Download or read book Photos of the Gods written by Christopher Pinney and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chris Pinney demonstrates how printed images were pivotal to India's struggle for national and religious independence. He also provides a history of printing in India.
Download or read book Gods in the Bazaar written by Kajri Jain and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-06 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVA theoretically informed cultural study of the design, production, and circulation of Indian calendar art./div
Download or read book The Language of the Gods in the World of Men written by Sheldon Pollock and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-05-23 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book Gods in the Time of Democracy written by Kajri Jain and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-08 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the “infrastructures of the sensible.”
Download or read book The Orbis Pictus of John Amos Comenius written by Johann Amos Comenius and published by . This book was released on 1887 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Equally in God s Image written by Julia Bolton Holloway and published by Julia Bolton Holloway. This book was released on 1990 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages is a volume of essays presenting the argument that with the coming of the universities women were excluded, in an apartheid of gender, from education and power. It discusses the resulting paradigm shift from Romanesque to Gothic, describing the images which women had of themselves and which the dominant male society had of them. We meet, in the pages of this book, medieval women in their roles as writers, pilgrims, wives, anchoresses and nuns, at court, on pilgrimage, in households and convents. The volume, as a «Distant Mirror» for ourselves today, seeks to present ways in which women then fulfilled the roles society expected of them and the ways in which they also subverted - through entering into textuality - the expectations of the dominating culture in order to quest identity and equality.
Download or read book America s Four Gods written by Paul Froese and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-07 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite all the hype surrounding the "New Atheism," the United States remains one of the most religious nations on Earth. In fact, 95% of Americans believe in God--a level of agreement rarely seen in American life. The greatest divisions in America are not between atheists and believers, or even between people of different faiths. What divides us, this groundbreaking book shows, is how we conceive of God and the role He plays in our daily lives. America's Four Gods draws on the most wide-ranging, comprehensive, and illuminating survey of American's religious beliefs ever conducted to offer a systematic exploration of how Americans view God. Paul Froese and Christopher Bader argue that many of America's most intractable social and political divisions emerge from religious convictions that are deeply held but rarely openly discussed. Drawing upon original survey data from thousands of Americans and a wealth of in-depth interviews from all parts of the country, Froese and Bader trace America's cultural and political diversity to its ultimate source--differing opinions about God. They show that regardless of our religious tradition (or lack thereof), Americans worship four distinct types of God: The Authoritative God--who is both engaged in the world and judgmental; The Benevolent God--who loves and helps us in spite of our failings; The Critical God--who catalogs our sins but does not punish them (at least not in this life); and The Distant God--who stands apart from the world He created. The authors show that these four conceptions of God form the basis of our worldviews and are among the most powerful predictors of how we feel about the most contentious issues in American life. Accessible, insightful, and filled with the voices of ordinary Americans discussing their most personal religious beliefs, America's Four Gods provides an invaluable portrait of how we view God and therefore how we view virtually everything else.
Download or read book Crazy Ji written by Meir Shahar and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crazy Ji: Chinese Religion and Popular Literatureis the first study in any language of one of the most colorful deities in the pantheon of late imperial and modern China: Sire Ji-or, as he is better known, Crazy Ji. The author uses the evolution of the cult of this eccentric deity to address central questions regarding the nature of the Chinese religion tradition, its relation to the Chinese social structure, and the role of vernacular fiction and popular media in shaping religious beliefs in China. Meir Shara demonstrates that vernacular novels and oral literature played a major role in the dissemination of knowledge about deities and the growth of cults and argues that the body of religious beliefs and practices we call "Chinese religion" is inseparable from the works of fiction and drama that have served as vehicles for its transmission. His analysis of the cult of Crazy Ji shows that far from being, as is often argued, a mirror of the Chinese bereaucratic order, Chinese religion offers a means of liberation from it. Finally, this study of the cult of Crzy Ji illustrates how lay believers influenced the practices of organized religion (in this case, monastic Buddhism). This study employs the analytical concepts of anthropology and literary criticism and is based on literary, historical, and ethnographic sources ranging from oral literature, vernacular novels, puppet plays, television serials, movies, local gazetteers, to monastic histories.
Download or read book Knotting the Banner written by David J. Mozina and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2021-06-30 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the hills of China’s central Hunan province, an anxious young apprentice officiates over a Daoist ritual known as the Banner Rite to Summon Sire Yin. Before a crowd of masters, relatives, and villagers—and the entire pantheon of gods and deceased masters ritually invited to witness the event—he seeks to summon Celestial Lord Yin Jiao, the ferocious deity who supplies the exorcistic power to protect and heal bodies and spaces from illness and misfortune. If the apprentice cannot bring forth the deity, the rite is considered a failure and the ordination suspended: His entire professional career hangs in the balance before it even begins. This richly textured study asks how the Banner Rite works or fails to work in its own terms. How do the cosmological, theological, and anthropological assumptions ensconced in the ritual itself account for its own efficacy or inefficacy? Weaving together ethnography, textual analysis, photography, and film, David J. Mozina invites readers into the religious world of ritual masters in today’s south China. He shows that the efficacy of rituals like the Banner Rite is driven by the ability of a ritual master to form an intimate relationship with exorcistic deities like Yin Jiao, which is far from guaranteed. Mozina reveals the ways in which such ritual claims are rooted in the great liturgical movements of the Song and Yuan dynasties (960–1368) and how they are performed these days amid the social and economic pressures of rural life in the post-Mao era. Written for students and scholars of Daoism and Chinese religion, Knotting the Banner will also appeal to anthropologists and comparative religionists, especially those working on ritual.
Download or read book Facing the Gods written by Verity Jane Platt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-28 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores divine manifestations and their representations not only in art, but also in literature, histories and inscriptions. The cultural analysis of epiphany is set within a historical framework that examines its development from the archaic period through the Hellenistic world and into the Roman Empire.
Download or read book Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures written by Kobena Mercer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does pop art translate across cultures? What does pop art look like through a postcolonial lens? This volume casts light on the aesthetics and politics of pop by taking a cross-cultural perspective on what happens when everyday objects are taken out of one context and repositioned in the language of art.
Download or read book Image Word and God in the Early Christian Centuries written by Mark Edwards and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christianity proclaims Christ and the incarnate word of God; the Bible is described as the Word of God in both Jewish and Christian tradition. Are these usages merely homonymous, or would the ancients have recognized a more intimate relation between the word incarnate and the word proclaimed? This book investigates the concept of logos in pagan, Jewish and Christian thought, with a view to elucidating the polyphonic functions which the word acquired when used in theological discourse. Edwards presents a survey of theological applications of the term Logos in Greek, Jewish and Christian thought from Plato to Augustine and Proclus. Special focus is placed on: the relation of words to images in representation of divine realm, the relation between the logos within (reason) and the logos without (speech) both in linguistics and in Christology, the relation between the incarnate Word and the written text, and the place of reason in the interpretation of revelation. Bringing together materials which are rarely synthesized in modern study, this book shows how Greek and biblical thought part company in their appraisal of the capacity of reason to grasp the nature of God, and how in consequence verbal revelation plays a more significant role in biblical teaching. Edwards shows how this entailed the rejection of images in Jewish and Christian thought, and how the manifestation in flesh of Christ as the living word of God compelled the church to reconsider both the relation of word to image and the interplay between the logos within and the written logos in the formulation of Christian doctrine.
Download or read book Pictures for Use and Pleasure written by James Cahill and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is an outstanding piece of work: timely, essential, authoritative, and original. Cahill throws light on obscure artists, emerging styles and regional traditions, unexplored aspects of cultural life, enigmatic iconographies, and questions of authorship and authenticity, leaving the reader richly informed and full of new ideas."--Susan Nelson, Indiana University "Cahill brings the vast body of 'vernacular' painting into the legitimate venue of art historical criticism, giving connoisseurs, viewers, and readers a more capacious and accurate grasp of the world of Chinese pictorial art."--Susan Mann, author of The Talented Women of the Zhang Family
Download or read book Gods in the Bazaar written by Kajri Jain and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-06 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gods in the Bazaar is a fascinating account of the printed images known in India as “calendar art” or “bazaar art,” the color-saturated, mass-produced pictures often used on calendars and in advertisements, featuring deities and other religious themes as well as nationalist leaders, alluring women, movie stars, chubby babies, and landscapes. Calendar art appears in all manner of contexts in India: in chic elite living rooms, middle-class kitchens, urban slums, village huts; hung on walls, stuck on scooters and computers, propped up on machines, affixed to dashboards, tucked into wallets and lockets. In this beautifully illustrated book, Kajri Jain examines the power that calendar art wields in Indian mass culture, arguing that its meanings derive as much from the production and circulation of the images as from their visual features. Jain draws on interviews with artists, printers, publishers, and consumers as well as analyses of the prints themselves to trace the economies—of art, commerce, religion, and desire—within which calendar images and ideas about them are formulated. For Jain, an analysis of the bazaar, or vernacular commercial arena, is crucial to understanding not only the calendar art that circulates within the bazaar but also India’s postcolonial modernity and the ways that its mass culture has developed in close connection with a religiously inflected nationalism. The bazaar is characterized by the coexistence of seemingly incompatible elements: bourgeois-liberal and neoliberal modernism on the one hand, and vernacular discourses and practices on the other. Jain argues that from the colonial era to the present, capitalist expansion has depended on the maintenance of these multiple coexisting realms: the sacred, the commercial, and the artistic; the official and the vernacular.
Download or read book The Way That Lives in the Heart written by Jean Elizabeth DeBernardi and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Way That Lives in the Heart is a richly detailed ethnographic analysis of the practice of Chinese religion in the modern, multicultural Southeast Asian city of Penang, Malaysia. The book conveys both an understanding of shared religious practices and orientations and a sense of how individual men and women imagine, represent, and transform popular religious practices within the time and space of their own lives. This work is original in three ways. First, the author investigates Penang Chinese religious practice as a total field of religious practice, suggesting ways in which the religious culture, including spirit-mediumship, has been transformed in the conjuncture with modernity. Second, the book emphasizes the way in which socially marginal spirit mediums use a religious anti-language and unique religious rituals to set themselves apart from mainstream society. Third, the study investigates Penang Chinese religion as the product of a specific history, rather than presenting an overgeneralized overview that claims to represent a single "Chinese religion."
Download or read book Images of the Immortal written by Paul R. Katz and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Palace of Eternal Joy (Yongle Gong) is a mammoth cult site dedicated to one of late imperial China's most popular deities, Lu Dongbin. This study focuses on the Palace's role in the development of Lu's legend. It takes into account the various histories of the Palace presented in different texts and stresses the ways in which the site both reflected and produced cultural diversity. Paul R. Katz analyzes the texts in terms of the textuality - the processes by which they were produced, transmitted and understood.
Download or read book Between Encyclopedia and Chorography written by Anna Boroffka and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-10-03 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the early modern period, regional specified compendia – which combine information on local moral and natural history, towns and fortifications with historiography, antiquarianism, images series or maps – gain a new agency in the production of knowledge. Via literary and aesthetic practices, the compilations construct a display of regional specified knowledge. In some cases this display of regional knowledge is presented as a display of a local cultural identity and is linked to early modern practices of comparing and classifying civilizations. At the core of the publication are compendia on the Americas which research has described as chorographies, encyclopeadias or – more recently – 'cultural encyclopaedias'. Studies on Asian and European encyclopeadias, universal histories and chorographies help to contextualize the American examples in the broader field of an early modern and transcultural knowledge production, which inherits and modifies the ancient and medieval tradition.
