Festivals and Songs of Ancient China

Festivals and Songs of Ancient China PDF Author: Marcel Granet
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317296044
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Granet’s original work delves deep into the religious and spiritual customs of ancient China by analysing their festivals and songs from the Book of Odes including the original Chinese script. This translation, originally published in 1932, aimed to present Granet’s observations to a wider English readership by omitting the Chinese characters and providing an in-depth insight into one of the most important early civilisations. This title will be of interest to students of Asian studies.

Festivals and Songs of Ancient China

Festivals and Songs of Ancient China PDF Author: Marcel Granet
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317296044
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Granet’s original work delves deep into the religious and spiritual customs of ancient China by analysing their festivals and songs from the Book of Odes including the original Chinese script. This translation, originally published in 1932, aimed to present Granet’s observations to a wider English readership by omitting the Chinese characters and providing an in-depth insight into one of the most important early civilisations. This title will be of interest to students of Asian studies.

Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations in Ancient China and Greece

Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations in Ancient China and Greece PDF Author: Yiqun Zhou
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139490400
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Ancient China and Greece are two classical civilisations that have exerted far-reaching influence in numerous areas of human experience and are often invoked as the paradigms in East-West comparison. This book examines gender relations in the two ancient societies as reflected in convivial contexts such as family banquets, public festivals, and religious feasts. Two distinct patterns of interpersonal affinity and conflict emerge from the Chinese and Greek sources that show men and women organising themselves and interacting with each other in social occasions intended for collective pursuit of pleasure. Through an analysis of the two different patterns, Yiqun Zhou illuminates the different socio-political mechanisms, value systems, and fabrics of human bonds in the two classical traditions. Her book will be important for readers who are interested in the comparative study of societies, gender studies, women's history, and the legacy of civilisations.

Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276

Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276 PDF Author: Jacques Gernet
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804707206
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Describes the occupations, pleasures, clothes, food, art, and social and civic life of the people in the city of Hangchow.

Classics and Interpretations

Classics and Interpretations PDF Author: Ching-I Tu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351289381
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
In recent years in the "West," scholars have attempted to unravel old constructs of interpretation and understanding, using the discipline of hermeneutics, or the scientific study of textual interpretation. Borrowed from students of the ever growing body of biblical interpretive literature that originated in the early Christian era, theoretical hermeneutics has given many contemporary scholars potent tools of textual interpretation. Classics and Interpretations applies this method to Chinese culture. Several essays focus on hermeneutic traditions of Neo-Confucianism. Others move outside of these traditions to attempt an understanding of the role of hermeneutics in Taoist and Buddhist textual interpretation, in Chinese poetics and painting, and in contemporary Chinese culture. This volume makes a concerted effort to remedy our ignorance of the Chinese hermeneutical tradition. Part 1, "The Great Learning and Hermeneutics," demonstrates the use of commentary to define how the individual creates his social self, and discusses differing interpretations of the Ta-hsueh text and its treatment as either canonical or heterodox. Part 2, "Canonicity and Orthodoxy," considers the philosophical touchstones employed by Neo-Confucian canonical exegetes and polemicists, and discusses the Han canonization of the scriptural Five Classics, while illuminating a double standard that existed in the hermeneutical regime of late imperial China. Part 3, "Hermeneutics as Politics," discusses the transformation of both the classics and scholars, and explores the dominant hermeneutic tradition in Chinese historiography, the scriptural tradition and reinterpretation of the Ch'un-ch'iu, and reveals the pragmatism of Chinese hermeneutics through comparison of the Sung debates over the Mencius. The concluding sections include essays on "Chu Hsi and Interpretation of Chinese Classics," "Hermeneutic Traditions in Chinese Poetics and Non-Confucian Contexts," "Reinterpretation of Confucian Texts in the Ming-Ch'ing Period," and "Contemporary Interpretations of Confucian Culture." Through these literate and brilliantly written essays the reader witnesses not merely the great breadth and depth of Chinese hermeneutics but also its continuity and evolutionary vigor. This volume will excite scholars of the Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist systems of thought and belief as well as students of history and hermeneutics.

The Homeric Epics and the Chinese Book of Songs

The Homeric Epics and the Chinese Book of Songs PDF Author: Fritz-Heiner Mutschler
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527523799
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 509

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Book Description
The Homeric epics and the Book of Songs are not just the fountainheads of the Western and Chinese literary traditions; for centuries they played a central role in education and communal life, and thus exercised a lasting influence on both civilizations. This volume presents the first systematic comparison of the two corpora. Part One analyzes their genesis and their reception, while Part Two discusses their characteristics as poetic creations. The book brings together Chinese and Western sinologists and classicists, and so promotes significant interdisciplinary and intercultural dialogue. Though the contributors rank among the leading experts in their fields, the essays here are accessible not only to their peers, but also to the interested ‘general reader’, and so to all those who seek a deeper understanding of Chinese and Western civilizations, their common human basis and their characteristic differences.

Demon Hordes and Burning Boats

Demon Hordes and Burning Boats PDF Author: Paul R. Katz
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143840848X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
One of the few full-length regional studies of popular religion in late imperial China, this book presents the history of the cult of Marshal Wen, a plague-fighting deity whose cult flourished through Chekiang and its neighboring provinces. The author provides a lively account of the rise of Wen's cult during the tumultuous years of the Southern Sung dynasty, as well as its spread during subsequent dynasties. In exploring the roles played by scholar-officials, merchants, and Taoist priests in the growth of Wen's cult, the author pays special attention to the various representations of this deity held by different social groups, and shows that these were constantly interacting in a process he calls "reverberation." His analysis of plague expulsion festivals featuring Marshal Wen reveals that they functioned as rites of affliction designed to both achieve communal purification and resolve social crises. This book draws on a wide variety of sources, including Taoist scriptures and liturgical texts, stele inscriptions, literati writings (including poetry), manuscripts from local archives, as well as popular novels and folktales. The author also supplements his historical research with data gathered during fieldwork in Chekiang and Taiwan

The Elementary Structures of Kinship

The Elementary Structures of Kinship PDF Author: Claude Levi-Strauss
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807096806
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 588

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Book Description
Professor Lévi-Strauss’s first major work, Les Structures élémentaires de la Parenté, has acquired a classic reputation since its original publication in 1949; and it has become the constant focus of academic debate about central theoretical concerns in social anthropology. It is, however, a long and difficult book for many students to read in French, and its arguments have consequently become known, even among professional anthropologists, largely through critical analysis. It was republished in a revised French edition in 1967 with a new foreword by the author, and it is this text with his further emendations that has been used in this translation. Lévi-Strauss applies his intellectual powers to the perennial problem of incest, which he elucidates by means of the concept of exchange as formulated by Marcel Mauss in his famous analysis of the gift (Essai sur le don, 1925). He distinguishes two elementary modes of exchange which govern not only the conventional variety of goods and services but also the transfer of women in marriage: these are “restricted” and “generalized” exchange. With a mass of ethnographic evidence he demonstrates how the formidable intricacy of marriage customs, comprising moral and jural ideas and institutions (which appear to be essentially arbitrary), can be seen as local and historical rules of exchange. Charles Lévi-Strauss traces these rules throughout a vast range of simple societies, chiefly in Australia and mainland Southeast Asia but also in the Americas, in Oceania, and in other parts of the world. To this survey he adds two extended sections on the great civilizations of China and India. He continues with a briefer consideration of the passage from elementary to complex structures, with particular reference to African societies, and concludes with a stimulating chapter on the principles of kinship, exchange as the universal basis for marriage prohibitions, and the formal relations between the sexes as part of a universe of communication. Although much of the work is technical, consisting of detailed analyses of types of social organization with which social anthropologists will be most familiar, it also contains much that will be of interest to psychologists, linguists, and philosophers, and to all who are interested in the possibility and the technique of the structural analysis of human activity. After the successes, moreover, of Lévi-Strauss’s subsequent books—notably Structural Anthropology, Tristes Tropiques, Totemism, and The Savage Mind—this new edition of the work which founded his present outstanding reputation will have additional value as a further means of contact with one of the original minds of this century. The translation has been made by James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, of the University of New England, Australia, and by Rodney Needham, of the University of Oxford. Dr. Needham also acted as general editor and supplied the work with a new general index. He is the translator of Lévi-Strauss’s Le Totemisme aujourd’hui and author of Structure and Sentiment (1962) and numerous papers which have contributed to the recognition of Professor Lévi-Strauss’s work in the English-speaking world.

China

China PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description


The Ghost Festival in Medieval China

The Ghost Festival in Medieval China PDF Author: Stephen F. Teiser
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691222177
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Largely unstudied until now, the religious festivals that attracted Chinese people from all walks of life provide the most instructive examples of the interaction between Chinese forms of social life and the Indian tradition of Buddhism. Stephen Teiser examines one of the most important of such annual celebrations. He provides a comprehensive interpretation of the festivities of the seventh lunar month, in which laypeople presented offerings to Buddhist monks to gain salvation for their ancestors. Teiser uncovers a wide range of sources, many translated or analyzed for the first time in any language, to demonstrate how the symbolism, rituals, and mythology of the ghost festival pervaded the social landscape of medieval China.

Occasional Papers

Occasional Papers PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 784

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Book Description