Idols in the East

Idols in the East PDF Author: Suzanne Conklin Akbari
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801464978
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Representations of Muslims have never been more common in the Western imagination than they are today. Building on Orientalist stereotypes constructed over centuries, the figure of the wily Arab has given rise, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, to the "Islamist" terrorist. In Idols in the East, Suzanne Conklin Akbari explores the premodern background of some of the Orientalist types still pervasive in present-day depictions of Muslims—the irascible and irrational Arab, the religiously deviant Islamist—and about how these stereotypes developed over time. Idols in the East contributes to the recent surge of interest in European encounters with Islam and the Orient in the premodern world. Focusing on the medieval period, Akbari examines a broad range of texts including encyclopedias, maps, medical and astronomical treatises, chansons de geste, romances, and allegories to paint an unusually diverse portrait of medieval culture. Among the texts she considers are The Book of John Mandeville, The Song of Roland, Parzival, and Dante's Divine Comedy. From them she reveals how medieval writers and readers understood and explained the differences they saw between themselves and the Muslim other. Looking forward, Akbari also comes to terms with how these medieval conceptions fit with modern discussions of Orientalism, thus providing an important theoretical link to postcolonial and postimperial scholarship on later periods. Far reaching in its implications and balanced in its judgments, Idols in the East will be of great interest to not only scholars and students of the Middle Ages but also anyone interested in the roots of Orientalism and its tangled relationship to modern racism and anti-Semitism.

Idols in the East

Idols in the East PDF Author: Suzanne Conklin Akbari
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801464978
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
Representations of Muslims have never been more common in the Western imagination than they are today. Building on Orientalist stereotypes constructed over centuries, the figure of the wily Arab has given rise, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, to the "Islamist" terrorist. In Idols in the East, Suzanne Conklin Akbari explores the premodern background of some of the Orientalist types still pervasive in present-day depictions of Muslims—the irascible and irrational Arab, the religiously deviant Islamist—and about how these stereotypes developed over time. Idols in the East contributes to the recent surge of interest in European encounters with Islam and the Orient in the premodern world. Focusing on the medieval period, Akbari examines a broad range of texts including encyclopedias, maps, medical and astronomical treatises, chansons de geste, romances, and allegories to paint an unusually diverse portrait of medieval culture. Among the texts she considers are The Book of John Mandeville, The Song of Roland, Parzival, and Dante's Divine Comedy. From them she reveals how medieval writers and readers understood and explained the differences they saw between themselves and the Muslim other. Looking forward, Akbari also comes to terms with how these medieval conceptions fit with modern discussions of Orientalism, thus providing an important theoretical link to postcolonial and postimperial scholarship on later periods. Far reaching in its implications and balanced in its judgments, Idols in the East will be of great interest to not only scholars and students of the Middle Ages but also anyone interested in the roots of Orientalism and its tangled relationship to modern racism and anti-Semitism.

Idols in the East

Idols in the East PDF Author: Suzanne Conklin Akbari
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801448072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Representations of Muslims have never been more common in the Western imagination than they are today. Building on Orientalist stereotypes constructed over centuries, the figure of the wily Arab has given rise, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, to the "Islamist" terrorist. In Idols in the East, Suzanne Conklin Akbari explores the premodern background of some of the Orientalist types still pervasive in present-day depictions of Muslims-the irascible and irrational Arab, the religiously deviant Islamist-and about how these stereotypes developed over time. Idols in the East contributes to the recent surge of interest in European encounters with Islam and the Orient in the premodern world. Focusing on the medieval period, Akbari examines a broad range of texts including encyclopedias, maps, medical and astronomical treatises, chansons de geste, romances, and allegories to paint an unusually diverse portrait of medieval culture. Among the texts she considers are The Book of John Mandeville, The Song of Roland, Parzival, and Dante's Divine Comedy. From them she reveals how medieval writers and readers understood and explained the differences they saw between themselves and the Muslim other. Looking forward, Akbari also comes to terms with how these medieval conceptions fit with modern discussions of Orientalism, thus providing an important theoretical link to postcolonial and postimperial scholarship on later periods. Far reaching in its implications and balanced in its judgments, Idols in the East will be of great interest to not only scholars and students of the Middle Ages but also anyone interested in the roots of Orientalism and its tangled relationship to modern racism and anti-Semitism.

Idols of the People

Idols of the People PDF Author: Peter Roger Stuart Moorey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780197262801
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
These lectures investigate the numerous miniature baked clay images from Canaan, Israel and Judah (c. 1600-600 BC). They constitute vital evidence for the imagery and domestic rituals of ordinary people, but significantly are not explicitly mentioned in the Old Testament. These terracottas are treated as a distinctive phenomenon with roots deep in prehistory and recurrent characteristics across millennia. Attention is focused on whether or not the female representations are worshippers of unknown deities or images of known goddesses, particularly in Early Israelite religion.

Moses among the Idols

Moses among the Idols PDF Author: Amy L. Balogh
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1978700318
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In Moses among the Idols: Mediators of the Divine in the Ancient Near East, Balogh simultaneously redefines one of the greatest figures in the history of religion and challenges the historically popular understanding of ancient Mesopotamian idols as the idle objects of antiquated faiths. Drawing on interdisciplinary research and methods of comparison, Balogh not only offers new insight into the lives of idols as active mediators between humanity and divinity, she also makes the case that when it comes to understanding the figure of Moses, Mesopotamian idols are the best analogy that the ancient Near East provides. This new understanding of Moses, idols, and the interplay between the two on the stage of history and within the biblical text has been made possible only with the recent publication of pertinent texts from ancient Mesopotamia. Drawing from the fields of Assyriology, biblical studies, comparative religion, and archaeology, Balogh identifies a problem with Moses’s status, and offers an unexpected solution to that problem. Moses among the Idols centers on the question: What is it that transforms Moses from an inadequate representative of Yahweh who is “uncircumcised of lips” to “god to Pharaoh” (Exodus 6:28-7:1)? In this moment, Moses undergoes a status change best understood through comparison with the induction ritual for ancient Mesopotamian idols as described in the texts of the Mīs Pȋ, “Washing” or “Purification of the Mouth.” This solution to the problem of Moses’s status explains not only his status change, but also why Moses radiates light after speaking with YHWH (Exod 34:29-35), and his peculiar relationship with YHWH and people of Israel. The comparative, interdisciplinary perspective provided by Balogh allows one to read these and other millennia-old interpretive issues anew, and to do so in a way that underscores the contribution of in-depth comparison to our understanding of ancient civilizations, texts, and intellectual frameworks.

Islands of Eight Million Smiles

Islands of Eight Million Smiles PDF Author: Hiroshi Aoyagi
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 168417418X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
" Since the late 1960s a ubiquitous feature of popular culture in Japan has been the ""idol,"" an attractive young actor, male or female, packaged and promoted as an adolescent role model and exploited by the entertainment, fashion, cosmetic, and publishing industries to market trendy products. This book offers ethnographic case studies regarding the symbolic qualities of idols and how these qualities relate to the conceptualization of selfhood among adolescents in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia. The author explores how the idol-manufacturing industry absorbs young people into its system of production, molds them into marketable personalities, commercializes their images, and contributes to the construction of ideal images of the adolescent self. Since the relationship between the idols and their consumers is dynamic, the study focuses on the fans of idols as well. Ultimately, Aoyagi argues, idol performances substantiate capitalist values in the urban consumer society of contemporary Japan and East Asia. Regardless of how crude their performances may appear in the eyes of critics, the idols have helped establish the entertainment industry as an agent of public socialization by driving public desires toward the consumption of commoditized fantasies. "

Idols

Idols PDF Author: Annie Caubet
Publisher: Skira
ISBN: 9788857238852
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A unique journey through time and space to the origins of the figuration of the human body, from the Neolithic era to the Bronze Age, through works of extraordinary beauty and charm. The dawn of anthropomorphic figurative culture, the founding myths of humanity and the representation of power, whether inseminated by gods or heroes - all these concerns are addressed and embodied in Idols. Edited by by Annie Caubet - she being a great archaeologist herself and Emerita of the Louvre - Idols, from the Greek eidolon, or image, invites the reader to embark on an aesthetic journey across time and space, to discover how artists who lived and worked around 4000-2000 BC created three-dimensional images of the human body, from the first ambiguous images of the Neolithic era, which still to this day have no definitive interpretation, to their evolution during the Bronze Age. The vast geographic area extends from West to East, from the Iberian peninsula to the Indus valley, from the gates of the Atlantic to the confines of the Far East. A tribute to Giancarlo Ligabue, whose multicultural interests are reflected in the exhibition, the journey will reveal a surprising number of common traits, shared by distant people and regions, and compare local variants. A unique journey that climbs mountains, treks through steppes and deserts and braves oceans and seas to reveal networks of connections, a commonality of perception, and contacts between remote lands.

Born in Heaven, Made on Earth

Born in Heaven, Made on Earth PDF Author: Michael Brennan Dick
Publisher: Eisenbrauns
ISBN: 1575060248
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Pejoratively referred to as "idols" in the Hebrew Bible and in western tradition, the cult image occupied a central place in the cultures of the ancient Near East. In Mesopotamia, a ritual (mis pi) was used to "give birth" to the god represented by the cult image. In this volume, three separate essays examine the topic within different ancient Near Eastern cultures, and a fourth provides a modern analogy as counterpoint.

Al-Maqrīzī’s al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar: Volume IV, Section 2: The Idols of the Arabs

Al-Maqrīzī’s al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar: Volume IV, Section 2: The Idols of the Arabs PDF Author: Michael Lecker
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004499865
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
The chapter about idol worship in Maqrīzī’s Universal History includes excerpts from books that are no longer extant. They make it harder to argue against the import or even the very existence of pre-Islamic idol worship.

Through Your Eyes: Religious Alterity and the Early Modern Western Imagination

Through Your Eyes: Religious Alterity and the Early Modern Western Imagination PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004464921
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
The focus of Through Your Eyes: Religious Alterity and the Early Modern Western Imagination is the (mostly Western) understanding, representation and self-critical appropriation of the "religious other" between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Mutually constitutive processes of selfing/othering are observed through the lenses of creedal Jews, a bhakti Brahmin, a widely translated Morisco historian, a collector of Western and Eastern singularia, Christian missionaries in Asia, critical converts, toleration theorists, and freethinkers: in other words, people dwelling in an 'in-between' space which undermines any binary conception of the Self and the Other. The genesis of the volume was in exchanges between eight international scholars and the two editors, intellectual historian Giovanni Tarantino and anthropologist Paola von Wyss-Giacosa, who share an interest in comparatism, debates over toleration, and history of emotions. Contributors are: Daniel Barbu, Vincent Carretta, Ananya Chakravarti, Talya Fishman, Rolando Minuti, Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, Paul Rule, Knut Martin Stünkel, Giovanni Tarantino, and Paola von Wyss-Giacosa.

The Norton Anthology of World Literature

The Norton Anthology of World Literature PDF Author: Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies Jerome W Clinton, PH D
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393933543
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A collection of poetry, prose, drama, and fiction written from the sixteenth century through the twentieth century by various writers from around the world.