traditions, and modes of worship. Unlike the scholarship that is now the norm, organized around a distinct theme, this volume exhibits a more daring approach to India's intellectual traditions, traversing the world of Kannada intellectuals, the Kashmir Shaiva tradition, a Marathi Bhakti poet, and a contemporary Indian philosopher, as much as conceptual ideas drawn from a wide array of Indian texts and experiences.

Author : Vivek Dhareshwar
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2023-11-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781000997408

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Sites of Learning and Practical Knowledge by Vivek Dhareshwar Pdf

This book examines the relationship between cultural difference and practical knowledge and its implications for the study of humanities and the social sciences. It sketches a meta-theory of Western thought to grasp the conceptual distortions that result when a normatively structured theoretical way of understanding the world seeks to displace practical forms of understanding. The book draws on both Western thinkers such as Nietzsche, Marx, Wittgenstein and Foucault and Indian thinkers such as Gandhi, Tagore and Balagangadhara to formulate a practical epistemology that delimits theoretical knowledge by regenerating experiential knowledge that was the hallmark of Indian intellectual traditions and provides the intellectual resources for rejecting normativity. By thus preparing the ground for a radical reconceptualization of the human sciences it seeks to overcome the loss of concepts and the violence generated by the grafting of ill–understood and experience-occluding normative conceptual structures on the fabric of practical life. Finally, the author offers an alternative conceptualization of Indian sociality through the idea of a practitional matrix, which explains both why the West necessarily misunderstood or misdescribed India and how that misdescription enables us to theorize the West. Part of Critical Humanities across Cultures series, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, post-colonial studies, cultural studies, Indian studies and literature.

Author : Beatrix Hauser
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2020-11-29
Category : History
ISBN : 9781000059229

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Promising Rituals by Beatrix Hauser Pdf

This book shows how the performance of rituals influences the understanding that Hindu women form of their own selves, their sense of femininity, identity as well as their role and position in the lived-in world, and vice versa. Drawn from an intensive ethnographic fieldwork in southern Orissa, each section of the book takes a close look at a specific ritual practice, in exploring concepts such as purity/pollution, religious observances (such as fasting), deity possession, associated beliefs and attitudes, as also celebrated traditions such as Thākurānī Yātrā, local processions, and the role of female ritual specialists. The study uses the premise that religious practices in themselves are neither restricting nor liberating; rather rituals provide a perceptual context with the ability to affect the self-understanding of participants, as also their conception of agency, in a way that spills across non-ritual spheres. Conceptualizing gender identity as resulting from seen, but mostly unnoticed, everyday activities and approaching cultural performances as sites of collectively defining the self, the author offers a telling and vivid account of how women perceive, realize and reflect on religious ideas, while engaging in rituals and, by doing so, negotiate complex gender norms. The book also examines the assumptions of recent theories on the social construction of identities, often-debated impact of religion on women, performativity, self-identity, and ritual agency in considering ‘doing’ gender in a traditional, non-Western context. This book will serve as essential reading for scholars of sociology, anthropology, gender studies, cultural studies, history, religion, performance, and folklore studies.

Author : Bi-qi Beatrice Lei,Judy Celine Ick,Poonam Trivedi
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2016-12-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781315442945

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Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys by Bi-qi Beatrice Lei,Judy Celine Ick,Poonam Trivedi Pdf

This volume gives Asia’s Shakespeares the critical, theoretical, and political space they demand, offering rich, alternative ways of thinking about Asia, Shakespeare, and Asian Shakespeare based on Asian experiences and histories. Challenging and supplementing the dominant critical and theoretical structures that determine Shakespeare studies today, close analysis of Shakespeare’s Asian journeys, critical encounters, cultural geographies, and the political complexions of these negotiations reveal perspectives different to the European. Exploring what Shakespeare has done to Asia along with what Asia has done with Shakespeare, this book demonstrates how Shakespeare helps articulate Asianess, unfolding Asia’s past, reflecting Asia’s present, and projecting Asia’s future. This is achieved by forgoing the myth of the Bard’s universality, bypassing the authenticity test, avoiding merely descriptive or even ethnographic accounts, and using caution when applying Western theoretical frameworks. Many of the productions studied in this volume are brought to critical attention for the first time, offering new methodologies and approaches across disciplines including history, philosophy, sociology, geopolitics, religion, postcolonial studies, psychology, translation theory, film studies, and others. The volume explores a range of examples, from exquisite productions infused with ancient aesthetic traditions to popular teen manga and television drama, from state-dictated appropriations to radical political commentaries in areas including Japan, India, Taiwan, Korea, Indonesia, China, and the Philippines. This book goes beyond a showcasing of Asian adaptations in various languages, styles, and theatre traditions, and beyond introductory essays intended to help an unknowing audience appreciate Asian performances, developing a more inflected interpretative dialogue with other areas of Shakespeare studies.

Author : D. Venkat Rao
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2018-03-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781351234924

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Critical Humanities from India by D. Venkat Rao Pdf

The field of humanities generates a discourse that traditionally addressed the questions of what is proper to man, rights of man, crimes against humanity, human creativity and action, human reflection and performance, human utterance and artefact. The university as a philosophical-political institution transmits this humanist account. This European humanistic legacy, which is little more than Christian anthropology, barely received any questioning from cultures that faced colonialism. In such a context, this volume attempts to unravel the ‘barely secularized heritage’ of Europe (Derrida’s phrase) and its fatal consequences in other cultures. The task of Critical Humanities is to explore the ways in which the question of being human (along with non-human others) today from heterogeneous cultural ‘backgrounds’ can be undertaken. The future of the humanities teaching and research is contingent upon the risky task of configuring cultural difference from non-European locations. Such a task is inescapable and urgently needed when tectonic cultural upheavals have begun to show devastating effect on planetary coexistence today. It is precisely in such a context that this collection of essays on critical humanities affirms, ‘without alibi’, the urgency of collective reflection and innovative research across the traditional disciplinary and institutional borders and communication systems on the one hand and Asian, African and European cultural formations on the other. Critical Humanities are at one level little more than communities on the verge (critical) but whose centuries long survival and resilient creations of cultural (and /as natural) habitats are of deeply enduring significance to affirm the biocultural diversities of living that compose the planet. Topical and timely, this book will be useful to scholars, researchers and teachers of cultural theory, literary studies, philosophy, cultural geography, legal studies, sociology, history, performance studies, environmental studies, caste and communalism studies, postcolonial theory, India studies, and education.

Author : Maitreyee Chowdhury
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 68 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2012
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 3841770657

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Reflections on My India by Maitreyee Chowdhury Pdf

The book is aimed at being a simple way of bringing Indian traditions, culture and life to the forefront, sometimes with jarring or humorous examples that may seem odd and yet connected. The author has drawn from life and avid people watching for each of the pieces that are a part of book. It is a book for everyone and one that anyone can associate with. While the book mirrors much of Indian culture, it also speaks of little vignettes that many of today's generation do not know of.

Author : Wilhelm Halbfass
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 425 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 1991
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0585088039

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Tradition and Reflection by Wilhelm Halbfass Pdf

Author : Miriam Levering
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 1989-01-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0887066135

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Rethinking Scripture by Miriam Levering Pdf

Exploring the nature of texts, this book explains how scriptures function within religions. Topics covered include the oral dimensions of scripture, canon formation, a study of the word in Hindu life, and the role of text in Buddhism.