Levantine Art in the “Orientalizing” Period

2019 ◽  
pp. 369-383
Author(s):  
Marian H. Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The West ◽  
False Dichotomy ◽  
First Millennium

The “Orientalizing period” represents a scholarly designation used to describe the eighth and seventh centuries bce when regions in Greece, Italy, and farther west witnessed a flourishing of arts and cultures attributed to contact with cultural areas to the east—in particular that of the Phoenicians. This chapter surveys Orientalizing as an intellectual and historiographic concept and reconsiders the role of purportedly Phoenician arts within the existing scholarly narratives. The Orientalizing period should be understood as a construct of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship that was structured around a false dichotomy between the Orient (the East) and the West. The designation “Phoenician” has a similarly complex historiographic past rooted in ancient Greek stereotyping that has profoundly shaped modern scholarly interpretations. This chapter argues that the luxury arts most often credited as agents of Orientalization—most prominent among them being carved ivories, decorated metal bowls, and engraved tridacna shells—cannot be exclusively associated with a Phoenician cultural origin, thus calling into question the primacy of the Phoenicians in Orientalizing processes. Each of these types of objects appears to have a much broader production sphere than is indicated by the attribute as Phoenician. In addition, the notion of unidirectional influences flowing from east to west is challenged, and instead concepts of connectivity and networking are proposed as more useful frameworks for approaching the problem of cultural relations during the early part of the first millennium bce.

Are the BRICS a Viable Alternative to the West? A Succinct Analysis

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 61-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Calderón-Zaks
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Global South ◽  
Viable Alternative ◽  
The West ◽  
The People

Abstract In this article I briefly examine the perceived role of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—also known as the BRICS—as an alternative to the West in the Global South. Their patterns of development must be placed in the context of the West’s development prior to and during the twentieth century. In fact, the burden of “development” remains on the shoulders of the people on the peripheries of the Americas and Africa.

scholarly journals About the Role of the Northern Branch Value in the Great Silk Road

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muratbek Kozhobekov
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Practical Importance ◽  
Silk Road ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
The West ◽  
Material Wealth ◽  
Large Scale Project ◽  
Northern Branch

The Great Silk Road for many centuries served as a connecting element between the cultures of East and West and on informative and communicative patency was a unique invention of world civilization. Not only the material wealth, but the cultural values of the East and the West, were carried along the Great Silk Road. In this regard, the study of the participation of Kyrgyz in this large-scale project of humanity, is of great scientific and practical importance. Despite the remoteness of the Kyrgyz Kaganate from the main path, the Kyrgyz actively participated not only in trade but also in cultural relations of the Eurasian subcontinent. According to the information of the eastern authors, the Kyrgyz had close trade and political ties with many countries of the East and Central Asia.

Byzantium and the West

2020 ◽  
pp. 552-566
Author(s):  
Marianne Pade
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Greek Language ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The West

This chapter examines the Humanists and their interest in Greek language from the mid-fourteenth century until the mid-fifteenth. It focuses on key Humanist figures who advanced the study of Ancient Greek in the West, discussing Petrarch’s engagement with Plutarch and Homer, as well as Coluccio Salutati and his appointment of Chrysoloras to teach Greek in Florence. The author also examines the work of Chrysoloras’ students, Leonardo Bruni and Guarino Veronese, and the role of Latin translators in arousing interest in Greek works.

Including Islam

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garth Fowden
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
Internal Reasons ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
New Perspective

This book examines history and thought “before and after Muhammad” by offering a new perspective on the debate about “the West and the Rest,” about America's destiny and Europe's identity. One party explains how Europe and eventually North America—the North Atlantic world—left the rest in the dust from about 1500. The other side argues that Asia—China, Japan, and the Islamic trio of Mughals, Safavids, and Ottomans—remained largely free of European encroachment until the mid-1700s, but then either collapsed for internal reasons, or else were gradually undermined by colonial powers' superior technological, economic, and military power. In seeking to overhaul the foundations of this debate, especially as regards the role of Islam and the Islamic world, the book reformulates the history of the First Millennium, by the end of which Islam had matured sufficiently to be compared with patristic Christianity, in order to fit Islam into it. The book draws primarily on Edward Gibbon's account of East Rome and Islam.

Performing Sappho’s Fractured Archive, or Listening for the Queer Sounds in the Life and Works of Natalie Clifford Barney

2018 ◽  
pp. 47-78
Author(s):  
Samuel N. Dorf
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
French Culture ◽  
Queer Performance ◽  
Private Collections

This chapter excavates the remaining traces of pseudo-ancient Greek musical and dance performance that took place in Natalie Clifford Barney’s Parisian home in the first decades of the twentieth century. Barney’s discovery of Greek antiquity came about at the same time that she became aware of her own sexual identity. She perceived a freedom in the culture of ancient Lesbos and Athens that she felt was lacking in early twentieth-century American and French culture, and she used her passion for studying ancient Greek poetry under the tutelage of the best Greek scholars in Paris to channel both her creative and erotic interests in a very public way. This chapter focuses on the alterity of queer performance and reception within Barney’s Parisian circle by exploring how queer performance and identity were mapped in her cultural salon. The evidence of these performances remains in fragments, scattered across public and private collections, preserved in photographs, memoirs, letters, and anecdotes told third-hand. The chapter draws on theories of performance and queerness to make sense of the archival materials relating to re-enactment of ancient Greek dance and music hosted at the heiress’s home. This illustrates the role of ancient Greek–inspired music and dance in defining queer subjectivity in early twentieth-century Parisian salons. In piecing together fragments, this chapter offers new ways for musicologists to think about performance and the archive.

scholarly journals Strategic Hypocrisy: The British Imperial Scripting of Tibet's Geopolitical Identity

2009 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 227-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dibyesh Anand
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
The West ◽  
Significant Aspect ◽  
Western Idea ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
British Imperialist

The protests in and around Tibet in 2008 show that Tibet's status within China remains unsettled. The West is not an outsider to the Tibet question, which is defined primarily in terms of the debate over the status of Tibet vis-à-vis China. Tibet's modern geopolitical identity has been scripted by British imperialism. The changing dynamics of British imperial interests in India affected the emergence of Tibet as a (non)modern geopolitical entity. The most significant aspect of the British imperialist policy practiced in the first half of the twentieth century was the formula of “Chinese suzerainty/Tibetan autonomy.” This strategic hypocrisy, while nurturing an ambiguity in Tibet's status, culminated in the victory of a Western idea of sovereignty. It was China, not Tibet, that found the sovereignty talk most useful. The paper emphasizes the world-constructing role of contesting representations and challenges the divide between the political and the cultural, the imperial and the imaginative.

Preference in Paris

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-77
Author(s):  
Christina Luke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Economic Gain ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Learned Societies ◽  
Paris Peace Conference

The pursuit of knowledge, cultural relations and diplomatic practice are discussed in this chapter in the context of the Treaty of Sèvres, the framing the League of Nations, and the role of early twentieth-century philanthropy and academia. The boundaries of where European and US scholars and businessmen penetrated Anatolia are defined as much by the lure of antiquity, recalling the vision of the Megali Idea, as by political posturing and economic gain embedded in the Wilsonian agenda. I trace the strategic diplomacy of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), Learned Societies, and two members of the Princeton Expedition to Sardis, Howard Crosby Butler and William Hepburn Buckler, during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the Turkish War of Independence. I argue that colonial networks writ large framed the nineteenth-century Western gaze of entitlement that underwrote duplicitous claims to Anatolian soil between 1919 and 1922.

The Politics of Interpretation: Understanding Biblical History in Palestinian Rural Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-20
Author(s):  
Elizabeth S. Marteijn
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rural Community ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Rural Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical History ◽  
Cultural Belonging

This article investigates the role of the biblical story in the Palestinian context of cultural and political change. It explores how Palestinian Christians have depicted modern-day Palestinian rural culture as being a continuation of biblical culture. The article explores two different ways of understanding the bible to which this continuation thinking applies: first, when the bible is being read through the eyes of the Palestinian rural community (or ‘the Bible through peasant eyes’, as New Testament scholar Kenneth E. Bailey put it) and secondly, through the eyes of the politically oppressed. To illustrate this, the small Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh in the West Bank serves as a case study. In the post-1967 context, it became important for the inhabitants to portray their village as going back historically to the Ophrah and Ephraim of the bible, thus reimagining their identity as being essentially biblical. This insertion of contemporary Palestinian history into biblical history, and vice versa, is for the inhabitants of Taybeh a way to give scriptural sanction against Zionist constructions and a way to express their theological and cultural belonging to the land. This article demonstrates how their view both relates to and stands in conflict with Western understandings of biblical history, featuring the work of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century travellers, missionaries and ethnographers from Europe.

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