Download or read book Sandalwood and Carrion written by James McHugh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-29 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James McHugh offers the first comprehensive examination of the concepts and practices related to smell in pre-modern India. Drawing on a wide range of textual sources, from poetry to medical texts, he shows the deeply significant religious and cultural role of smell in India throughout the first millennium CE. McHugh describes sophisticated arts of perfumery, developed in temples, monasteries, and courts, which resulted in worldwide ocean trade. He shows that various religious discourses on the purpose of life emphasized the pleasures of the senses, including olfactory experience, as a valid end in themselves. Fragrances and stenches were analogous to certain values, aesthetic or ethical, and in a system where karmic results often had a sensory impact-where evil literally stank-the ethical and aesthetic became difficult to distinguish. Sandalwood and Carrion explores smell in pre-modern India from many perspectives, covering such topics as philosophical accounts of smell perception, odors in literature, the history of perfumery in India, the significance of sandalwood in Buddhism, and the divine offering of perfume to the gods.
Download or read book Sandalwood and Carrion written by James McHugh and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James McHugh offers the first comprehensive examination of the concepts and practices related to smell in pre-modern India. Drawing on a wide range of textual sources, from poetry to medical texts, he shows the deeply significant religious and cultural role of smell in India throughout the first millennium CE.
Download or read book Sacred Space Sacred Thread written by John W. Welch and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2019-04-17 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The insightful studies contained in this book will be of significant value to anyone interested in experiencing more deeply the intersections between materiality and spirituality. Part 1 introduces readers into Egyptian, Israelite, Christian, and Hindu temples, shrines, or sanctuaries. Part 2 helps readers understand how items of colored fabrics, clothing, robes, and veils, convey ritual meanings. Part 3 reports two panel discussions that exemplify the pathway of fruitful conversation. Matter and spirit might seem to some to be polar opposites. But as these studies by distinguished and diverse scholars demonstrate, spiritual experiences are constructively defined and refined within the coordinates of place and time. Sacred space, as well as sacred cloth, define borders, but not necessarily boundaries, between the sacred and the profane. These material coordinates physically enclose and also spiritually disclose. They both symbolize and synergize, as they encompass and expansively inspire. These original and enjoyable presentations will help all readers to hold tenaciously to the tenets and also the tensions inherent in physical spiritual experiences.
Download or read book Indian Sandalwood written by A. N. Arunkumar and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: i="" This book provides a global perspective of Indian Sandalwood categorized as ‘Vulnerable’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. It deals with history, distribution, propagation, chemistry, utilization, improvement, trade, and conservation in the present context. This book explores ways and means for restoring its past glory by creating awareness for its conservation and sustainable utilization. The content encompasses informative tables, appropriate graphs and figures, and illustrations with photographs and line drawings. This compendium would be useful for foresters, forestry professionals, botanists, policymakers, conservationists, NGOs, and researchers in the academia and the industry sectors.
Download or read book Art Scents written by Larry Shiner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the arts of incense and perfume making are among the oldest of human cultural practices, it is only in the last two decades that the use of odors in the creation of art has begun to attract attention under the rubrics of 'olfactory art' or 'scent art.' Contemporary olfactory art ranges from gallery and museum installations and the use of scents in music, film, and drama, to the ambient scenting of stores and the use of scents in cuisine. All these practices raise aesthetic and ethical issues, but there is a long-standing philosophical tradition, most notably articulated in the work of Kant and Hegel, which argues that the sense of smell lacks the cognitive capacity to be a vehicle for either serious art or reflective aesthetic experience. This neglect and denigration of the aesthetic potential of smell was further reinforced by Darwin's and Freud's views of the human sense of smell as a near useless evolutionary vestige. Smell has thus been widely neglected within the philosophy of art. Larry Shiner's wide-ranging book counters this tendency, aiming to reinvigorate an interest in smell as an aesthetic experience. He begins by countering the classic arguments against the aesthetic potential of smell with both philosophical arguments and evidence from neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, history, linguistics, and literature. He then draws on this empirical evidence to explore the range of aesthetic issues that arise in each of the major areas of the olfactory arts, whether those issues arise from the use of scents with theater and music, sculpture and installation, architecture and urban design, or avant-garde cuisine. Shiner gives special attention to the art status of perfumes and to the ethical issues that arise from scenting the body, the ambient scenting of buildings, and the use of scents in fast food. Shiner's book provides both philosophers and other academic readers with not only a comprehensive overview of the aesthetic issues raised by the emergence of the olfactory arts, but also shows the way forward for further studies of the aesthetics of smell.
Download or read book An Unholy Brew written by James McHugh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Books about the global history of alcohol almost never give attention to India. But a wide range of texts provide plenty of evidence that there was a thriving culture of drinking in ancient and medieval India, from public carousing at the brewery and drinking house to imbibing at festivals andweddings. There was also an elite drinking culture depicted in poetic texts (often in an erotic mode), and medical texts explain how to balance drink and health. Not everyone drank, however, and there were sophisticated religious arguments for abstinence.The first book on alcohol in pre-modern India, An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian Religion and History uses a wide range of sources from the Vedas to the Kamasutra to explore drinks and styles of drinking, as well as rationales for abstinence from the earliest Sanskrit written records through thesecond millennium CE. McHugh begins by surveying the intoxicating drinks that were available, including grain beers, palm toddy, and imported wine, detailing the ways people used grains, sugars, fruits, and herbs over the centuries to produce an impressive array of liquors. He outlines myths andepics that explain how drink came into being and how it was assigned the ritual and legal status it has in our time. The book also explores Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain moral and legal texts on drink and abstinence, as well as how drink is used in some Tantric rituals, and translates in full a detaileddescription of the goddess Liquor, Sura, Cannabis, betel, soma, and opium are also considered. Finally, McHugh investigates what has happened to these drinks, stories, and theories in the last few centuries.An Unholy Brew brings to life the overlooked, complex world of brewing, drinking, and abstaining in pre-modern India, and offers illuminating case studies on topics such as law and medicine, even providing recipes for some drinks.
Download or read book The Buddha s Footprint written by Johan Elverskog and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2020-01-24 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A corrective to the contemporary idea that Buddhism has always been an environmentally friendly religion In the current popular imagination, Buddhism is often understood to be a religion intrinsically concerned with the environment. The Dharma, the name given to Buddhist teachings by Buddhists, states that all things are interconnected. Therefore, Buddhists are perceived as extending compassion beyond people and animals to include plants and the earth itself out of a concern for the total living environment. In The Buddha's Footprint, Johan Elverskog contends that only by jettisoning this contemporary image of Buddhism as a purely ascetic and apolitical tradition of contemplation can we see the true nature of the Dharma. According to Elverskog, Buddhism is, in fact, an expansive religious and political system premised on generating wealth through the exploitation of natural resources. Elverskog surveys the expansion of Buddhism across Asia in the period between 500 BCE and 1500 CE, when Buddhist institutions were built from Iran and Azerbaijan in the west, to Kazakhstan and Siberia in the north, Japan in the east, and Sri Lanka and Indonesia in the south. He examines the prosperity theology at the heart of the Dharma that declared riches to be a sign of good karma and the means by which spritiual status could be elevated through donations bequeathed to Buddhist institutions. He demonstrates how this scriptural tradition propelled Buddhists to seek wealth and power across Asia and to exploit both the people and the environment. Elverskog shows the ways in which Buddhist expansion not only entailed the displacement of local gods and myths with those of the Dharma—as was the case with Christianity and Islam—but also involved fundamentally transforming earlier social and political structures and networks of economic exchange. The Buddha's Footprint argues that the institutionalization of the Dharma was intimately connected to agricultural expansion, resource extraction, deforestation, urbanization, and the monumentalization of Buddhism itself.
Download or read book Scent from the Garden of Paradise Musk and the Medieval Islamic World written by Anya H. King and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-01-09 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scent from the Garden of Paradise: Musk and the Medieval Islamic World traces the history of musk from ancient Asia to the early medieval Islamic world and examines the important role musk played in perfumery and medicine in this new context.
Download or read book Seven Scents written by Dorothy P. Abram and published by Singing Dragon. This book was released on 2017-06-21 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identifying seven aromatic plants with specific psychoactive properties, the author describes the different states of consciousness that are achieved, manipulated, and transformed by the people and cultures that use them in specialized ways, both in the past and in the contemporary world. Focusing on the role that scent plays in healing and spiritual experience, the author explores the use of the fragrant tulsi plant both in Hindu women's ritual and to treat mental and physical ailments. She analyses the appearance of the lotus in sacred Egyptian customs, and as a model of the process of psychological change through metaphorical journeys, as witnessed in shamanic practice and its relation to the Biblical book of Job. Making a significant contribution to the understanding of the healing state, the book is stimulating reading for all those who work with and are interested in aromatics, the sense of smell, or the nature of spiritual experience.
Download or read book Burning the Dead written by David Arnold and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Burning the Dead traces the evolution of cremation in India and the South Asian diaspora across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through interconnected histories of movement, space, identity, and affect, it examines how the so-called traditional practice of Hindu cremation on an open-air funeral pyre was culturally transformed and materially refashioned under British rule, following intense Western hostility, colonial sanitary acceptance, and Indian adaptation. David Arnold examines the critical reception of Hindu cremation abroad, particularly in Britain, where India formed a primary reference point for the cremation debates of the late nineteenth century, and explores the struggle for official recognition of cremation among Hindu and Sikh communities around the globe. Above all, Arnold foregrounds the growing public presence and assertive political use made of Hindu cremation, its increasing social inclusivity, and its close identification with Hindu reform movements and modern Indian nationhood.
Download or read book Religion Landscape and Material Culture in Pre modern South Asia written by Tilottama Mukherjee and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-02-10 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights emerging trends and new themes in South Asian history. It covers issues broadly related to religion, materiality and nature from differing perspectives and methods to offer a kaleidoscopic view of Indian history until the late eighteenth century. The essays in the volume focus on understanding questions of premodern religion, material culture processes and their spatial and environmental contexts through a study of networks of commodities and cultural and religious landscapes. From the early history of coastal regions such as Gujarat and Bengal to material networks of political culture, from temples and their connection with maritime trade to the importance of landscape in influencing temple-building, from regions considered peripheral to mainstream historiography to the development of religious sects, this collection of articles maps the diverse networks and connections across regions and time. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, archaeology, museum and heritage studies, religion, especially Hinduism, Sufism and Buddhism, and South Asian studies.
Download or read book Aromas of Asia written by Hannah Gould and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2023-10-12 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A uniquely powerful marker of ethnic, gender, and class identities, scent can also overwhelm previously constructed boundaries and transform social-sensory realities within contexts of environmental degradation, pathogen outbreaks, and racial politics. This innovative multidisciplinary volume critically examines olfaction in Asian societies with the goal of unlocking its full potential as an analytical frame and lived phenomenon. Featuring contributions from international scholars with deep knowledge of the region, this volume conceptualizes Asia and its borders as a dynamic, transnationally connected space of olfactory exchange. Using examples such as trade along the Silk Road; the diffusion of dharmic religious traditions out of South Asia; the waves of invasion, colonization, and forced relocation that shaped the history of the continent; and other “sensory highways” of contact, the contributors break down essentializing olfactory tropes and reveal how scent functions as a category of social and moral boundary-marking and boundary-breaching within, between, and beyond Asian societies. Smell shapes individual, collective, and state-based memory, as well as discourses about heritage and power. As such, it suggests a pervasive and powerful intimacy that contributes to our understanding of the human condition, mobility, and interconnection. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Khoo Gaik Cheng, Jean Duruz, Qian Jia, Shivani Kapoor, Adam Liebman, Lorenzo Marinucci, Peter Romaskiewicz, Saki Tanada, Aubrey Tang, and Ruth E. Toulson.
Download or read book Sensory Anthropology written by Kelvin E. Y. Low and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From constructions of rasa (taste) in pre-colonial India and Indonesia, children and sensory discipline within the monastic orders of the Edo period of Japan, to sound expressives among the Semai in Peninsular Malaysia, the sensory soteriology of Tibetan Buddhism, and sensory warscapes of WWII, this book analyses how sensory cultures in Asia frame social order and disorder. Illustrated with a wide range of fascinating examples, it explores key anthropological themes, such as culture and language, food and foodways, morality, transnationalism and violence, and provides granular analyses on sensory relations, sensory pairings, and intersensoriality. By offering rich ethnographic perspectives on inter- and intra-regional sense relations, the book engages with a variety of sensory models, and moves beyond narrower sensory regimes bounded by group, nation or temporality. A pioneering exploration of the senses in and out of Asia, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students in social and cultural anthropology.
Download or read book Empires of the Senses written by Andrew J. Rotter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-21 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When encountering unfamiliar environments in India and the Philippines, the British and the Americans wrote extensively about the first taste of mango and meat spiced with cumin, the smell of excrement and coconut oil, the feel of humidity and rough cloth against skin, the sound of bells and insects, and the appearance of dark-skinned natives and lepers. So too did the colonial subjects they encountered perceive the agents of empire through their senses and their skins. Empire of course involved economics, geopolitics, violence, a desire for order and greatness, a craving for excitement and adventure. It also involved an encounter between authorities and subjects, an everyday process of social interaction, political negotiation, policing, schooling, and healing. While these all concerned what people thought about each other, perceptions of others, as Andrew Rotter shows, were also formed through seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. In this book, Rotter offers a sensory history of the British in India from the formal imposition of their rule to its end (1857-1947) and the Americans in the Philippines from annexation to independence (1898-1946). The British and the Americans saw themselves as the civilizers of what they judged backward societies, and they believed that a vital part of the civilizing process was to properly prioritize the senses and to ensure them against offense or affront. Societies that looked shabby, were noisy and smelly, felt wrong, and consumed unwholesome food in unmannerly ways were unfit for self-government. It was the duty of allegedly more sensorily advanced Anglo-Americans to educate them before formally withdrawing their power. Indians and Filipinos had different ideas of what constituted sensory civilization and to some extent resisted imperial efforts to impose their own versions. What eventually emerged were compromises between these nations' sensory regimes. A fascinating and original comparative work, Empires of the Senses offers new perspectives on imperial history.
Download or read book Perception Cognition and Aesthetics written by Dena Shottenkirk and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-29 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses key questions related to how content in thought is derived from perceptual experience. It includes chapters that focus on single issues on perception and cognition, as well as others that relate these issues to an important social construct that involves both perceptual experience and cognitive activities: aesthetics. While the volume includes many diverse views, several prominent themes unite the individual essays: a challenge to the notion of the discreet, and non-temporal, unit of perception, a challenge to the traditional divide between perception and cognition, and a challenge to the traditional divide between unconscious and conscious intentionality. Additionally, the chapters discuss the content of perceptual experience, the value of traditional notions of content, disjunctivism, adverbialism, and phenomenal experience. The final section of essays dealing with perception and cognition in aesthetics features work in experimental aesthetics and unique perspectives from artists and gallerists working outside of philosophy. Perception, Cognition and Aesthetics is a timely volume that offers a range of unique perspectives on debates in philosophy of mind surrounding perception and cognition. It will also appeal to scholars working in aesthetics and art theory who are interested in the ways these debates influence our understanding of art.
Download or read book Handbook of Research on Consumerism and Buying Behavior in Developing Nations written by Gbadamosi, Ayantunji and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having a grasp on what appeals to consumers and how consumers are making purchasing decisions is essential to the success of any organization that thrives by offering a product or service. Despite the importance of consumer knowledge and understanding, research-based insight into the buying patterns and consumption habits of individuals in emerging nations remains limited. The Handbook of Research on Consumerism and Buying Behavior in Developing Nations takes a critical look at the often overlooked opportunities available for driving consumer demand and interest in developing countries. Emphasizing the power of the consumer market in emerging economies and their overall role in the global market system, this edited volume features research-based perspectives on consumer perception, behavior, and relationship management across industries. This timely publication is an essential resource for marketing professionals, consumer researchers, international business strategists, scholars, and graduate-level students.
Download or read book Olfaction An Interdisciplinary Perspective from Philosophy to Life Sciences written by Nicola Di Stefano and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a broad and timely perspective on research on olfaction and its current technological challenges. It specifically emphasizes the interdisciplinary context in which olfaction is investigated in contemporary research. From aesthetics to sociology, from bioengineering to anthropology, the different chapters discuss a wide variety of issues arising from olfaction research and its application in different contexts. By highlighting the overlaps between different areas of research, the book fosters a better communication between disciplines and leads towards a better understanding of the role of olfaction in human perception and cognition. This inspiring read is of interest to students, researchers and practitioners in psychology, philosophy, bioengineering, and cultural studies.
