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Author: Gananath Obeyesekere
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022618921X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
The great pilgrimage center of southeastern Sri Lanka, Kataragama, has become in recent years the spiritual home of a new class of Hindu-Buddhist religious devotees. These ecstatic priests and priestesses invariably display long locks of matted hair, and they express their devotion to the gods through fire walking, tongue-piercing, hanging on hooks, and trance-induced prophesying. The increasing popularity of these ecstatics poses a challenge not only to orthodox Sinhala Buddhism (the official religion of Sri Lanka) but also, as Gananath Obeyesekere shows, to the traditional anthropological and psychoanalytic theories of symbolism. Focusing initially on one symbol, matted hair, Obeyesekere demonstrates that the conventional distinction between personal and cultural symbols is inadequate and naive. His detailed case studies of ecstatics show that there is always a reciprocity between the personal-psychological dimension of the symbol and its public, culturally sanctioned role. Medusa's Hair thus makes an important theoretical contribution both to the anthropology of individual experience and to the psychoanalytic understanding of culture. In its analyses of the symbolism of guilt, the adaptational and integrative significance of belief in spirits, and a host of related issues concerning possession states and religiosity, this book marks a provocative advance in psychological anthropology.
Author: Gananath Obeyesekere
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022618921X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Get Book Here
Book Description
The great pilgrimage center of southeastern Sri Lanka, Kataragama, has become in recent years the spiritual home of a new class of Hindu-Buddhist religious devotees. These ecstatic priests and priestesses invariably display long locks of matted hair, and they express their devotion to the gods through fire walking, tongue-piercing, hanging on hooks, and trance-induced prophesying. The increasing popularity of these ecstatics poses a challenge not only to orthodox Sinhala Buddhism (the official religion of Sri Lanka) but also, as Gananath Obeyesekere shows, to the traditional anthropological and psychoanalytic theories of symbolism. Focusing initially on one symbol, matted hair, Obeyesekere demonstrates that the conventional distinction between personal and cultural symbols is inadequate and naive. His detailed case studies of ecstatics show that there is always a reciprocity between the personal-psychological dimension of the symbol and its public, culturally sanctioned role. Medusa's Hair thus makes an important theoretical contribution both to the anthropology of individual experience and to the psychoanalytic understanding of culture. In its analyses of the symbolism of guilt, the adaptational and integrative significance of belief in spirits, and a host of related issues concerning possession states and religiosity, this book marks a provocative advance in psychological anthropology.
Author: Kylie A. Pitt
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402097492
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
Jellyfish form spectacular population blooms and there is compelling evidence that jellyfish blooms are becoming more frequent and widespread. Blooms have enormous ecological, economic, and social impacts. For example, they have been implicated in the decline of commercial fisheries, they block the cooling water intakes of coastal industries and ships, and reduce the amenity of coastal waters for tourists. Blooms may be caused by overfishing, climate change, and coastal pollution, which all affect coastal waters around the world. Jellyfish Blooms: Causes, Consequences and Recent Advances presents reviews and original research articles written by the world’s leading experts on jellyfish. Topics covered include the evolution of jellyfish blooms, the impacts of climate change on jellyfish populations, advances in acoustic and molecular methods used to study jellyfish, the role of jellyfish in food webs and nutrient cycles, and the ecology of the benthic stages of the jellyfish life history. This is a valuable resource for students and professional marine biologists, fisheries scientists, oceanographers, and researchers of climate change.
Author: Thomas Albrecht
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438428677
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
Examines images of horror in Victorian fiction, criticism, and philosophy.
Author:
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804765879
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
This book examines the central role of casuistry - the science of resolving problems of moral choice, known as 'cases of conscience' - in Elizabethan religious, political, and literary culture. In the process, that author develops a theory of casuistical hermeneutics in a synthesis of new historicist and post-structuralist methodologies, a synthesis made intelligible in terms applied within the discourses of ideological and epistemological crisis that late-sixteenth-century casuiatry both addressed and provoked. Casuistry gained unprecedented notoriety in the last two decades of Elizabeth's reign, emerging as an ambiguous practice that continued to be claimed as a heuristic procedure while it also came to function as a locus of moral and epistemological uncertainty. The author shows the equivocal nature of casuistry to be the effect of the inherently dialogic activity of the word 'conscience'. Believed to be a sacred repository of truth as well as a hermeneutic operation, conscience both embodied the culture's received norms and subjected to scrutiny the social and political negotiations that produced and maintained these norms. The author examines the application of casuistry in wide-ranging but interrelated documents: Elizabeth's two speeches to Parliament concerning the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots; representative manuals of casuistry; accounts of the secret movements of the English Catholic mission and Walsingham's intelligence network; the 'Siena Sieve' portrait of Spencer's The Faerie Queene. The author establishes casuistical hermeneutics as a central organizing principle of Spenserian narrative and charts the connection between Spenserian narrative and novelistic discourse (in Bakhtin's sense of the term). These documents yield new insights into the politics of ambiguity and misreading in the Elizabethan period, variously exploiting the casuistical doctrines of equivocation, 'honest dissimulation', and mental reservation, as well as what the author calls the rhetoric of inviolability, which was associated with the voice of conscience and appropriated by monarch and dissidents alike. That rhetoric depended on a politic self-censorship that proved indispensable to the maintenance of the culture's norms, producing narrative structures that represent scandalous - and theoretically unrepresentable - insights. Reading the text of casuistry in the Renaissance illumines the pivotal, complementary processes of reading and writing the texts through which Elizabethan culture defined itself - its texts of power, its hierarchy of values and norms, its taboos, and its tacit or naturalized protocol for determining canonical texts and 'good' readings.
Author: Marina Belozerskaya
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199739315
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
The long and intricate history of the beautifully carved Hellenistic style Egyptian bowl, from the days of Cleopatra to Constantinople, the French Revolution, and to near destruction by a deranged museum guard in 1925.
Author: Melanie Jackson
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
ISBN: 1459814428
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 143
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Book Description
There's something weird going on down in the mine.
Author: Matt Kaplan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451667981
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
Giant animals : Nemean lion, Calydonian boar, Rukh, King Kong -- Beastly blends : chimera, griffon, cockatrice, Sphinx -- It came from the earth : Minotaur, Medusa -- The mysterious fathoms : Charybdis, Leviathan, giant squid, Jaws -- Of flame and claw : dragons -- Hauntings : demons, ghosts, spirits -- Cursed by a bite : vampires, zombies, werewolves -- The created : The Golem, Frankenstein, HAL 9000, Terminator -- Terror resurrected : dinosaurs -- Extraterrestrial threat : aliens.
Author: Justin Richards
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448131855
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
Medusa - an experimental spaceship developed by the Advanced Research Department of St Oscar's University. Missing since it was launched, presumed lost in the wars, it was a project so secret that it has never been declassified. Now, twenty years on, Medusa is coming home. After one of the investigation team dies suspiciously, Professor Bernice Summerfield is assigned to help discover what went wrong. But to do so she must solve a riddle. What is the strange link between the original crew and the team now on board the drifting ship? And why do their ghosts still haunt Medusa?
Author: Jack Du Brul
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780451409225
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
Ten years ago, the American spy satellite Medusa malfunctioned and crashed--but not before its sensors revealed a secret buried deep in the Earth, hidden for thousands of years from the eyes of man. It's a priceless discovery that some will die to find--and kill to possess.
Author: Kathi Harris
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1796026514
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 466
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Book Description
******Relaunched Version****** The aliens arrived on Earth, and transformed our lives with just seven words; “You will change, or you will die.” These visitors were fearful that humans would eventually export our way of resolving conflicts to our intergalactic neighbors. Hoping to prevent this, they sealed off the entire planet in a massive isolation device. But confining us in this way has doomed us to almost certain death. Between the human race and our unwelcome guests stands an extraordinary family, who may be able to save humanity from this fate. Lark Wright, their youngest member, has incredible abilities. But this information has been kept hidden by the family, as they fear she may be taken from them and exploited. This secret is revealed, however when Lark uses one of her astounding gifts to gain an audience with our other-worldly jailers. Her heartfelt plea on behalf of humankind secures for us a compromise, which has astonishing implications. Will humans survive this concession by the aliens? Will they triumph over their new normal?
