Sacred Economies

Sacred Economies PDF Author: Michael J. Walsh
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231519931
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
Buddhist monasteries in medieval China employed a variety of practices to ensure their ascendancy and survival. Most successful was the exchange of material goods for salvation, as in the donation of land, which allowed monks to spread their teachings throughout China. By investigating a variety of socioeconomic spaces produced and perpetuated by Chinese monasteries, Michael J. Walsh reveals the "sacred economies" that shaped early Buddhism and its relationship with consumption and salvation. Centering his study on Tiantong, a Buddhist monastery that has thrived for close to seventeen centuries in southeast China, Walsh follows three main topics: the spaces monks produced, within and around which a community could pursue a meaningful existence; the social and economic avenues through which monasteries provided diverse sacred resources and secured the primacy of Buddhist teachings within an agrarian culture; and the nature of "transactive" participation within monastic spaces, which later became a fundamental component of a broader Chinese religiosity. Unpacking these sacred economies and repositioning them within the history of religion in China, Walsh encourages a different approach to the study of Chinese religion, emphasizing the critical link between religious exchange and the production of material culture.

Sacred Economies

Sacred Economies PDF Author: Michael J. Walsh
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231519931
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
Buddhist monasteries in medieval China employed a variety of practices to ensure their ascendancy and survival. Most successful was the exchange of material goods for salvation, as in the donation of land, which allowed monks to spread their teachings throughout China. By investigating a variety of socioeconomic spaces produced and perpetuated by Chinese monasteries, Michael J. Walsh reveals the "sacred economies" that shaped early Buddhism and its relationship with consumption and salvation. Centering his study on Tiantong, a Buddhist monastery that has thrived for close to seventeen centuries in southeast China, Walsh follows three main topics: the spaces monks produced, within and around which a community could pursue a meaningful existence; the social and economic avenues through which monasteries provided diverse sacred resources and secured the primacy of Buddhist teachings within an agrarian culture; and the nature of "transactive" participation within monastic spaces, which later became a fundamental component of a broader Chinese religiosity. Unpacking these sacred economies and repositioning them within the history of religion in China, Walsh encourages a different approach to the study of Chinese religion, emphasizing the critical link between religious exchange and the production of material culture.

Living the Good Life

Living the Good Life PDF Author: Elif Akçetin
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004353453
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 591

Get Book Here

Book Description
Eighteenth-century consumers of the Qing and Ottoman empires had access to an increasingly diverse array of goods, from home furnishings to fashionable clothes and new foodstuffs. While this tendency was of shorter duration and intensity in the Ottoman world, some urbanites of the sultans’ realm did enjoy silks, coffee, and Chinese porcelain. By contrast, a vibrant consumer culture flourished in Qing China, where many consumers flaunted their fur coats and indulged in gourmet dining. Living the Good Life explores how goods furthered the expansion of social networks, alliance-building between rulers and regional elites, and the expression of elite, urban, and gender identities. The scholarship in the present volume highlights the recently emerging “material turn” in Qing and Ottoman historiographies and provides a framework for future research. Contributors: Arif Bilgin, Michael G. Chang, Edhem Eldem, Colette Establet, Antonia Finnane, Selim Karahasanoglu, Lai Hui-min, Amanda Phillips, Hedda Reindl-Kiel, Martina Siebert, Su Te-Cheng, Joanna Waley-Cohen, Wang Dagang, Wu Jen-shu, Yıldız Yılmaz, and Yun Yan.

In Hock

In Hock PDF Author: Wendy A. Woloson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226905691
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
The definitive history of pawnbroking in the United States from the nation’s founding through the Great Depression, In Hock demonstrates that the pawnshop was essential to the rise of capitalism. The class of working poor created by this economic tide could make ends meet only, Wendy Woloson argues, by regularly pawning household objects to supplement inadequate wages. Nonetheless, businessmen, reformers, and cultural critics claimed that pawnshops promoted vice, and employed anti-Semitic stereotypes to cast their proprietors as greedy and cold-hearted. Using personal correspondence, business records, and other rich archival sources to uncover the truth behind the rhetoric, Woloson brings to life a diverse cast of characters and shows that pawnbrokers were in fact shrewd businessmen, often from humble origins, who possessed sophisticated knowledge of a wide range of goods in various resale markets. A much-needed new look at a misunderstood institution, In Hock is both a first-rate academic study of a largely ignored facet of the capitalist economy and a resonant portrait of the economic struggles of generations of Americans.

China Bibliography

China Bibliography PDF Author: Harriet T. Zurndorfer
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004483950
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume serves as a guide to all facets of China study: from advice on choosing an appropriate literary dictionary to finding the most recent yearbooks that offer statistical data about the contemporary economy. China Bibliography does not restrict itself to one particular 'discipline', but considers the development of Chinese civilization as a whole, from its imperial beginnings to the present, and therefore demonstrates how one would find information about Chinese history, literature, religion, linguistics, collectanea, as well as present day PRC economic and political policies. Because this book also explains how bibliographical data on China has accumulated over the last 300 years (including within China itself), it also may help the reader understand the significance of a particular type of reference work.

Modern Chinese Religion I (2 vols.)

Modern Chinese Religion I (2 vols.) PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004271643
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 1713

Get Book Here

Book Description
A follow-up to Early Chinese Religion (Brill, 2009-10), Modern Chinese Religion focuses on the third period of paradigm shift in Chinese cultural and religious history, from the Song to the Yuan (960-1368 AD). As in the earlier periods, political division gave urgency to the invention of new models that would then remain dominant for six centuries. Defining religion as “value systems in practice”, this multi-disciplinary work shows the processes of rationalization and interiorization at work in the rituals, self-cultivation practices, thought, and iconography of elite forms of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, as well as in medicine. At the same time, lay Buddhism, Daoist exorcism, and medium-based local religion contributed each in its own way to the creation of modern popular religion. With contributions by Juhn Ahn, Bai Bin, Chen Shuguo, Patricia Ebrey, Michael Fuller, Mark Halperin, Susan Huang, Dieter Kuhn, Nap-yin Lau, Fu-shih Lin, Pierre Marsone, Matsumoto Kôichi, Joseph McDermott, Tracy Miller, Julia Murray, Ong Chang Woei, Fabien Simonis, Dan Stevenson, Curie Virag, Michael Walsh, Linda Walton, Yokote Yutaka, Zhang Zong

Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age

Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age PDF Author: Helen Dunstan
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047290146X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 365

Get Book Here

Book Description
Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age translates and analyzes thirty-eight memorials to the throne and other Qing documents dealing with important issues of Chinese political economy, providing thoughtful and provocative commentary. Subjects covered by the texts include water control, mining, grain trade, pawnshops, brewing, and commercial shipping. The documents also contain detailed discussions of how the state should control wealth, self-interest, profit, hoarding, and the market. In translating these primary sources, Helen Dunstan invites fellow specialists in Chinese studies, including Qing historians, to watch Qing officials and others thinking through problems of political economy and developing arguments to persuade colleagues or superiors. By emphasizing their rhetorical nature and genre conventions, Dunstan offers a reminder that it is improper to use the “information” in such texts without attention to the author’s purpose, and without grasping the rhetorical structure of the text as a whole. As a model for close reading, Conflicting Counsels aims to induce greater sensitivity to the nature of Qing records. The second purpose of Conflicting Counsels is to help dispel the notion that economic liberalism is necessarily a Western, “modern” phenomenon. Many of the texts translated record areas of tension and controversy in eighteenth-century approaches to a central project of Confucian paternalist administration, “nourishing the people” (yangmin). Although Dunstan attempts to present both sides fairly, some materials included present the opinion that, in certain vital matters, it was better for the state to stand aside, and leave society’s own economic institutions, trade in particular, to handle things. While not a majority, the texts that build some kind of market mechanism argument should be of greatest interest to Qing historians.

Subject Catalog

Subject Catalog PDF Author: Library of Congress
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1012

Get Book Here

Book Description


National Union Catalog

National Union Catalog PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Union catalogs
Languages : en
Pages : 1032

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Cambridge History of China

The Cambridge History of China PDF Author:
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521243346
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Get Book Here

Book Description


State or Merchant?

State or Merchant? PDF Author: Helen Dunstan
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684174414
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 555

Get Book Here

Book Description
"What did it mean to run a large, commercialized agrarian polity according to the best Confucian principles? This book is intended as a contribution to both intellectual and political history. It is partly a study of how Confucian-trained officials thought about the grain trade and the state’s role in it, particularly the “ever-normal granaries,” the stockpiles of grain maintained by every county government as protection against shortages and high prices. The author investigates the scope and limits of belief in market forces among those critical of government intervention, establishing that rudimentary economic arguments for state withdrawal from the grain trade were available by 1750. She then explores challenges, from within the ruling apparatus, to the state’s claim that its own stockpiling served the public interest, as well as the factors behind decisions in the mid- and late 1740s to suspend or decrease state purchases of grain. As a study of Confucian government in action, this book describes a mode of public policy discussion far less dominated by the Confucian scriptures than one might expect. As a contribution to intellectual history, the work offers a detailed view of members of an ostensibly Confucian government pursuing divergent agendas around the question of “state or merchant?”"