Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity

Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity PDF Author: Ralph Haussler
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789253284
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 840

Get Book Here

Book Description
From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behavior while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalize their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practices. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinize carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people’s sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were ‘rewritten’, adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people’s understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalized – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyze the complex links between landscape, ‘religiosity’ and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.

Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity

Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity PDF Author: Ralph Haussler
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789253284
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 840

Get Book Here

Book Description
From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behavior while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalize their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practices. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinize carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people’s sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were ‘rewritten’, adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people’s understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalized – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyze the complex links between landscape, ‘religiosity’ and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.

The Diary

The Diary PDF Author: Batsheva Ben-Amos
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253046963
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 492

Get Book Here

Book Description
The diary as a genre is found in all literate societies, and these autobiographical accounts are written by persons of all ranks and positions. The Diary offers an exploration of the form in its social, historical, and cultural-literary contexts with its own distinctive features, poetics, and rhetoric. The contributors to this volume examine theories and interpretations relating to writing and studying diaries; the formation of diary canons in the United Kingdom, France, United States, and Brazil; and the ways in which handwritten diaries are transformed through processes of publication and digitization. The authors also explore different diary formats, including the travel diary, the private diary, conflict diaries written during periods of crisis, and the diaries of the digital era, such as blogs. The Diary offers a comprehensive overview of the genre, synthesizing decades of interdisciplinary study to enrich our understanding of, research about, and engagement with the diary as literary form and historical documentation.

Inscribed Landscapes

Inscribed Landscapes PDF Author: Richard E. Strassberg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520085809
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 610

Get Book Here

Book Description
Alongside the scores of travel books about China written by foreign visitors, Chinese travelers' impressions of their own country rarely appear in translation. This anthology is the only comprehensive collection in English of Chinese travel writing from the first century A.D. through the nineteenth. Early examples of the genre describe sites important for their geography, history, and role in cultural mythology, but by the T'ang dynasty in the mid-eighth century certain historiographical and poetic discourses converged to form the "travel account" (yu-chi) and later the "travel diary" (jih-chi) as vehicles of personal expression and autobiography. These first-person narratives provide rich material for understanding the attitudes of Chinese literati toward place, nature, politics, and the self. The anthology is abundantly illustrated with paintings, portraits, maps, and drawings. Each selection is meticulously translated, carefully annotated, and prefaced by a brief description of the writer's life and work. The entire collection is introduced by an in-depth survey of the rise of Chinese travel writing as a cultural phenomenon. Inscribed Landscapes provides a unique resource for travelers as well as for scholars of Chinese literature, art, and history.

Landscapes of Movement

Landscapes of Movement PDF Author: James E. Snead
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1934536539
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 383

Get Book Here

Book Description
The essays in this volume document trails, paths, and roads across different times and cultures, from those built by hunter-gatherers in the Great Basin of North America to causeway builders in the Bolivian Amazon to Bronze Age farms in the Near East, through aerial and satellite photography, surface survey, historical records, and excavation.

Handbook of Landscape Archaeology

Handbook of Landscape Archaeology PDF Author: Bruno David
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315427710
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1307

Get Book Here

Book Description
Over the past three decades, “landscape” has become an umbrella term to describe many different strands of archaeology. From the processualist study of settlement patterns to the phenomenologist’s experience of the natural world, from human impact on past environments to the environment’s impact on human thought, action, and interaction, the term has been used. In this volume, for the first time, over 80 archaeologists from three continents attempt a comprehensive definition of the ideas and practices of landscape archaeology, covering the theoretical and the practical, the research and conservation, and encasing the term in a global framework. As a basic reference volume for landscape archaeology, this volume will be the benchmark for decades to come. All royalties on this Handbook are donated to the World Archaeological Congress.

Inscribed Landscapes

Inscribed Landscapes PDF Author: Bruno David
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824824723
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

Book Description
Annotation. Inscribed Landscapes explores the role of inscription in the social construction of place, power, and identity. Bringing together twenty-one scholars across a range of fields-primarily archaeology, anthropology, and geography-it examines how social codes and hegemonic practices have resulted in the production of particular senses of place, exploring the physical and metaphysical marking of place as a means of accessing social history.

The Place of Landscape

The Place of Landscape PDF Author: Jeff Malpas
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262015528
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
Interdisciplinary perspectives on landscape, from the philosophical to the geographical, with an emphasis on the overarching concept of place. This volume explores the conceptual "topography" of landscape: It examines the character of landscape as itself a mode of place as well as the modes of place that appear in relation to landscape. Leading scholars from a range of disciplines explore the concept of landscape, including its supposed relation to the spectatorial, its character as time-space, its relation to indigenous notions of "country," and its liminality. They examine landscape as it appears within a variety of contexts, from geography through photography and garden history to theology; and more specific studies look at the forms of landscape in medieval landscape painting, film and television, and in relation to national identity. The essays demonstrate that the study of landscape cannot be restricted to any one genre, cannot be taken as the exclusive province of any one discipline, and cannot be exhausted by any single form of analysis. What the place of landscape now evokes is itself a wide-ranging terrain encompassing issues concerning the nature of place, of human being in place, and of the structures that shape such being and are shaped by it.

Fixing Landscape

Fixing Landscape PDF Author: Corey Byrnes
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547129
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1994, workers broke ground on China’s Three Gorges Dam. By its completion in 2012, the dam had transformed the ecology of the Yangzi River, displaced over a million people, and forever altered a landscape immortalized in centuries of literature and art. The controversial history of the dam is well known; what this book uncovers are its unexpected connections to the cultural traditions it seems to sever. By reconsidering the dam in relation to the aesthetic history of the Three Gorges region over more than two millennia, Fixing Landscape offers radically new ways of thinking about cultural and spatial production in contemporary China. Corey Byrnes argues that this monumental feat of engineering can only be understood by confronting its status as a techno-poetic act, a form of landscaping indebted to both the technical knowledge of engineers and to the poetic legacies of the Gorges as cultural site. Synthesizing methods drawn from premodern, modern, and contemporary Chinese studies, as well as from critical geography, art history, and the environmental humanities, Byrnes offers innovative readings of eighth-century poetry, paintings from the twelfth through twenty-first centuries, contemporary film, nineteenth-century British travelogues, and Chinese and Western maps, among other sources. Fixing Landscape shows that premodern poetry and visual art have something urgent to tell us about a contemporary experiment in spatial production. Poems and paintings may not build dams, but Byrnes argues that the Three Gorges Dam would not exist as we know it without them.

Mining the Landscape

Mining the Landscape PDF Author: Geraldine Mate
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031129067
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
Mining was one of the primary elements of colonial enterprise in Australia and a factor in movement on colonial frontiers. In the second half of the 19th and early 20th century, mining—particularly of gold—saw transformations of the land itself, as well as in the way that people working in mining engaged with the landscape around them. Landscape archaeology provides a theoretical perspective that allows an articulation of how people created and understood the place in which they lived and worked. The impact of and narrative surrounding gold mining has meant that it has long been a focus of study, both historical and archaeological. The archaeology of mining has traditionally fallen under the umbrella of industrial archaeology, with analyses based on historical, economic and technological evidence. However this is changing. From an industrial focus, examining the remnants of mines and associated processing equipment, archaeology has progressed towards understandings of the social aspects of mining, recognising that people, not just equipment, occupied these landscapes. Nevertheless, there remains a separation between industrial/technology-based studies and purely social/ household-based archaeological studies—a division that overlooks the integration of home and livelihood. This work addresses these very challenges, using a landscape-based approach that articulates a nuanced, meaning-ladened and experienced mining landscape. Integrating the social and the industrial, the case study of Mount Shamrock, a gold-mining town in Queensland, Australia, demonstrates how this methodology can enhance our understanding of the past. The work presents an integration of social and industrial perspectives in a mining settlement, and provides an exemplar in the application of landscape theory to Australian historical archaeology. These concepts and approaches, developed in an Australian context, are of universal interest.

Refractions

Refractions PDF Author: Frauke Reitemeier
Publisher: Universitätsverlag Göttingen
ISBN: 3863955358
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Get Book Here

Book Description
Put simply, refraction describes a change in the direction of light or sound due to a change in the medium the light or sound goes through. Writing a Bachelor’s or Master’s thesis means changing the direction of light shed on a particular text or topic, as the theses collected in this volume conclusively show: A dystopian novel is shown to hinge on questions of animal rights; a complex novelistic structure is revealed to have its origins in scientific discourses; a clearly Gothic novel has its foundation in aesthetic Christianity, to outline just some of the topics. All these papers have in common that they take a well-known text or idea and change the angle through which it is read and analysed – and suddenly a rainbow of new insights is created.