Download or read book Eurasian Musical Journeys written by Gabriela Currie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-05 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element explores the circulation of musical instruments, practices, and thought in pre-modern Eurasia at the crossroads of empires and nomadic cultures. It takes into consideration mechanisms of transmission, appropriation, adaptation, and integration that helped shape musical traditions that are perceived as culturally and geographically distinct yet are historically linked. The four stories featured here range from the geographically diverse performing groups during the Sui and Tang era, to the elusive musical world of Kucha in the Tarim Basin; from the fragmentary history of a single instrument linked to the Turkic peoples across Eurasia, to the transcontinental circulation of sound-making automata, including the organ, on both east-west and north-south axes. Within the conceptual background of cultural encounter and exchange, this Element provides possible strategies for integrating such information into the historical tapestry of Eurasian transcontinental networks as explored in other Elements in the series.
Download or read book Elements in the Global Middle Ages Eurasian Musical Journeys written by Currie, Gabriela and published by . This book was released on with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Musical Journeys in Sumatra written by Margaret Kartomi and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012-06-30 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Sumatra is the sixth largest island in the world and home to an estimated 44 million Indonesians, its musical arts and cultures have not been the subject of a book-length study until now. Documenting and explaining the ethnographic, cultural, and historical contexts of Sumatra's performing arts, Musical Journeys in Sumatra also traces the changes in their style, content, and reception from the early 1970s onward. Having dedicated almost forty years of scholarship to exploring the rich and varied music of Sumatran provinces, Margaret Kartomi provides a fascinating ethnographic record of vanishing musical genres, traditions, and practices that have become deeply compromised by the pressures of urbanization, rural poverty, and government policy. This deeply informed collection showcases the complex diversity of Indonesian music and includes field observations from six different provinces: Aceh, North Sumatra, Riau, West Sumatra, South Sumatra, and Bangka-Belitung. Featuring photographs and original drawings from Kartomi's field observations of instruments and performances, Musical Journeys in Sumatra provides a comprehensive musical introduction to this neglected, very large island, with its hundreds of ethno-linguistic-musical groups.
Download or read book Medieval Textiles across Eurasia c 300 1400 written by Patricia Blessing and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study considers the textiles made, traded, and exchanged across Eurasia from late antiquity to the late Middle Ages with special attention to the socio-political and cultural aspects of this universal medium. It presents a wide range of textiles used in both domestic and religious settings, as dress and furnishings, and for elite and ordinary owners. The introduction presents historiographical background to the study of textiles and explains the conditions of their survival in archaeological contexts and museums. A section on the materials and techniques used to produce textiles if followed by those outlining textile production, industry, and trade across Eurasia. Further sections examine the uses for dress and furnishing textiles and the appearance of imported fabrics in European contexts, addressing textiles' functions and uses in medieval societies. Lastly, a concluding section on textile aesthetics connects fabrics to their broader visual and material context.
Download or read book Lutes and Marginality in Pre Modern China written by Ingrid Maren Furniss and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lutes and Marginality in Pre-Modern China traces the complex history of lutes as they moved from the far west into China, and how these instruments became linked to various forms of social, cultural, ethnic, and religious marginality within and at China’s borders. The book argues that the lute, a musical instrument that likely originated in the Near East or Central Asia, became a highly charged object replete with associations of ethnic and political identity, social status, and gender in China across the third to seventeenth centuries, and as such, offers a crucial vehicle for understanding interactions between the Chinese center and periphery. Using a richly interdisciplinary perspective that brings together music history, performance studies, archaeology, and art history, the author draws together the visual evidence for the history of Chinese lutes and analyzes the political and cultural dimensions of their depictions in art. In exploring the lute’s reception across time and space, this book illuminates the shifting relationships between China and cultures along its frontier, as well as the dynamics of gender and social status within China’s center. Comprehensive in scope, Lutes and Marginality in Pre-Modern China offers new insights for scholars of pre-modern China, art history, archaeology, music history, ethnomusicology, and Silk Road and frontier studies.
Download or read book Staging Tianxia written by Lanlan Kuang and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-03 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staging Tianxia explores the ancient Chinese vision of world order known as tianxia (all under heaven) by focusing on the historical, performative, and rhetorical processes of expressive arts and cultural heritages that inform a vision of China as a historically multiethnic and cosmopolitan nation. Author Lanlan Kuang unites multimedia ethnographic research and theoretical insights from ethnomusicology, philosophy, religious studies, performance studies, and cognitive science, with a focus on Dunhuang bihua yuewu, a modern interpretation inserted into the Chinese classical dance and theatrical arts tradition. Staging Tianxia thus aims to redefine Silk Road studies and Dunhuangology, a transdisciplinary field dedicated to studying the texts and art of Dunhuang, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that connected China via the Silk Road with Central Asia, South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Staging Tianxia is a careful ethnographic study that looks at the importance of performance tradition and poetics in the arts and aesthetic theory of China.
Download or read book Swahili Worlds in Globalism written by Chapurukha M. Kusimba and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-31 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element discusses a medieval African urban society as a product of interactions among African communities who inhabited the region between 100 BCE and 500 CE. It deviates from standard approaches that credit urbanism and state in Africa to non-African agents. East Africa, then and now, was part of the broader world of the Indian Ocean. Globalism coincided with the political and economic transformations that occurred during the Tang-Sung-Yuan-Ming and Islamic Dynastic times, 600-1500 CE. Positioned as the gateway into and out of eastern Africa, the Swahili coast became a site through which people, inventions, and innovations bi-directionally migrated, were adopted, and evolved. Swahili peoples' agency and unique characteristics cannot be seen only through Islam's prism. Instead, their unique character is a consequence of social and economic interactions of actors along the coast, inland, and beyond the Indian Ocean.
Download or read book The Chertsey Tiles the Crusades and Global Textile Motifs written by Amanda Luyster and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-31 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While visual cultures mingled comfortably along the silk roads and on the shores of the Mediterranean, medieval England has sometimes been viewed – by both medieval and more recent writers – as isolated. In this Element the author introduces new evidence to show that this understanding of medieval England's visual relationship to the rest of the world demands revision. An international team led by the author has completed a digital reconstruction of the so-called Chertsey combat tiles (sophisticated pictorial floor tiles made c. 1250, England), including both images and lost Latin texts. Grounded in the discoveries made while completing this reconstruction, the author proposes new conclusions regarding the historical circumstances within which the Chertsey tiles were commissioned and their significant connections with global textile traditions.
Download or read book Ethiopia and the World 330 1500 CE written by Yonatan Binyam and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-30 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Cambridge Element offers an interdisciplinary introduction to the histories of the Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands from late antiquity to the late medieval period, updating traditional Western academic perspectives. Early scholarship, often by philologists and religious scholars, upheld 'Ethiopia' as an isolated repository of ancient Jewish and Christian texts. This work reframes the region's history, highlighting the political, economic, and cultural interconnections of different kingdoms, polities, and peoples. Utilizing recent advancements in Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies as well as Medieval Studies, it reevaluates key instances of contact between 'Ethiopia' and the world of Afro-Eurasia, situating the histories of the Christian, Muslim, and local-religious or 'pagan' groups living in the Red Sea littoral and the Eritrean-Ethiopian highlands in the context of the Global Middle Ages.
Download or read book Eurasian Politics Ideas Institutions and External Relations written by Mr Tulsiram and published by KW Publishers Pvt Ltd. This book was released on 2013-06-15 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transitional politics of Eurasian space is marked by a constant struggle among three sets of ideas and institutions: the 1 is the remarkable resilience of Soviet ideas and institutions; 2, an attempt by the regimes of these states to reinvent the historical and cultural traditions of preSoviet periods; and third is an attempt by a section of the powerful elite to superimpose Western liberal ideas and institutions. There is a strange intertwining of these ideas and institutions. This book examines the extent to which the postSoviet politics has departed from the Soviet one. What are the new ideational structures emerging in these states and how far have they crystallised into institutions? What are the external influences which are shaping the institutions in the Eurasian space? And finally, what are the various dynamics of geopolitics in this region? Experts from various countries will delve into the shifting dynamics of Eurasian politics.
Download or read book Southeast Asian Interconnections written by Derek Heng and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-05 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the late first millennium CE, Maritime Southeast Asia has been an inter-connected zone, with its societies and states maintaining economic and diplomatic relations with both China and Japan on the east, and the Indian Sub-Continent and Middle East on the west. This global connectedness was facilitated by merchant and shipping networks that originated from within and outside Southeast Asia, resulting in a trans-regional economy developing by the early second millennium CE. Sojourning populations began to appear in Maritime Southeast Asia, culminating in records of Chinese and Indian settlers in such places as Sumatra, Malay Peninsula and the Gulf of Siam by the mid-first millennium CE. At the same time, information of products that were harvested in Southeast Asia began to be appropriated by pockets of society in China, the India and the Middle East, resulting in the production of new knowledge and usages for these products in these markets.
Download or read book Late Tang China and the World 750 907 CE written by Shao-yun Yang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-25 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, the Tang dynasty (618-907) has acquired a reputation as the most 'cosmopolitan' period in Chinese history. The standard narrative also claims that this cosmopolitan openness faded after the An Lushan Rebellion of 755-763, to be replaced by xenophobic hostility toward all things foreign. This Element reassesses the cosmopolitanism-to-xenophobia narrative and presents a more empirically-grounded and nuanced interpretation of the Tang empire's foreign relations after 755.
Download or read book Slavery in East Asia written by Don J. Wyatt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-05 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In premodern China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, just as in the far less culturally cohesive countries composing the West of the Middle Ages, enslavement was an assumed condition of servitude warranting little examination, as the power and profits it afforded to the slaver made it a convention pursued unreflectively. Slavery in medieval East Asia shared with the West the commonplace assumption that nearly all humans were potential chattel, that once they had become owned beings, they could then be either sold or inherited. Yet, despite being representative of perhaps the most universalizable human practice of that age, slavery in medieval East Asia was also endowed with its own distinctive traits and traditions. Our awareness of these features of distinction contributes immeasurably to a more nuanced understanding of slavery as the ubiquitous and openly practiced institution that it once was and the now illicit and surreptitious one that it intractably remains.
Download or read book Early Tang China and the World 618 750 CE written by Shao-yun Yang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-30 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For about half a century, the Tang dynasty has held a reputation as the most 'cosmopolitan' period in Chinese history, marked by unsurpassed openness to foreign peoples and cultures and active promotion of international trade. Heavily influenced by Western liberal ideals and contemporary China's own self-fashioning efforts, this glamorous image of the Tang calls for some critical reexamination. This Element presents a broad and revisionist analysis of early Tang China's relations with the rest of the Eurasian world and argues that idealizing the Tang as exceptionally “cosmopolitan” limits our ability to think both critically and globally about its actions and policies as an empire.
Download or read book Studies on a Global History of Music written by Reinhard Strohm and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-09 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of a global history of music may be traced back to the Enlightenment, and today, the question of a conceptual framework for a history of music that pays due attention to global relationships in music is often raised. But how might a historical interpretation of those relationships proceed? How should it position, or justify, itself? What would 'Western music' look like in an account of music history that aspires to be truly global? The studies presented in this volume aim to promote post-European historical thinking. They are based on the idea that a global history of music cannot be one single, hegemonic history. They rather explore the paradigms and terminologies that might describe a history of many different voices. The chapters address historical practices and interpretations of music in different parts of the world, from Japan to Argentina and from Mexico to India. Many of these narratives are about relations between these cultures and the Western tradition; several also consider socio-political and historical circumstances that have affected music in the various regions. The book addresses aspects that Western musical historiography has tended to neglect even when looking at its own culture: performance, dance, nostalgia, topicality, enlightenment, the relationships between traditional, classical, and pop musics, and the regards croisés between European, Asian, or Latin American interpretations of each other’s musical traditions. These studies have been derived from the Balzan Musicology Project Towards a Global History of Music (2013–2016), which was funded by the International Balzan Foundation through the award of the Balzan Prize in Musicology to the editor, and designed by music historians and ethnomusicologists together. A global history of music may never be written in its entirety, but will rather be realised through interaction, practice, and discussion, in all parts of the world.
Download or read book Revival and Reconciliation written by Philip V. Bohlman and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-06-07 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sacred music has long contributed fundamentally to the making of Europe. The passage from origin myths to history, the sacred journeys that have mobilized pilgrims, crusaders, and colonizers, the politics and power sounded by the vox populi—all have joined in counterpoint to shape Europe’s historical longue durée. Drawing upon three decades of research in European sacred music, Philip V. Bohlman calls for a re-examination of European modernity in the twenty first century, a modernity shaped no less by canonic religious and musical practices than by the proliferation of belief systems that today more than ever respond to the diverse belief systems that engender the New Europe. In contrast to most studies of sacred musical practice in European history, with their emphasis on the musical repertories and ecclesiastical practices at the center of society, Bohlman turns our attention to individual and marginalized communities and to the collectives of believers to whose lives meaning accrues upon sounding the sacred together. In the historical chapters that open Revival and Reconciliation, Bohlman examines the genesis of modern history in the convergence and conflict the lie at the heart of the Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Critical to the meaning of these religions to Europe, Bohlman argues, has been their capacity to mobilize both sacred journey and social action, which enter the everyday lives of Europeans through folk religion, pilgrimage, and politics, the subjects of the second half of his study. The closing sections then cross the threshold from history into modernity, above all that of the New Europe, with its return to religion through revival and reconciliation. Based on an extensive ethnographic engagement with the sacred landscapes and sites of conflict in twenty-first-century Europe, Bohlman calls in his final chapters for new ways of hearing the silenced voices and the full chorus of sacred music in our contemporary world. Ethnomusicologists from different traditions as well as scholars of religious studies and the history of modern Europe will find Revival and Reconciliation a fascinating exploration of the connections between sacred music and the role it plays in the formations of the modern self.
Download or read book Loop of Jade written by Sarah Howe and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-05-07 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *WINNER OF THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2015* *WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES / PETERS FRASER + DUNLOP YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2015* *SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION 2015* There is a Chinese proverb that says: ‘It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.’ But geese, like daughters, know the obligation to return home. In her exquisite first collection, Sarah Howe explores a dual heritage, journeying back to Hong Kong in search of her roots. With extraordinary range and power, the poems build into a meditation on hybridity, intermarriage and love – what meaning we find in the world, in art, and in each other. Crossing the bounds of time, race and language, this is an enthralling exploration of self and place, of migration and inheritance, and introduces an unmistakable new voice in British poetry.
