Yang Style Traditional Long Form T'ai Chi Ch'uan

Yang Style Traditional Long Form T'ai Chi Ch'uan
Author: Gordon Muir
Publisher: Blue Snake Books
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2008-05-13
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 9781583942215

Gordon Muir began his martial arts studies at the age of twelve, followed by years of serious study of a wide variety of disciplines including judo, kyokushinkai, karate, kempo, several kung fu styles, and kickboxing. Eventually he discovered the internal martial arts, which led to t’ai chi and Master T. T. Liang, renowned teacher of Yang style. The culmination of the author’s longtime study of this style is this enlightening look at the Yang style of t’ai chi. Focusing on the revered traditional form rather than the more recently created short form, the book describes in depth the type of movement t’ai chi strives for that distinguishes it from other martial arts. Clear and concise instructions help students understand how to move in order to create internal strength. Numerous photographs and detailed descriptions showcase and simplify the movements, which include the traditional Yang stances, hand and arm positions, and moving and powering. Written in a simple, engaging style, the book is designed to help new students get started in this rewarding tradition and more advanced practitioners deepen their knowledge of it.

Re-Imaging Japanese Women

Re-Imaging Japanese Women
Author: Anne E. Imamura
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 1996-07-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780520202634

Re-Imaging Japanese Women takes a revealing look at women whose voices have only recently begun to be heard in Japanese society: politicians, practitioners of traditional arts, writers, radicals, wives, mothers, bar hostesses, department store and blue-collar workers. This unique collection of essays gives a broad, interdisciplinary view of contemporary Japanese women while challenging readers to see the development of Japanese women's lives against the backdrop of domestic and global change. These essays provide a "second generation" analysis of roles, issues and social change. The collection brings up to date the work begun in Gail Lee Bernstein's Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 (California, 1991), exploring disparities between the current range of images of Japanese women and the reality behind the choices women make.

The Suit

The Suit
Author: Christopher Breward
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2016-04-15
Genre: Design
ISBN: 1780235585

A beautifully tailored history of this fashion staple—at once a garment of tradition, power, and subversion. The Suit unpicks the story of this most familiar garment, from its emergence in western Europe at the end of the seventeenth century to today. Suit-wearing figures such as the Savile Row gentleman and the Wall Street businessman have long embodied ideas of tradition, masculinity, power, and respectability, but the suit has also been used to disrupt concepts of gender and conformity. Adopted and subverted by women, artists, musicians, and social revolutionaries through the decades—from dandies and Sapeurs to the Zoot Suit and Le Smoking—the suit is also a device for challenging the status quo. For all those interested in the history of menswear, this beautifully illustrated book offers new perspectives on this most mundane, and poetic, product of modern culture.

Form, Style and Meaning in Byzantine Church Architecture

Form, Style and Meaning in Byzantine Church Architecture
Author: Hans Buchwald
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2024-10-28
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1040231624

Using detailed analyses of individual buildings as a point of departure, Professor Buchwald here examines various approaches to Byzantine architectural forms, and raises questions concerning the use of stylistic and other forms of analysis. One group of articles focuses on stylistic currents in Asia Minor, including that of the 13th-century Lascarid dynasty, previously unknown. Others explore methods which appear to have been used in the design of Byzantine churches, such as dimensional ’rules of thumb’, modular and geometric systems of proportion, and the quadratura, hitherto recognised only in Western architecture. The final essays pose further questions: what were the goals and achievements of Byzantine architects, when they transformed older existing buildings? How, and why, did they use stereometric Euclidean geometry? And was there any ultimately Platonic connection?

The Forgotten Compass

The Forgotten Compass
Author: Werner H. Kelber
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2022-09-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1725278332

As form criticism arose, the French anthropologist Marcel Jousse developed a hermeneutical paradigm, global in scope and prescient in its vision but opposed to the philological paradigm of biblical studies. While the philological methodology came to define modernity’s biblical hermeneutics, Jousse’s rhythmically energized paradigm was marginalized and largely forgotten. Although Jousse has left relatively few traces in writing, many of his more than one thousand lectures, delivered at four different academic institutions in Paris between 1931 and 1957, have been edited and translated into English by Edgard Sienaert. The Forgotten Compass surveys Jousse’s views on biblical tradition and scholarship, documenting the relevance of his paradigm for current biblical studies. What distinguishes Jousse’s paradigm is that it is firmly established within the orbit of ancient communications and deeply rooted in Jewish tradition. The Forgotten Compass challenges readers to come to appreciate the print Bible’s lack of fluency in the very sensibilities privileged by Jousse’s paradigm and to raise consciousness about the multivocal, multisensory culture in which the biblical traditions emerged and from which they drew their initial nourishment.

Theorizing Built Form and Culture

Theorizing Built Form and Culture
Author: Kapila D. Silva
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2024-03-08
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1003856527

In this collection of essays, Theorizing Built Form and Culture: The Legacy of Amos Rapoport – a felicitation volume to celebrate the significance of Professor Amos Rapoport's lifelong scholarship – scholars from around the world discuss the analytical relevance, expansion, and continuing application of these contributions in developing an advanced understanding of mutual relationships between people and built environments across cultures. Professor Amos Rapoport has espoused an intellectual and theoretical legacy on environmental design scholarship that explains how cultural factors play a significant role in the ways people create and use environments as well as the way environments, in turn, influence people’s behavior. This volume presents a hitherto-not-seen, unique, and singular work that simultaneously articulates a cohesive framework of Rapoport’s architectural theories and demonstrates how that theoretical approach be used in architectural inquiry, education, and practice across environmental scales, types, and cultural contexts. It also acknowledges, for the very first time, how this theoretical legacy has pioneered the decolonizing of the Eurocentric approaches to architectural inquiry and has thus privileged an inclusive, cross-cultural perspective that laid the groundwork to understand and analyze non-Western design traditions. The book thus reflects a wide range of cross-cultural and cross-contextual range to which Professor Rapoport’s theories apply, a general notion of theoretical validity he always advocated for in his own writings. The volume is a paramount source for scholars and students of architecture who are interested in understanding how culture mediates the creation, use, and preservation of the built environment.

Text as Father

Text as Father
Author: Alan Cole
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2005-08-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0520242769

Alan Cole sheds new light on the origin & nature of Mahāyāna Buddhism with close readings of four well-known texts: the Lotus Sūtra, Diamond Sūtra, Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra, & Vimalakīrtinirdeśa.

Living with Koryak Traditions

Living with Koryak Traditions
Author: Alexander D. King
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2011
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0803236018

An examination of the globalization of culture and the invention of tradition, and what it means to modern Koryak people living in post-Soviet Siberia.