Zen and Material Culture

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Art History ◽  
Zen Buddhism ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Multiple Audiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Interdisciplinary Study ◽  
Tea Ceremony ◽  
Economic Considerations ◽  
Vast Range

The stereotype of Zen Buddhism as a primarily minimalistic or even immaterial meditative tradition persists in the Euro-American cultural imagination. By contrast, this volume calls attention to the vast range of “stuff” in Zen by highlighting the material abundance and iconic range of the Sōtō, Rinzai, and Ōbaku sects in Japan. Chapters on beads, bowls, buildings, staffs, statues, rags, robes, and even retail commodities in America all shed new light on overlooked items of lay and monastic practice in both historical and contemporary perspectives. Nine authors from the cognate fields of art history and religious studies as well as the history of material culture analyze these “Zen matters” in all four senses of the phrase: the interdisciplinary study of Zen matters (objects and images) ultimately speaks to larger Zen matters (ideas, ideals) that matter (in the predicate sense) to both male and female practitioners, often because such matters (economic considerations) help to ensure the cultural and institutional survival of the tradition. Zen and Material Culture expands the study of Zen Buddhism, art history, and Japanese material/visual culture by examining the objects and images of everyday Zen practice, not just its texts, institutions, or elite masterpieces. As a result, this volume is aimed at multiple audiences whose interests lie at the intersection of Zen art, architecture, history, ritual, tea ceremony, women’s studies, and the fine line between Buddhist materiality and materialism.

Material Culture and Healing Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-290
Author(s):  
Anna Elizabeth Winterbottom
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Art History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Medical Culture ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract The practice of medicine and healing is always accompanied by a range of paraphernalia, from pillboxes to instruments to clothing. Yet such things have rarely attracted the attention of historians of medicine. Here, I draw on perspectives from art history and religious studies to ask how these objects relate, in practical and symbolic terms, to practices of healing. In other words, what is the connection between medical culture and material culture? I focus on craft objects relating to medicine and healing in Lanka during the Kandyan period (ca. 1595–1815) in museum collections in Canada and Sri Lanka. I ask what the objects can tell us, first, about early modern Lankan medicine and healing and, second, about late nineteenth- and twentieth-century efforts to reconstruct tradition. Finally, I explore what studying these objects might add to current debates about early modern globalization in the context of both material culture and medicine.

Material Culture

Buddhism ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kieschnick
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Art History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Buddhist Art ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Traditional Art ◽  
Material Culture Studies ◽  
Textual Representations ◽  
The Subject

The study of material culture belongs to a relatively young discipline that examines artifacts as well as ideas about, and practices related to, artifacts, with artifacts defined as material objects created or modified by people. Aspects of research in material culture overlap with art history, archaeology, and anthropology, but studies in material culture approach the subject from a different perspective, focusing on areas not necessarily emphasized in these disciplines. Unlike traditional art history, material culture studies concentrate on the function of objects, devoting little attention to their aesthetic qualities, with more emphasis, for instance, on miracles associated with icons than on the style or iconography of icons; unlike traditional archaeology, material culture studies do not necessarily focus on extant artifacts, giving as much attention to references to objects in texts as to extant objects; and, unlike traditional anthropology, material culture studies often give great emphasis to historical development, often over vast expanses of time. While the field of material culture studies has flourished for decades, religious studies have been slow to recognize the importance of material things. Many areas of religion in which material culture plays a prominent role remain largely unexplored, including the place of objects in ritual, religious emotion, pilgrimage, and doctrine. Readers interested in the material culture of Buddhism will want to consult entries for Buddhist art, archaeology, and anthropology as well; in the entries below, the focus is on areas of material culture not necessarily emphasized in these disciplines as well as on studies within these disciplines that are especially relevant to the study of material culture. The term visual culture overlaps with much of what is considered material culture, but excludes objects associated with other senses, such as taste, smell, and touch, which are covered by the term material culture. The material culture approach is particularly well suited for exploring the qualities of particular classes of objects. What is it about relics as body parts that accounts for their appeal? Why are miracles so often associated with physical representations of holy figures and how do these differ from textual representations? How do clothing and food differ from language as a medium of communication? To highlight this aspect of research in Buddhist material culture, the scholarship listed below is divided according to type of object. At the same time, material culture studies also offer an opportunity to examine attitudes toward the material world as applied to a wide variety of objects normally separated by discipline. The doctrine of merit inspired the creation of a wide variety of different types of objects, and the monastic ideal of renunciation permeates many different areas of Buddhist material culture.

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan L. Ready
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Anthropology ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Classical Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Traditional Work ◽  
Interdisciplinary Study ◽  
The Relationship

This book queries from three different angles what it means to speak of Homeric poetry together with the word “text.” Scholarship from outside the discipline of classical studies on the relationship between orality and textuality motivates and undergirds the project. Part I uses work in linguistic anthropology on oral texts and oral intertextuality to illuminate both the verbal and oratorical landscapes our Homeric poets fashion in their epics and what the poets were striving to do when they performed. Looking to folkloristics, Part II examines modern instances of the textualization of an oral traditional work in order to reconstruct the creation of written versions of the Homeric poems through a process that began with a poet dictating to a scribe. Combining research into scribal activity in other cultures, especially in the fields of religious studies and medieval studies, with research into performance in the field of linguistic anthropology, Part III investigates some of the earliest extant texts of the Homeric epics, the so-called wild papyri. Written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey achieved an unprecedented degree of standardization after 150 BCE. By looking at oral texts, dictated texts, and wild texts, this book traces the intricate history of Homeric texts from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period, long before the emergence of standardized written texts. Researchers in a number of disciplines will benefit from this comparative and interdisciplinary study.

scholarly journals An owl and a mirror: On Bosch’s visual motif’s meaning

2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (1/4) ◽  
pp. 210-241
Author(s):  
Jelena Melnikova-Grigorjeva ◽  
Olga Bogdanova
Keyword(s):  
Text Analysis ◽  
Art History ◽  
Formal Model ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
History Of ◽  
Erwin Panofsky ◽  
Moscow School ◽  
Aby Warburg ◽  
Mutual Communication ◽  
Vast Range

Our main goal in this paper is to study one Hieronymus Bosch’s iconographic motif, an owl, considering the iconography, production of meaning and connotations. Pursuant to the comparative analysis of the variants of the formal model we intend to ascertain the meaning of Bosch’s “owl” motif. We supplement its pure visual legend throughout European art history with mythological and symbolic (mainly verbal) legend. Methodologically, we base the vast range of interpretations on the school of history of ideas (Aby Warburg, Ernst Gombrich, Erwin Panofsky, Francis Yates, Carlo Ginzburg) and the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics of culture and text analysis. The article concludes that the “owl” motif, including in the works of Bosch, conveys the semantic aura of the “blind sight” (“blind foresight”). This ideological concept is in turn included into the archaic concept of mutual communication between the worlds carried out by a mythological observer — shaman, trickster.

Zen Buddhism and Muromachi Art

1963 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 417-432
Author(s):  
Ichirō Ishida ◽  
Delmer M. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Zen Buddhism ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Japanese Buddhism ◽  
Muromachi Period ◽  
Noh Drama ◽  
History Of ◽  
Tea Ceremony ◽  
Landscape Gardening

When tea ceremony, flower arrangement, Noh drama, linked verse (renga), monochrome painting, and dry-landscape gardening are said to represent Japanese culture, it is usually assumed that they were produced and fostered by Zen Buddhism. If we are fully to understand these art forms, we must therefore make a systematic study of their relationship to Zen. The particular species of Zen diat is said to have produced and fostered these arts is the Rinzai Zen developed by Muso at the beginning of the Muromachi Period (1336–1573) when Zen first became a pervasive influence in the cultural history of Japan. Let us look, then, at the position of Muromachi Zen in the history of Japanese Buddhism.

Trends in Contemporary Research on Shamanism

Numen ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas A. DuBois
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Medical Anthropology ◽  
Art History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
History Of Anthropology ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Contemporary Research ◽  
Strong Interest ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cognitive Study

Recent research on the topic of shamanism is reviewed and discussed. Included are works appearing since the early 1990s in the fields of anthropology, religious studies, archaeology, cognitive sciences, ethnomusicology, medical anthropology, art history, and ethnobotany. The survey demonstrates a continued strong interest in specific ethnographic case studies focusing on communities which make use of shamanic practices. Shamanic traditions are increasingly studied within their historical and political contexts, with strong attention to issues of research ideology. New trends in the study of cultural revitalization, neoshamanism, archaeology, gender, the history of anthropology, and the cognitive study of religion are highlighted.

scholarly journals Czy może istnieć świat rzeczy bez rzeczy? Problem badania inwentarzy dóbr w historii sztuki

2019 ◽  
pp. 187-208
Author(s):  
Konrad Morawski
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Art History ◽  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
Source Analysis ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Traditional Art ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
History Of ◽  
Textual Representation

The paper addresses a problem which traditional art history has thus far ignored, i.e. the examination of items listed in inventories of property. Art historians usually approach concrete works of art to textualize them, while they are helpless confronting items “hidden” behind a text. In the context of the “materiality turn,” inventories reveal their paradoxical character since they include “personal” information about individual objects. If one assumes that the inventory is an instrument used to examine the objects listed in it, one must also realize a basic paradox of approaching them via their purely textual representation. A growing interest of art historians in publishing historical sources, in particular inventories, should result in more reflection on the role assigned to texts and things by historiography. To answer the question how items listed in inventories are available to their readers, the author has made references to cognitive linguistics and epistemology, critiques of historical narrativism, and poststructuralism. Such a comprehensive frame of reference made it possible to analyze some problems of the theory of historical source analysis and the editing and publishing of source texts. A comparison of art history and history of material culture resulted in defining the expectations and limitations related to the study of property inventories conducted by both disciplines. The experience of object analysis, which is a key prerequisite of interpretation, has been described in reference to three cognitive terms: concepts, exemplars, and invariants. The scholar trying to use all the available sources to reach the object itself must take advantage of all his/her experience. Analysis is possible only in a context, while the meaning of concepts, i.e. brief entries about individual items, can be discovered only in a complex system of semiotic reference. Apparently, such analysis can never be objective.

Form and Function

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morgan Pitelka
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Zen Buddhism ◽  
Form And Function ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function

The institutional and discursive connections between Zen Buddhism and the ritualized culture of tea (chanoyu) in Japan are clear, but the ostensible link between Zen and the material culture of tea (i.e., tea houses, gardens, and both imported and domestically produced utensils such as tea bowls and calligraphy) is less evident. This chapter will consider the problem of Zen’s inconsistent and historically contingent relationship to the material culture of tea with particular reference to the history of the tea bowl in Japan. It considers well-known examples of tea bowls in Japanese tea culture and the changing social and political contexts for their production and use, and it argues that for some, drinking tea from a bowl may indeed trigger satori, but for others, a bowl is just a bowl.

The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Law

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Textual Tradition ◽  
Vernacular Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modes Of Life

The foundation of Hindu law is the voluminous textual tradition called Dharmaśāstra, the expert tradition on dharma. This book seeks to delineate the historical development of Dharmaśāstra, even though the tradition presented dharma as timeless and ahistorical. The volume establishes the importance of law for the history and study of Hinduism by providing interpretive descriptions of all the major topics of Hindu dharma according to this tradition. First, two broad introductions to the historical development of the textual sources of Hindu law suggest new ways to understand both the original texts (smṛti) and the later commentaries and digests. Next, groundbreaking research into the origin of the householder (gṛhastha), who is at the center of the Dharmaśāstric enterprise, provides new insights into both the origin of this genre and many of its topics, such as the āśrama system and married household life. The book devotes its central chapters to each of the major topics of Dharmaśāstra: epistemology of dharma, caste and social class, orders of life, rites of passage, Vedic student and graduate, marriage, children, inheritance, women, daily duties, food, gifting, funeral and ancestral offerings, impurity and purification, ascetic modes of life, dharma during emergencies, king, punishment, legal procedure, titles of law, penances, vows, pilgrimage, images, and temples. The final chapters then explore both the reception of Dharmaśāstra in other religious traditions, both Hindu and Buddhist, and the relevance of Dharmaśāstra to studies of critical concepts in religious studies—the body, emotions, material culture, subjectivity, animal studies, and vernacular culture.

The problem of the artefact: subject limits of the art library

1979 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor Fawcett
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Art History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Round Table ◽  
History Of Technology ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
A Value ◽  
History Of

The traditional subject category ‘visual arts’ is based on a value judgment, but aesthetic criteria no longer suffice to define this category. Art is increasingly permissive in its range. The subjects of art history, archaeology, social anthropology, and history of technology tend more and more to overlap. Almost any material artefact can now be viewed aesthetically, and any work of visual art may be considered as an artefact. Libraries should aim to bring together all the material culture of human societies, whether tools or works of art, in their bibliographic classifications instead of scattering it as at present.(Slightly revised version of a paper given at the Art Libraries Round Table, 45th IFLA Congress, Copenhagen, 1979.)

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