Ritual Arts of the New World

Ritual Arts of the New World
Author: Octavio Paz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 454
Release: 2000
Genre: Art
ISBN:

A collection of historical and cultural essays explores the history of the New World before its discovery by Christopher Columbus, and of the magnificent civilizations overrun and destroyed by the Spanish conquerors in the early 16th century: from the empire of the Incas in Peru and the Mayan civilization on the high plateaux of Guatemala to the Olmec and Aztec cultures in Mexico and the populations of the Amazon territories.

Ritual Art of India

Ritual Art of India
Author: Ajit Mookerjee
Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Co
Total Pages: 198
Release: 1998-09
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780892817214

RITUAL ART OF INDIA shows the splendor and diversity of an art form that has enriched every stage of human life in India--and reveals the inward-seeking quality of relationship with the divine that exemplifies Indian ritual art. A stunning guide with over 100 color photos and 34 b&w photos.

Daily Rituals

Daily Rituals
Author: Mason Currey
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-04-23
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 0307962377

More than 150 inspired—and inspiring—novelists, poets, playwrights, painters, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians on how they subtly maneuver the many (self-inflicted) obstacles and (self-imposed) daily rituals to get done the work they love to do. Franz Kafka, frustrated with his living quarters and day job, wrote in a letter to Felice Bauer in 1912, “time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.” Kafka is one of 161 minds who describe their daily rituals to get their work done, whether by waking early or staying up late; whether by self-medicating with doughnuts or bathing, drinking vast quantities of coffee, or taking long daily walks. Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up in the kitchen, the top of the refrigerator as his desk, dreamily fondling his “male configurations”.... Jean-Paul Sartre chewed on Corydrane tablets (a mix of amphetamine and aspirin), ingesting ten times the recommended dose each day ... Descartes liked to linger in bed, his mind wandering in sleep through woods, gardens, and enchanted palaces where he experienced “every pleasure imaginable.” Here are: Anthony Trollope, who demanded of himself that each morning he write three thousand words (250 words every fifteen minutes for three hours) before going off to his job at the postal service, which he kept for thirty-three years during the writing of more than two dozen books ... Karl Marx ... Woody Allen ... Agatha Christie ... George Balanchine, who did most of his work while ironing ... Leo Tolstoy ... Charles Dickens ... Pablo Picasso ... George Gershwin, who, said his brother Ira, worked for twelve hours a day from late morning to midnight, composing at the piano in pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers.... Here also are the daily rituals of Charles Darwin, Andy Warhol, John Updike, Twyla Tharp, Benjamin Franklin, William Faulkner, Jane Austen, Anne Rice, and Igor Stravinsky (he was never able to compose unless he was sure no one could hear him and, when blocked, stood on his head to “clear the brain”).

Rituals of Resistance

Rituals of Resistance
Author: Jason R. Young
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2011-02-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807139238

In Rituals of Resistance Jason R. Young explores the religious and ritual practices that linked West-Central Africa with the Lowcountry region of Georgia and South Carolina during the era of slavery. The choice of these two sites mirrors the historical trajectory of the transatlantic slave trade which, for centuries, transplanted Kongolese captives to the Lowcountry through the ports of Charleston and Savannah. Analyzing the historical exigencies of slavery and the slave trade that sent not only men and women but also cultural meanings, signs, symbols, and patterns across the Atlantic, Young argues that religion operated as a central form of resistance against slavery and the ideological underpinnings that supported it. Through a series of comparative chapters on Christianity, ritual medicine, burial practices, and transmigration, Young details the manner in which Kongolese people, along with their contemporaries and their progeny who were enslaved in the Americas, utilized religious practices to resist the savagery of the slave trade and slavery itself. When slaves acted outside accepted parameters—in transmigration, spirit possession, ritual internment, and conjure—Young explains, they attacked not only the condition of being a slave, but also the systems of modernity and scientific rationalism that supported slavery. In effect, he argues, slave spirituality played a crucial role in the resocialization of the slave body and behavior away from the oppressions and brutalities of the master class. Young's work expands traditional scholarship on slavery to include both the extensive work done by African historians and current interdisciplinary debates in cultural studies, anthropology, and literature. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources from both American and African archives, including slave autobiography, folktales, and material culture, Rituals of Resistance offers readers a nuanced understanding of the cultural and religious connections that linked blacks in Africa with their enslaved contemporaries in the Americas. Moreover, Young's groundbreaking work gestures toward broader themes and connections, using the case of the Kongo and the Lowcountry to articulate the development of a much larger African Atlantic space that connected peoples, cultures, languages, and lives on and across the ocean's waters.

Res

Res
Author: Jaś Elsner
Publisher: Peabody Museum Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2011-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0873658612

This double volume of the renowned international journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics includes “Aesthetics’ non-recyclable ground” by Félix Duque; “Seeing through dead eyes” by Jonathan Hay; “The hidden aesthetic of red in the painted tombs of Oaxaca” by Diana Magaloni; “A consideration of the quatrefoil motif in Preclassic Mesoamerica” by Julia Guernsey; “Hunters, Sufis, soldiers, and minstrels” by Cynthia Becker; “Figures fidjiennes” by Marc Rochette; “A sacred landscape” by Rachel Kousser; “Military architecture as a political tool in the Renaissance” by Francesco Benelli; “The icon as performer and as performative utterance” by Marie Gasper-Hulvat; “Image and site” by Jas’ Elsner; “Untimely objects” by Ara H. Merjian; “Max Ernst in Arizona” by Samantha Kavky; “Form as revolt” by Sebastian Zeidler; “Embodiments and art beliefs” by Filippo Fimiani; “The theft of the goddess Amba Mata” by Deborah Stein; and contributions to “Lectures, Documents and Discussions” by Gottfried Semper, Spyros Papapetros, Erwin Panofsky, Megan R. Luke, Francesco Paolo Adorno, and Remo Guidieri.

Ritual, Heritage and Identity

Ritual, Heritage and Identity
Author: Christiane Brosius
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2020-11-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1000087239

This book explores the importance of ritual and ritual theory to discourses of authenticity and originality, thereby deepening our insight into concepts of cultural heritage, identity and nation in a globalised world. The volume is the first interdisciplinary attempt to understand the significance of rituals and related performative traditions in the creation of grounded cultural identities, ‘home’ and heritage as geographically experienceable locations. It assembles perspectives from social and cultural anthropology, performance studies, education and arts that can deal with the politics of revitalisation and preservation of ritualised traditions. While some chapters in this book emphasise on the ritualisation of cultural heritage by concentrating on power relations and politics, as well as actual processes of identification, especially for marginalised ethnic groups or migrant communities, others explore how rituals as intangible heritage are strategically employed by different groups all over the world to make their claims public and to improve and negotiate their position on a local, national or global platform. This book recognises ritualised performances as transnational and cross-cultural phenomena, which are not only tied to and defined via national territories and identities but which also demand new theoretical and methodological approaches towards the discussion of rituals and heritage.

Civilizing Rituals

Civilizing Rituals
Author: Carol Duncan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2005-06-20
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1134913125

Illustrated with over fifty photos, Civilizing Rituals merges contemporary debates with lively discussion and explores central issues involved in the making and displaying of art as industry and how it is presented to the community. Carol Duncan looks at how nations, institutions and private individuals present art , and how art museums are shaped by cultural, social and political determinants. Civilizing Rituals is ideal reading for students of art history and museum studies, and professionals in the field will also find much of interest here.

ART MYTH AND RITUAL P

ART MYTH AND RITUAL P
Author: Kwang-chih CHANG
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0674029402

A leading scholar in the United States on Chinese archaeology challenges long-standing conceptions of the rise of political authority in ancient China. Questioning Marx's concept of an "Asiatic" mode of production, Wittfogel's "hydraulic hypothesis," and cultural-materialist theories on the importance of technology, K. C. Chang builds an impressive counterargument, one which ranges widely from recent archaeological discoveries to studies of mythology, ancient Chinese poetry, and the iconography of Shang food vessels.

Huxley's Brave New World: Essays

Huxley's Brave New World: Essays
Author: David Garrett Izzo
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2014-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0786480033

Aldous Huxley's prophetic novel of ideas warned of a terrible future then 600 years away. Though Brave New World was published less than a century ago in 1932, many elements of the novel's dystopic future now seem an eerily familiar part of life in the 21st century. These essays analyze the influence of Brave New World as a literary and philosophical document and describe how Huxley forecast the problems of late capitalism. Topics include the anti-utopian ideals represented by the rigid caste system depicted, the novel's influence on the philosophy of "culture industry" philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the Nietzschean birth of tragedy in the novel's penultimate scene, and the relationship of the novel to other dystopian works.