Download or read book Amazigh Arts in Morocco written by Cynthia Becker and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In southeastern Morocco, around the oasis of Tafilalet, the Ait Khabbash people weave brightly colored carpets, embroider indigo head coverings, paint their faces with saffron, and wear ornate jewelry. Their extraordinarily detailed arts are rich in cultural symbolism; they are always breathtakingly beautiful—and they are typically made by women. Like other Amazigh (Berber) groups (but in contrast to the Arab societies of North Africa), the Ait Khabbash have entrusted their artistic responsibilities to women. Cynthia Becker spent years in Morocco living among these women and, through family connections and female fellowship, achieved unprecedented access to the artistic rituals of the Ait Khabbash. The result is more than a stunning examination of the arts themselves, it is also an illumination of women's roles in Islamic North Africa and the many ways in which women negotiate complex social and religious issues. One of the reasons Amazigh women are artists is that the arts are expressions of ethnic identity, and it follows that the guardians of Amazigh identity ought to be those who literally ensure its continuation from generation to generation, the Amazigh women. Not surprisingly, the arts are visual expressions of womanhood, and fertility symbols are prevalent. Controlling the visual symbols of Amazigh identity has given these women power and prestige. Their clothing, tattoos, and jewelry are public identity statements; such public artistic expressions contrast with the stereotype that women in the Islamic world are secluded and veiled. But their role as public identity symbols can also be restrictive, and history (French colonialism, the subsequent rise of an Arab-dominated government in Morocco, and the recent emergence of a transnational Berber movement) has forced Ait Khabbash women to adapt their arts as their people adapt to the contemporary world. By framing Amazigh arts with historical and cultural context, Cynthia Becker allows the reader to see the full measure of these fascinating artworks.
Download or read book Artistry of the Everyday written by Lisa Bernasek and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-15 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Artistry of the Everyday: Beauty and Craftsmanship in Berber Art, anthropologist Lisa Bernasek gives an insightful overview of Berber history and culture, focusing on the rich aesthetic traditions of Berber craftsmen and -women. She also tells the stories of the collectors whose generosity enhanced the holdings of the Peabody Museum. In a final chapter, she looks at Berber arts in the present day, examining how traditional arts are being used in new forms by Berber artists in North Africa and Europe."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Arts and Crafts of Morocco written by James F Jereb and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the dazzling fusion of cultural influences in Moroccan arts and crafts Its unique geographical location established Morocco as a center of cultural exchange, and its remarkable arts and crafts are the product of a centuries-long intermingling of influences from other parts of Africa and the traditions of Islam and from the singular cultural alliance of the Moors and the Spaniards. Superbly illustrated with more than 150 specially commissioned color photographs, Arts and Crafts of Morocco illuminates the wonders of this thriving tradition. Dr. James F. Jereb’s pioneering account, based on his own first hand research, examines an extensive range of media: vibrantly colored textiles; jewelry in a range of exquisite configurations; original leather, wood, and metalwork; and an enormous variety of pottery and ceramics. These marvelous objects derive either from a rural lifestyle, with symbols and patterns that reflect the powerful animistic beliefs of the Berber country artisans, or from the cities, where Islamic tenets compose the cultural foundation. All of these works are thus endowed with a spiritually charged significance that determines their functions and ensures their remarkable beauty. This in-depth study is made complete with guidance on Moroccan arts and crafts from expert collectors and a revealing analysis of the belief systems, festivals, and ceremonies that inform the predominant techniques and visual motifs of Moroccan art.
Download or read book Berbers and Others written by Katherine E. Hoffman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Berbers and Others offers fresh perspectives on new forms of social and political activism in today's Maghrib. In recent years, the Amazigh (Berber) movement has become a focus of widespread political, social, and cultural attention in North Africa, Europe, and the United States. Berber groups have peacefully yet persistently laid claim to ownership over broad areas of creativity in the arts, politics, literature, education, and national memory. The contributors to this volume present some of the best new thinking in the emerging field of Berber studies, offering insight into historical antecedents, language usage, land rights, household economies, artistic production, and human rights. The scope, depth, and multidisciplinary approach will engage specialists on the Maghrib as well as students of ethnicity, social and political change, and cultural innovation.
Download or read book Berber Carpets of Morocco written by Bruno Barbatti and published by www.acr-edition.com. This book was released on 2008 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new slant on Berber carpets, their meanings and motifs.
Download or read book Berber Tattooing in Morocco s Middle Atlas written by Felix Leu and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Berber Culture on the World Stage written by Jane E. Goodman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-03 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation Explores Berber cultural identity and performance in Algeria, France, and on the world music scene.
Download or read book Imazighen written by Margaret Courtney-Clarke and published by Clarkson Potter Publishers. This book was released on 1996 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As she has in her previous books, Ndebele: The Art of an African Tribe and African Canvas: The Art of West African Women, Margaret Courtney-Clarke turns her sensitive eye on women whose lives have seldom been observed. Her photos explore the remarkable arts and rapidly changing way of life of the Berber women of North Africa. 230 full-color photos.
Download or read book We Share Walls written by Katherine E. Hoffman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We Share Walls: Language, Land, and Gender in Berber Morocco explores how political economic shifts over the last century have reshaped the language practices and ideologies of women (and men) in the plains and mountains of rural Morocco. Offers a unique and richly textured ethnography of language maintenance and shift as well as language and place-making among an overlooked Muslim group Examines how Moroccan Berbers use language to integrate into the Arab-speaking world and retain their own distinct identity Illuminates the intriguing semiotic and gender issues embedded in the culture Part of the Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture Series
Download or read book Berber Memories written by Michel Draguet and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Berbers are considered to be the earliest occupants of the regions stretching north of the Sahara. Their ancient cultural tradition has been enhanced by absorbing diverse outside influences, the result of successive invasions punctuating the history of the southern Mediterranean ever since the arrival of the Phoenicians - followed by the Greeks, the Romans, the Vandals, the Byzantines and finally the Arabs. Through appropriation and assimilation, the Berbers gave birth to an exceptionally rich culture, while retaining the very foundations of an age-old civilisation born when the Sahara was still green. The remarkable collection of finery assembled by Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet relates this fascinating history brilliantly. Besides the virtuosity of the Muslim and Jewish artisans, this jewellery also testifies to the complex situation of women within the Berber world. The fruit of a partnership with the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, Berber Memories pays tribute to Berber women, as guardians and conveyors of civilisation in Morocco.
Download or read book Library of Congress Subject Headings written by Library of Congress and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 1160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Library of Congress Subject Headings written by Library of Congress. Cataloging Policy and Support Office and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture written by Finbarr Barry Flood and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-06-16 with total page 1442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two-volume Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture bridges the gap between monograph and survey text by providing a new level of access and interpretation to Islamic art. The more than 50 newly commissioned essays revisit canonical topics, and include original approaches and scholarship on neglected aspects of the field. This two-volume Companion showcases more than 50 specially commissioned essays and an introduction that survey Islamic art and architecture in all its traditional grandeur Essays are organized according to a new chronological-geographical paradigm that remaps the unprecedented expansion of the field and reflects the nuances of major artistic and political developments during the 1400-year span The Companion represents recent developments in the field, and encourages future horizons by commissioning innovative essays that provide fresh perspectives on canonical subjects, such as early Islamic art, sacred spaces, palaces, urbanism, ornament, arts of the book, and the portable arts while introducing others that have been previously neglected, including unexplored geographies and periods, transregional connectivities, talismans and magic, consumption and networks of portability, museums and collecting, and contemporary art worlds; the essays entail strong comparative and historiographic dimensions The volumes are accompanied by a map, and each subsection is preceded by a brief outline of the main cultural and historical developments during the period in question The volumes include periods and regions typically excluded from survey books including modern and contemporary art-architecture; China, Indonesia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Sicily, the New World (Americas)
Download or read book Revisiting the Colonial Past in Morocco written by Driss Maghraoui and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the concept of ‘colonial cultures,’ this book analyses how these cultures both transformed, and were transformed by, their various societies. Challenging both the colonial vulgate, and the nationalist paradigm, Revisiting the Colonial Past in Morocco, examines the lesser known specificities of particular moments, practices and institutions in Morocco, with the aim of uncovering a ‘new colonial history.’ By examining society on a micro-level, this book raises the profiles of the mass of Moroccans who were highly influential in the colonial period yet have been excluded from the historical record because of a lack of textual source material. Introducing social and cultural history, gender studies and literary criticism to the more traditional economic, political and military studies, the book promotes a more complex and nuanced understanding of Moroccan colonial history. Employing new theoretical and methodological approaches, this volume encourages a re-assessment of existing work and promotes a more interdisciplinary approach to the colonial history of Morocco. Revisiting the Colonial Past in Morocco is a highly topical and useful addition to literature on the subject and will be of interest to students and scholars of History, Imperialism and more generally, Middle Eastern Studies.
Download or read book Two Arabs a Berber and a Jew written by Lawrence Rosen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Drawn from Memory" is an important contribution to Moroccan studies, to the field of anthropology, and to academic approaches to biography. Rosen weaves the threads of his narrative together into a tapestry focused on the lives of four men: a raconteur, a teacher, an entrepreneur, and a cloth dealer, a Jew. Ordinary people have intellectual lives, Rosen tells us. They may never have written a book; they may never even have read one. But their lives are rich in ideas, constantly fashioned and revised, elaborated and rearranged. Rosen first encountered the four men he profiles in his book in the course of his academic research, and he then visited and revisited these men, and the towns in which they live, over several decades. He engaged them ina kind of continuous conversation. He spoke to members of their family, their neighbors, and the town people. Out of this wealth of material, he has constructed a narrative that takes the reader not only into four intensely observed individual lives but also, as it were, the history of Morocco s evolution across the span of many decades; he takes the reader not only into the outwardly lived lives of his subjects, but their innermost thoughts, their own perceptions of themselves and the evolving Moroccan world around them. At the same time, he manages to evoke the physical landscape, the towns in which these men live, marvelously well, so that the towns and their inhabitants come alive for the reader. Beautifully illustrated with archival and ethnographic photos, "Drawn from Memory" teaches us that that for Moroccans, and by extension Muslims in general, nothing in everyday social life is hard and fast, and the meaning and outcome of all interactions is the product of negotiation and relatedness."
Download or read book Colonial al Andalus written by Eric Calderwood and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through state-backed Catholicism, monolingualism, militarism, and dictatorship, Spain’s fascists earned their reputation for intolerance. It may therefore come as a surprise that 80,000 Moroccans fought at General Franco’s side in the 1930s. What brought these strange bedfellows together, Eric Calderwood argues, was a highly effective propaganda weapon: the legacy of medieval Muslim Iberia, known as al-Andalus. This legacy served to justify Spain’s colonization of Morocco and also to define the Moroccan national culture that supplanted colonial rule. Writers of many political stripes have celebrated convivencia, the fabled “coexistence” of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in medieval Iberia. According to this widely-held view, modern Spain and Morocco are joined through their shared Andalusi past. Colonial al-Andalus traces this supposedly timeless narrative to the mid-1800s, when Spanish politicians and intellectuals first used it to press for Morocco’s colonization. Franco later harnessed convivencia to the benefit of Spain’s colonial program in Morocco. This shift precipitated an eloquent historical irony. As Moroccans embraced the Spanish insistence on Morocco’s Andalusi heritage, a Spanish idea about Morocco gradually became a Moroccan idea about Morocco. Drawing on a rich archive of Spanish, Arabic, French, and Catalan sources—including literature, historiography, journalism, political speeches, schoolbooks, tourist brochures, and visual arts—Calderwood reconstructs the varied political career of convivencia and al-Andalus, showing how shared pasts become raw material for divergent contemporary ideologies, including Spanish fascism and Moroccan nationalism. Colonial al-Andalus exposes the limits of simplistic oppositions between European and Arab, Christian and Muslim, that shape current debates about European colonialism.
Download or read book Imagined Museums written by Katarzyna Pieprzak and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagined Museumsexamines the intertwined politics surrounding art and modernization in Morocco from 1912 to the present by considering the structure of the museum not only as a modern institution but also as a national monument to modernity, asking what happens when museum monuments start to crumble. In an analysis of museum history, exhibition policy, the lack of national museum space for modern art, and postmodern exhibit spaces in Morocco, Katarzyna Pieprzak focuses on the role that art plays in the social fabric of a modernizing Morocco. She argues that the decay of colonial and national institutions of culture has invited the rethinking of the museum and generated countermuseums to stage new narratives of art, memory, and modernity. Through these spaces she explores a range of questions: How is modernity imagined locally? How are claims to modernity articulated? How is Moroccan modernity challenged globally? In this first cultural history of modern Moroccan art and its museums, Pieprzak goes beyond the investigation of national institutions to treat the history and evolution of multiple museums—from official state and corporate exhibition spaces to informal, popular, street-level art and performance spaces—as cultural architectures that both enshrine the past and look to the future.
