scholarly journals BUDDHIST LAW IN EARLY TIBET: THE EMERGENCE OF AN IDEOLOGY

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 406-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernanda Pirie

AbstractTibet is distinct within the Buddhist regions of Asia for its claims to have developed religious laws. The rulers of its early empire civilized their people by creating laws on the basis of Buddhist principles—or so it is claimed by the writers of Tibetan historical narratives. In fact, the earliest Tibetan laws were not linked in any significant way with Buddhist principles, even after the religion had been firmly established in the region. In this article I explore why and how the idea of Buddhist law first emerged, examining its development through a number of texts from the empire (sixth to ninth centuries) and the immediate postimperial period (tenth to twelfth centuries). It turns out that more ideological accounts of Buddhist law were developed only as the structures of the empire were collapsing. Nevertheless, they do seem to have resonated with at least one, tenth-century ruler. These narratives set the scene for a long series of historical accounts in which the idea that Tibetan law was based on Buddhist principles took hold—an idea that was maintained well into the twentieth century.

2019 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
Nicolas G. Rosenthal

A vibrant American Indian art scene developed in California from the 1960s to the 1980s, with links to a broader indigenous arts movement. Native American artists working in the state produced and exhibited paintings, prints, sculptures, mixed media, and other art forms that validated and documented their cultures, interpreted their history, asserted their survival, and explored their experiences in modern society. Building on recent scholarship that examines American Indian migration, urbanization, and activism in the twentieth century, this article charts these developments and argues that American Indian artists in California challenged and rewrote dominant historical narratives by foregrounding Native American perspectives in their work.


Author(s):  
James Tweedie

Like the tableau vivant, the cinematic still life experienced a stunning revival and reinvention in the late twentieth century. In contrast to the stereotypically postmodern overload of images, the still life in film initiates a moment of repose and contemplation within a medium more often defined by the forward rush of moving pictures. It also involves a profound meditation on the relationship between images and objects consistent with practices as diverse as the Spanish baroque still life and the Surrealist variation on the genre. With the work of Terence Davies and Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse (1986) as its primary touchstones, this chapter situates this renewed interest in the cinematic still life within the context of both the late twentieth-century cinema of painters and a socially oriented art cinema that focuses on marginal people and overlooked objects rather than the hegemonic historical narratives also undergoing a revival at the time.


Author(s):  
Adam J. Silverstein

This book examines the ways in which the biblical book of Esther was read, understood, and used in Muslim lands, from ancient to modern times. It zeroes-in on a selection of case studies, covering works from various periods and regions of the Muslim world, including the Qur’an, premodern historical chronicles and literary works, the writings of a nineteenth-century Shia feminist, a twentieth-century Iranian dictionary, and others. These case studies demonstrate that Muslim sources contain valuable materials on Esther, which shed light both on the Esther story itself and on the Muslim peoples and cultures that received it. The book argues that Muslim sources preserve important, pre-Islamic materials on Esther that have not survived elsewhere, some of which offer answers to ancient questions about Esther, such as the meaning of Haman’s epithet in the Greek versions of the story, the reason why Mordecai refused to prostrate himself before Haman, and the literary context of the “plot of the eunuchs” to kill the Persian king. Furthermore, throughout the book we will see how each author’s cultural and religious background influenced his or her understanding and retelling of the Esther story: In particular, it will be shown that Persian Muslims (and Jews) were often forced to reconcile or choose between the conflicting historical narratives provided by their religious and cultural heritages respectively.


Author(s):  
James W. Underhill ◽  
Mariarosaria Gianninoto ◽  
Mariarosaria Gianninoto

Exploring the roots of four keywords for our times: Europe, the citizen, the individual, and the people, Mariarosaria Gianninoto’s and James Underhill’s Migrating Meanings (2019) takes a broad view of conceptualization by taking on board various forms of English, (Scottish, American, and English), as well as other European languages (German, French, Spanish & Czech), and incorporating in-depth contemporary and historical accounts of Mandarin Chinese. The corpus-based research leads the authors to conclude that the English keywords are European concepts with roots in French and parallel traditions in German. But what happens to Chinese words when they come into contact with migrating meanings from Europe? How are existing concepts like the people transformed? This book goes beyond the cold analysis of concepts to scrutinize the keywords that move people and get them excited about individual rights and personal destinies. With economic, political and cultural globalisation, our world is inseparable from the fates of other nations and peoples. But how far can we trust English to provide us with a reliable lingua franca to speak about our world? If our keywords reflect our cultures and form parts of specific cultural and historical narratives, they may well trace the paths we take together into the future. This book helps us to understand how other languages are adapting to English words, and how their worldviews resist ‘anglo-concepts’ through their own traditions, stories and worldviews.


1998 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 233-271
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Jones

The great monument of tenth-century Anglo-Saxon monastic liturgy, theRegularis concordia, has been particularly fortunate in its twentieth-century devotees. The most prominent was Dom Thomas Symons, who published numerous learned articles on the text and, in 1953, an edition and translation that are still immensely valuable. More recently, Lucia Kornexl has re-edited theConcordiawith its continuous Old English gloss from London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, and provided an exhaustive collation against the second Latin copy in London, British Library, Cotton Faustina B. iii. Building on this detailed editorial work, Kornexl's introductory chapters also suggest new and helpful ways of regarding the transmission of this text and the authority of its two extant manuscripts.


2006 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 131-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Neville

AbstractThis article sets forth the contrast between the image of the horses in Beowulf and the image of Anglo-Saxon horses that can be derived from archaeology, historical narratives, wills, law codes and glossaries. It focuses particularly on the issue of colour, represented in the poem by the difficult word fealu and its derivative, æppelfealu. It argues that the horses described in Beowulf do not match up closely with Anglo-Saxon horses recorded in any century and that they would have struck the poem's tenth-century audience as very strange. This strangeness has implications for our understanding of Anglo-Saxon reception of the poem.


Author(s):  
Adam Herring

This chapter discusses the interpretive challenges that art historians and anthropologists have faced in approaching Inca intellectual and artistic achievements, which do not fit comfortably in Western categories. George Kubler took up the question of Inca art in the mid-twentieth century, creating a space in art history for studying the Incas. This development occurred at a time when archaeologists such as John Rowe worked to place the Incas within the broader context of Andean civilizations, and structuralists like Tom Zuidema were beginning to challenge historical narratives in search of underlying elements of Andean culture. The scholarly interest in Inca art, material culture, and intellect was but one aspect of the Inca focus of that time, as artists found inspiration in Inca ruins and museum galleries in the United States, and other countries began to exhibit Inca artifacts as an art to be approached on its own terms.


Author(s):  
Barrie Sander

As communities—both local and international—have struggled to make sense of mass atrocity situations, expectations have increasingly been placed on international criminal courts to render authoritative historical accounts of the episodes of mass violence that fall within their purview. Taking these expectations as its point of departure, Doing Justice to History seeks to understand international criminal courts through the prism of their historical function—critically examining how such courts confront the past by constructing historical narratives concerning both the culpability of the accused on trial and the broader mass atrocity contexts in which they are alleged to have participated. The book argues that international criminal courts are host to struggles for historical justice, discursive contests between different actors vying for judicial acknowledgement of their preferred interpretations of the past. By examining these struggles within different institutional settings, the book surfaces the legitimating qualities of international criminal judgments—illuminating, in particular, what tends to be foregrounded and included within, as well as marginalised and excluded from, the narratives of international criminal courts in practice. What emerges from this account is a sense of the significance of thinking about the emancipatory limits and possibilities of international criminal courts in terms of the historical narratives that are constructed and contested both within and beyond the courtroom in different institutional and societal contexts.


2017 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Mark C. Jerng

This introduction describes the theory and method of racial worldmaking. Critiquing the dominant approach of racial formation theory for analyzing race in the humanities and social sciences, it distinguishes an approach based on racial salience - how, when, and where we notice race. It describes the interrelations among genre and race in terms of larger theories of worldbuilding. The archive of popular fiction from 1893 to the present is established and linked to major, overlooked modes of black and Asiatic racialization. This archive challenges prominent historical accounts of race and racism in the twentieth century.


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