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Author: Prudence M. Rice
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607328895
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Anthropomorphizing the Cosmos explores the sociocultural significance of more than three hundred Middle Preclassic Maya figurines uncovered at the site of Nixtun-Ch'ich' on Lake Petén Itzá in northern Guatemala. In this careful, holistic, and detailed analysis of the Petén lakes figurines—hand-modeled, terracotta anthropomorphic fragments, animal figures, and musical instruments such as whistles and ocarinas—Prudence M. Rice engages with a broad swath of theory and comparative data on Maya ritual practice. Presenting original data, Anthropomorphizing the Cosmos offers insight into the synchronous appearance of fired-clay figurines with the emergence of societal complexity in and beyond Mesoamerica. Rice situates these Preclassic Maya figurines in the broader context of Mesoamerican human figural representation, identifies possible connections between anthropomorphic figurine heads and the origins of calendrics and other writing in Mesoamerica, and examines the role of anthropomorphic figurines and zoomorphic musical instruments in Preclassic Maya ritual. The volume shows how community rituals involving the figurines helped to mitigate the uncertainties of societal transitions, including the beginnings of settled agricultural life, the emergence of social differentiation and inequalities, and the centralization of political power and decision-making in the Petén lowlands. Literature on Maya ritual, cosmology, and specialized artifacts has traditionally focused on the Classic period, with little research centering on the very beginnings of Maya sociopolitical organization and ideological beliefs in the Middle Preclassic. Anthropomorphizing the Cosmos is a welcome contribution to the understanding of the earliest Maya and will be significant to Mayanists and Mesoamericanists as well as nonspecialists with interest in these early figurines
Author: Prudence M. Rice
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607328895
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Get Book Here
Book Description
Anthropomorphizing the Cosmos explores the sociocultural significance of more than three hundred Middle Preclassic Maya figurines uncovered at the site of Nixtun-Ch'ich' on Lake Petén Itzá in northern Guatemala. In this careful, holistic, and detailed analysis of the Petén lakes figurines—hand-modeled, terracotta anthropomorphic fragments, animal figures, and musical instruments such as whistles and ocarinas—Prudence M. Rice engages with a broad swath of theory and comparative data on Maya ritual practice. Presenting original data, Anthropomorphizing the Cosmos offers insight into the synchronous appearance of fired-clay figurines with the emergence of societal complexity in and beyond Mesoamerica. Rice situates these Preclassic Maya figurines in the broader context of Mesoamerican human figural representation, identifies possible connections between anthropomorphic figurine heads and the origins of calendrics and other writing in Mesoamerica, and examines the role of anthropomorphic figurines and zoomorphic musical instruments in Preclassic Maya ritual. The volume shows how community rituals involving the figurines helped to mitigate the uncertainties of societal transitions, including the beginnings of settled agricultural life, the emergence of social differentiation and inequalities, and the centralization of political power and decision-making in the Petén lowlands. Literature on Maya ritual, cosmology, and specialized artifacts has traditionally focused on the Classic period, with little research centering on the very beginnings of Maya sociopolitical organization and ideological beliefs in the Middle Preclassic. Anthropomorphizing the Cosmos is a welcome contribution to the understanding of the earliest Maya and will be significant to Mayanists and Mesoamericanists as well as nonspecialists with interest in these early figurines
Author: Gabriella Airenti
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
ISBN: 2889630382
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 132
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Book Description
The attribution of human traits to non-humans - animals, artifacts or even natural events - is an attitude, deeply grounded in human mind. It is frequent to see children addressing dolls and figures as if they were alive. Adults often attribute mental states and emotions to animals. In everyday life humans speak of events such as fires as if they possessed some form of intentionality, a behavior sometimes shared also by scientists. Furthermore, a systematized form of anthropomorphism underlies most religions. The pervasiveness of this phenomenon makes it a particularly interesting object of psychological enquiry. Psychologists have set out to understand which aspects of human mind are involved in this behavior, its motivations and the circumstances favoring its enactment. Moreover, there is an ongoing debate among scientists about the merits or harm of anthropomorphism in the scientific study of animal behavior and in scientific discourse. Despite the interest and the specificity of the topic most of the relevant studies are scattered across disciplines and have not built a systematic research framework. This observation has motivated the collection of articles presented here, under the unifying perspective of the cognitive underpinnings of anthropomorphism. Within this general umbrella, the authors included in this e-book have explored the issues mentioned above from different points of view. From their work it emerges that far from being the result of naive beliefs, the exercise of anthropomorphism involves a multiplicity of mental abilities including perception and imagination. They also show that the context and the interactive situation are crucial to understanding this phenomenon. Some authors analyze the relationship between anthropomorphization and theory of mind abilities both in typical and atypical populations. Finally, others contributions have identified possible benefits deriving from the natural attitude to anthropomorphize, as a design philosophy for robots and artifacts in general, or as a useful heuristic in the scientific study of animal behavior.
Author: Ashley Curtis
Publisher: Kommode Verlag
ISBN: 3905574055
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 191
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Book Description
The currently unfolding ecological catastrophe is the result of more than just deforestation, fossil fuel extraction, and factory farming. Behind the immediate causes of the degradation of our environment lies something else: a deeply rooted but ultimately absurd understanding of our place in the universe. Through a series of encounters with a striking array of protagonists - from revolutionary physicists and embattled philosophers to subsistence hunters and Himalayan shamans - The Soul in the Stone exposes the incoherence of the barren, human-centered perspective dominant in most societies today. It recommends instead an alternative worldview: one that acknowledges and honors non-human experience and, precisely because it does, is both more logically consistent and more fulfilling. And might just save the planet.
Author: Gregory Allen Schrempp
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773539891
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Examining the nature of myth-making and its surprising appearance in popular science writing.
Author: Brigitte Faugère
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607329956
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 419
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Book Description
In Anthropomorphic Imagery in the Mesoamerican Highlands, Latin American, North American, and European researchers explore the meanings and functions of two- and three-dimensional human representations in the Precolumbian communities of the Mexican highlands. Reading these anthropomorphic representations from an ontological perspective, the contributors demonstrate the rich potential of anthropomorphic imagery to elucidate personhood, conceptions of the body, and the relationship of human beings to other entities, nature, and the cosmos. Using case studies covering a broad span of highlands prehistory—Classic Teotihuacan divine iconography, ceramic figures in Late Formative West Mexico, Epiclassic Puebla-Tlaxcala costumed figurines, earth sculptures in Prehispanic Oaxaca, Early Postclassic Tula symbolic burials, Late Postclassic representations of Aztec Kings, and more—contributors examine both Mesoamerican representations of the body in changing social, political, and economic conditions and the multivalent emic meanings of these representations. They explore the technology of artifact production, the body’s place in social structures and rituals, the language of the body as expressed in postures and gestures, hybrid and transformative combinations of human and animal bodies, bodily representations of social categories, body modification, and the significance of portable and fixed representations. Anthropomorphic Imagery in the Mesoamerican Highlands provides a wide range of insights into Mesoamerican concepts of personhood and identity, the constitution of the human body, and human relationships with gods and ancestors. It will be of great value to students and scholars of the archaeology and art history of Mexico. Contributors: Claire Billard, Danièle Dehouve, Cynthia Kristan-Graham, Melissa Logan, Sylvie Peperstraete, Patricia Plunket, Mari Carmen Serra Puche, Juliette Testard, Andrew Turner, Gabriela Uruñuela, Marcus Winter
Author: Stewart Elliott Guthrie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190282746
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Religion is universal human culture. No phenomenon is more widely shared or more intensely studied, yet there is no agreement on what religion is. Now, in Faces in the Clouds, anthropologist Stewart Guthrie provides a provocative definition of religion in a bold and persuasive new theory. Guthrie says religion can best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism--that is, the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things and events. Many writers see anthropomorphism as common or even universal in religion, but few think it is central. To Guthrie, however, it is fundamental. Religion, he writes, consists of seeing the world as humanlike. As Guthrie shows, people find a wide range of humanlike beings plausible: Gods, spirits, abominable snowmen, HAL the computer, Chiquita Banana. We find messages in random events such as earthquakes, weather, and traffic accidents. We say a fire "rages," a storm "wreaks vengeance," and waters "lie still." Guthrie says that our tendency to find human characteristics in the nonhuman world stems from a deep-seated perceptual strategy: in the face of pervasive (if mostly unconscious) uncertainty about what we see, we bet on the most meaningful interpretation we can. If we are in the woods and see a dark shape that might be a bear or a boulder, for example, it is good policy to think it is a bear. If we are mistaken, we lose little, and if we are right, we gain much. So, Guthrie writes, in scanning the world we always look for what most concerns us--livings things, and especially, human ones. Even animals watch for human attributes, as when birds avoid scarecrows. In short, we all follow the principle--better safe than sorry. Marshalling a wealth of evidence from anthropology, cognitive science, philosophy, theology, advertising, literature, art, and animal behavior, Guthrie offers a fascinating array of examples to show how this perceptual strategy pervades secular life and how it characterizes religious experience. Challenging the very foundations of religion, Faces in the Clouds forces us to take a new look at this fundamental element of human life.
Author: Robert Wicks
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1780741707
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
Discover the truth about the much-misunderstood thinker Often quoted yet highly divisive, Nietzsche remains an enigma long after his death. This clear primer moves deftly through the controversy to examine the philosopher's work in the context of his tumultuous childhood and Christian upbringing. Discussing his infamous declaration that God is dead, his posthumous association with Nazism, and his criticisms of conventional morality, this book is the ideal introduction to the much debated thinker and his extensive legacy.
Author: A. Musolff
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230594646
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
The contributors present a coherent collection of work on the functioning of metaphor in public discourse and related discourse areas from a broadly cognitive-linguistic background, providing a state-of-the-art overview of research on the discursive grounding of metaphor from a cognitive-linguistic perspective.
Author: Michael Rowan-Robinson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191509175
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
How old is the universe? How far away are the galaxies and how fast are they travelling away from us? What is dark matter and why do astronomers think it pervades the universe? How heavy is the vacuum? How do galaxies form? Michael Rowan-Robinson answers these and many more questions in a highly original and intriguing way. He encapsulates our current knowledge (both what we do and don't know) of the origin and the nature of the universe into nine numbers. These cosmic numbers appear to be independent characteristics of our universe and include its age, the Hubble constant (a measure of its rate of expression), and the density of matter in the universe. Only one of the nine numbers is known with real precision, and four of them only poorly known. The complex ideas that underpin modern cosmology such as the origin of the elements and quantum theory are explained clearly and accessibly, and more speculative ideas like inflation and superstrings are also covered, but with a refreshing scepticism. While most of what we know has been learnt during the 20th century, Rowan-Robinson provides a historical perspective, paying homage to the achievements of the Greeks, Renaissance astronomers, and the age of Newton. He ends the book with a look to the future, predicting that with the further space missions we will accurately know the nine numbers described in this book by the year 2015, but concludes that the origin of the Big Bang itself will still be a mystery by the end of the twenty-first century, and perhaps even in the year 3000.
Author: Gianluca Miniaci
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789259150
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 493
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Book Description
Archaeological remains are ‘fragmented by definition’: apart from exceptional cases, the study of the human past takes into account mainly traces, ruins, discards, and debris of past civilizations. It is rare that things have been preserved as they were originally made and conceived in the past. However, not all the ancient fragmentary objects were the ‘leftovers’ from the past. A noticeable portion of them was part and parcel of the ancient materiality already in the form of a fragment or damaged item. In 2000, John Chapman, with his volume Fragmentation in Archaeology, attracted the attention of scholars on the need to reconsider broken artifacts as the result of the deliberate anthropic process of physical fragmentation. The phenomenon of fragmentation can be thus explored with more outcomes for a category of objects that played an important role inside the society: the figurines. Due to their portability and size, figurines are particularly entangled and engaged in social, spatial, temporal, and material relations, and – more than other artifacts – can easily accommodate acts of embodiment and dismemberment. The act of creation symmetrically also involves the act of destruction, which in turn is another act of creation, since from the fragmentation comes a new entity with a different ontology. Breaking contains the paradigms of life: creation and reparation, destruction and regeneration. The scope of this volume is to search for traces of any voluntary and intentional fragmentation of ancient artifacts, creating, improving, and sharpening the methods and principles for a scientific investigation that goes beyond single author impression or sensitivity. The comparative lens adopted in this volume can allow the reader to explore different fields taken from ancient societies of how we can address, assess, detect, and even discuss the action of breaking and mutilation of ancient figurines.
