Picturing Heaven In Early China
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Picturing Heaven In Early China
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Author : Lillian Lan-ying Tseng
language : en
Publisher: BRILL
Release Date : 2020-03-17
Picturing Heaven In Early China written by Lillian Lan-ying Tseng and has been published by BRILL this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2020-03-17 with Art categories.
Tian, or Heaven, had multiple meanings in early China. It had been used since the Western Zhou to indicate both the sky and the highest god, and later came to be regarded as a force driving the movement of the cosmos and as a home to deities and imaginary animals. By the Han dynasty, which saw an outpouring of visual materials depicting Heaven, the concept of Heaven encompassed an immortal realm to which humans could ascend after death. Using excavated materials, Lillian Tseng shows how Han artisans transformed various notions of Heaven—as the mandate, the fantasy, and the sky—into pictorial entities. The Han Heaven was not indicated by what the artisans looked at, but rather was suggested by what they looked into. Artisans attained the visibility of Heaven by appropriating and modifying related knowledge of cosmology, mythology, astronomy. Thus the depiction of Heaven in Han China reflected an interface of image and knowledge. By examining Heaven as depicted in ritual buildings, on household utensils, and in the embellishments of funerary settings, Tseng maintains that visibility can hold up a mirror to visuality; Heaven was culturally constructed and should be culturally reconstructed.
Imagining Heaven
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Author : Ellen W. Williams
language : en
Publisher: McFarland
Release Date : 2024-01-01
Imagining Heaven written by Ellen W. Williams and has been published by McFarland this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2024-01-01 with Art categories.
Over the centuries, humans have conjured images--the stuff of dreams, convictions, and ardent desire--to describe our afterlife. The vision of heaven can appear as simple as a place among the stars or as complex as a universe filled with a multitude of busy souls. Positioned at the intersection of art, religion, and culture, this book sheds new light on human creativity in its portrayal of the afterlife. Beginning with prehistoric burial objects that help with one's heavenly needs, it travels through history to probe ancient texts, examines enigmatic carvings, dissects the meaning of paintings, and discusses contemporary perspectives in film and media. The author demonstrates that humans around the world have always had the capacity to confront the "final frontier" in spirited, hopeful, and beautiful ways.
Astrology And Cosmology In Early China
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Author : David W. Pankenier
language : en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date : 2013-10-10
Astrology And Cosmology In Early China written by David W. Pankenier and has been published by Cambridge University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2013-10-10 with History categories.
The ancient Chinese were profoundly influenced by the Sun, Moon and stars, making persistent efforts to mirror astral phenomena in shaping their civilization. In this pioneering text, David W. Pankenier introduces readers to a seriously understudied field, illustrating how astronomy shaped the culture of China from the very beginning and how it influenced areas as disparate as art, architecture, calendrical science, myth, technology, and political and military decision-making. As elsewhere in the ancient world, there was no positive distinction between astronomy and astrology in ancient China, and so astrology, or more precisely, astral omenology, is a principal focus of the book. Drawing on a broad range of sources, including archaeological discoveries, classical texts, inscriptions and paleography, this thought-provoking book documents the role of astronomical phenomena in the development of the 'Celestial Empire' from the late Neolithic through the late imperial period.
Heaven Is Empty
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Author : Filippo Marsili
language : en
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Release Date : 2018-11-01
Heaven Is Empty written by Filippo Marsili and has been published by State University of New York Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018-11-01 with History categories.
Offers a new perspective on the relationship between religion and the creation of the first Chinese empires. Heaven Is Empty offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in the formation of China’s early empires (221 BCE–9 CE) and shows how the unification of the Central States was possible without a unitary and universalistic conception of religion. The cohesive function of the ancient Mediterranean cult of the divinized ruler was crucial for the legitimization of Rome’s empire across geographical and social boundaries. Eventually reelaborated in Christian terms, it came to embody the timelessness and universality of Western conceptions of legitimate authority, while representing an analytical template for studying other ancient empires. Filippo Marsili challenges such approaches in his examination of the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han (141–87 BCE). Wu purposely drew from regional traditions and tried to gain the support of local communities through his patronage of local cults. He was interested in rituals that envisioned the monarch as a military leader, who directly controlled the land and its resources, as a means for legitimizing radical administrative and economic centralization. In reconstructing this imperial model, Marsili reinterprets fragmentary official accounts in light of material evidence and noncanonical and recently excavated texts. In bringing to life the courts, battlefields, markets, shrines, and pleasure quarters of early imperial China, Heaven Is Empty provides a postmodern and postcolonial reassessment of “religion” before the arrival of Buddhism and challenges the application of Greco-Roman and Abrahamic systemic, identitary, and exclusionary notions of the “sacred” to the analysis of pre-Christian and non-Western realities. Filippo Marsili is Associate Professor of History at Saint Louis University.
Pictures And Visuality In Early Modern China
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Author : Craig Clunas
language : en
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Release Date : 2006-03-01
Pictures And Visuality In Early Modern China written by Craig Clunas and has been published by Reaktion Books this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2006-03-01 with History categories.
Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China is not simply a survey of sixteenth-century images, but rather, a thorough and thoughtful examination of visual culture in China's Ming Dynasty, one that considers images wherever they appeared—not only paintings, but also illustrated books, maps, ceramic bowls, lacquered boxes, painted fans, and even clothing and tomb pictures. Clunas's theory of visuality incorporates not only the image and the object upon which it is placed but also the culture which produced and purchased it. Economic changes in sixteenth-century China—the rapid expansion of trade routes and a growing class of consumers—are thus intricately bound up with the evolution of the image itself. Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China will be a touchstone for students of Chinese history, art, and culture.
Public Memory In Early China
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Author : K. E. Brashier
language : en
Publisher: BRILL
Release Date : 2020-10-26
Public Memory In Early China written by K. E. Brashier and has been published by BRILL this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2020-10-26 with History categories.
In early imperial China, the dead were remembered by stereotyping them, by relating them to the existing public memory and not by vaunting what made each person individually distinct and extraordinary in his or her lifetime. Their posthumous names were chosen from a limited predetermined pool; their descriptors were derived from set phrases in the classical tradition; and their identities were explicitly categorized as being like this cultural hero or that sage official in antiquity. In other words, postmortem remembrance was a process of pouring new ancestors into prefabricated molds or stamping them with rigid cookie cutters. Public Memory in Early China is an examination of this pouring and stamping process. After surveying ways in which learning in the early imperial period relied upon memorization and recitation, K. E. Brashier treats three definitive parameters of identity—name, age, and kinship—as ways of negotiating a person’s relative position within the collective consciousness. He then examines both the tangible and intangible media responsible for keeping that defined identity welded into the infrastructure of Han public memory.
Ancient China
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Author : John S. Major
language : en
Publisher: Routledge
Release Date : 2016-09-22
Ancient China written by John S. Major and has been published by Routledge this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016-09-22 with History categories.
Ancient China: A History surveys the East Asian Heartland Region – the geographical area that eventually became known as China – from the Neolithic period through the Bronze Age, to the early imperial era of Qin and Han, up to the threshold of the medieval period in the third century CE. For most of that long span of time there was no such place as "China"; the vast and varied territory of the Heartland Region was home to many diverse cultures that only slowly coalesced, culturally, linguistically, and politically, to form the first recognizably Chinese empires. The field of Early China Studies is being revolutionized in our time by a wealth of archaeologically recovered texts and artefacts. Major and Cook draw on this exciting new evidence and a rich harvest of contemporary scholarship to present a leading-edge account of ancient China and its antecedents. With handy pedagogical features such as maps and illustrations, as well as an extensive list of recommendations for further reading, Ancient China: A History is an important resource for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Chinese History, and those studuing Chinese Culture and Society more generally.
The Art Of Terrestrial Diagrams In Early China
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Author : Michelle H. Wang
language : en
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Release Date : 2023-11-21
The Art Of Terrestrial Diagrams In Early China written by Michelle H. Wang and has been published by University of Chicago Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2023-11-21 with Technology & Engineering categories.
A study of early Chinese maps using interdisciplinary methods. This is the first English-language monograph on the early history of maps in China, centering on those found in three tombs that date from the fourth to the second century BCE and constitute the entire known corpus of early Chinese maps (ditu). More than a millennium separates them from the next available map in the early twelfth century CE. Unlike extant studies that draw heavily from the history of cartography, this book offers an alternative perspective by mobilizing methods from art history, archaeology, material culture, religion, and philosophy. It examines the diversity of forms and functions in early Chinese ditu to argue that these pictures did not simply represent natural topography and built environments, but rather made and remade worlds for the living and the dead. Wang explores the multifaceted and multifunctional diagrammatic tradition of rendering space in early China.
Divination And Prediction In Early China And Ancient Greece
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Author : Lisa Raphals
language : en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date : 2013-10-17
Divination And Prediction In Early China And Ancient Greece written by Lisa Raphals and has been published by Cambridge University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2013-10-17 with History categories.
This book compares the intellectual and social history and past and present contexts of mantic practices (divination) in Chinese and Greek antiquity.
Mind And Body In Early China
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Author : Edward Slingerland
language : en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date : 2018-11-23
Mind And Body In Early China written by Edward Slingerland and has been published by Oxford University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018-11-23 with Religion categories.
Mind and Body in Early China critiques Orientalist accounts of early China as the radical, "holistic" other. The idea that the early Chinese held the "strong" holist view, seeing no qualitative difference between mind and body, has long been contradicted by traditional archeological and qualitative textual evidence. New digital humanities methods, along with basic knowledge about human cognition, now make this position untenable. A large body of empirical evidence suggests that "weak" mind-body dualism is a psychological universal, and that human sociality would be fundamentally impossible without it. Edward Slingerland argues that the humanities need to move beyond social constructivist views of culture, and embrace instead a view of human cognition and culture that integrates the sciences and the humanities. Our interpretation of texts and artifacts from the past and from other cultures should be constrained by what we know about the species-specific, embodied commonalities shared by all humans. This book also attempts to broaden the scope of humanistic methodologies by employing team-based qualitative coding and computer-aided "distant reading" of texts, while also drawing upon our current best understanding of human cognition to transform our basic starting point. It has implications for anyone interested in comparative religion, early China, cultural studies, digital humanities, or science-humanities integration.