Hidden Paradigms

Hidden Paradigms PDF Author: Brenda E.F. Beck
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487529368
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 510

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Book Description
Understanding an epic story’s key belief patterns can reveal community-level values, the nature of familial bonds, and how divine and human concerns jockey for power and influence. These foundational motifs remain understudied as they relate to South Asian folk legends, but are nonetheless crucial in shaping the values exemplified by such stories’ central heroes and heroines. In Hidden Paradigms, anthropologist Brenda E.F. Beck describes The Legend of Ponnivala, an oral epic from rural South India. Recorded in 1965, this story was sung to a group of village enthusiasts by a respected pair of local bards. This grand legend took more than thirty-eight hours to complete over eighteen nights. Bringing this unique example of Tamil culture to the attention of an international audience, Beck compares this virtually unknown South Indian epic to five other culturally significant works – the Ojibwa Nanabush cycle, the Mahabharata, an Icelandic Saga, the Bible, and the Epic of Gilgamesh – establishing this foundational Tamil story as one that engages with the same universal human struggles and themes present throughout the world. Copiously illustrated, Hidden Paradigms provides a fresh example of the power of comparative thinking, offering a humanistic complement to scientific reasoning.

Hidden Paradigms

Hidden Paradigms PDF Author: Brenda E.F. Beck
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487529368
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 510

Get Book Here

Book Description
Understanding an epic story’s key belief patterns can reveal community-level values, the nature of familial bonds, and how divine and human concerns jockey for power and influence. These foundational motifs remain understudied as they relate to South Asian folk legends, but are nonetheless crucial in shaping the values exemplified by such stories’ central heroes and heroines. In Hidden Paradigms, anthropologist Brenda E.F. Beck describes The Legend of Ponnivala, an oral epic from rural South India. Recorded in 1965, this story was sung to a group of village enthusiasts by a respected pair of local bards. This grand legend took more than thirty-eight hours to complete over eighteen nights. Bringing this unique example of Tamil culture to the attention of an international audience, Beck compares this virtually unknown South Indian epic to five other culturally significant works – the Ojibwa Nanabush cycle, the Mahabharata, an Icelandic Saga, the Bible, and the Epic of Gilgamesh – establishing this foundational Tamil story as one that engages with the same universal human struggles and themes present throughout the world. Copiously illustrated, Hidden Paradigms provides a fresh example of the power of comparative thinking, offering a humanistic complement to scientific reasoning.

Vedic Voices

Vedic Voices PDF Author: David M. Knipe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190266732
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
For countless generations families have lived in isolated communities in the Godavari Delta of coastal Andhra Pradesh, learning and reciting their legacy of Vedas, performing daily offerings and occasional sacrifices. They are the virtually unrecognized survivors of a 3,700-year-old heritage, the last in India who perform the ancient animal and soma sacrifices according to Vedic tradition. In Vedic Voices, David M. Knipe offers for the first time, an opportunity for them to speak about their lives, ancestral lineages, personal choices as pandits, wives, children, and ways of coping with an avalanche of changes in modern India. He presents a study of four generations of ten families, from those born at the outset of the twentieth century down to their great-grandsons who are just beginning, at the age of seven, the task of memorizing their Veda, the Taittiriya Samhita, a feat that will require eight to twelve years of daily recitations. After successful examinations these young men will reside with the Veda family girls they married as children years before, take their places in the oral transmission of a three-thousand-year Vedic heritage, teach the Taittiriya collection of texts to their own sons, and undertake with their wives the major and minor sacrifices performed by their ancestors for some three millennia. Coastal Andhra, famed for bountiful rice and coconut plantations, has received scant attention from historians of religion and anthropologists despite a wealth of cultural traditions. Vedic Voices describes in captivating prose the geography, cultural history, pilgrimage traditions, and celebrated persons of the region. Here unfolds a remarkable story of Vedic pandits and their wives, one scarcely known in India and not at all to the outside world.

Puja and Piety

Puja and Piety PDF Author: Pratapaditya Pal
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520288475
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Accompanies the exhibition presented at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California, April 17-July 31, 2016.

A Buddhist Ritual Manual on Agriculture

A Buddhist Ritual Manual on Agriculture PDF Author: Gergely Hidas
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110620499
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
This volume is the first in-depth study of a recently discovered Sanskrit dharani spell text from around the 5th century CE surviving in two palm-leaf and three paper manuscript compendia from Nepal. This rare Buddhist scripture focuses on the ritual practice of thaumaturgic weather control for successful agriculture through overpowering mythical Nagas. Traditionally, these serpentine beings are held responsible for the amount of rainfall. The six chapters of the Vajratundasamayakalparaja present the vidyadhara spell-master as a ritualist who uses mandalas, mudras and other techniques to gain mastery over the Nagas and thus control the rains. By subjugating the Nagas, favourable weather and good crops are guaranteed. This links this incantation tradition to economic power and the securing of worldly support for the Buddhist community.

Frog Hymns and Rain Babies

Frog Hymns and Rain Babies PDF Author: Gautamavajra Vajrācārya
Publisher: Marg Publications
ISBN: 9788192110646
Category : Art, Indic
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Examines the influence of monsoons on the art, literature, and culture of India and the South Asian region.

The Indian Drum of the King-God and the Pakhāvaj of Nathdwara

The Indian Drum of the King-God and the Pakhāvaj of Nathdwara PDF Author: Paolo Pacciolla
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000060012
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
The book studies the evolution of the ancient drum mṛdaṅga into the pakhāvaj, crossing more than 2,000 years of history. While focusing on the Nathdwara school of pakhāvaj, the author joins ethnographic, historical, religious and iconographic perspectives to argue a multifaceted interpretation of the role and function of the pakhāvaj in royal courts, temples and contemporary stages. Furthermore, he offers the first analysis of the visual and narrative contents of its repertoire.

Interior

Interior PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1328

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Book Description


Continent

Continent PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 1554

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Book Description


Himalayas

Himalayas PDF Author: Pratapaditya Pal
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Presents and describes 187 Hindu and Buddhist artworks of the Himalayas from the sixth through the nineteenth centuries; geographically themed essays; and translations and interpretations of several Nepali, Kashmiri, and Tibetan inscriptions.

Yaqui Myths and Legends

Yaqui Myths and Legends PDF Author:
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816504671
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Sixty-one tales narrated by Yaquis reflect this people's sense of the sacred and material value of their territory.