Danxia Burns a Buddha

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory P. A. Levine
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Art Collecting ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Photographic Reproduction ◽  
Art Canon ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
Modern Artists

Chapter 3 focuses on a medieval painting in the Zen art canon—Yintuoluo’s painting of Danxia Tianran (738/39-824), a Chinese monk said to have burned a wood statue of the Buddha—and situates it within its modern surround, particularly in relation to Zen iconoclasm, a prominent trope in postwar Zen cultural production including Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and other countercultural works. The chapter suggests how premodern representations of the Danxia tale circulated in the modern world through art collecting, photographic reproduction, translations of hagiography into modern Japanese and English for lay and non-practicing readers, and “reverse orientalist” critique of Western views of Buddhism. It notes too the tale’s representation by modern artists in Japan, including Yamamoto Shunkyo and Okamoto Ippei. Whatever the representation of Danxia burning the Buddha meant in preceding centuries, in the early twentieth century, it responded to new prospects, ambitions, and conflicts, as much geo-political as personal.

The limits of comparison: institutional mortality rates, long-term confinement and causes of death during the early twentieth century

2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 404-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Waltraud Ernst
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Causes Of Death ◽  
Modern World ◽  
British India ◽  
Psychiatric Institution ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material

This article presents a case study of institutional trends in a psychiatric institution in British India during the early twentieth century. It focuses on mortality statistics and long-term confinement rates as well as causes of death. The intention is two-fold: first, to provide new material that potentially lends itself to comparison with the few existing institutional case studies that have explored this particular period; second, to highlight some of the problems inherent in the status of the statistics and the conceptual categories used, and to consider the challenges these pose for any intended comparative and transnational assessment. Furthermore, it is suggested that historians working on the history of western institutions ought to look beyond the confining rim of Eurocentric self-containment and relate their research to other institutions around the world. It is important for social historians to abstain from uncritically reproducing hegemonic histories of the modern world in which western cultures and nations are posited by default as the centre or metropolis and the rest as peripheries whose social and scientific developments may be seen to be of exotic interest, but merely derivative and peripheral.

scholarly journals Curriculum, knowledge, and the idea of South Africa

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 26-45
Author(s):  
Crain Soudien
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Social Difference ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Higher Education System ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Curriculum Project

South Africa is an important social space in world history and politics for understanding how the modern world comes to deal with the questions of social difference, and the encounter of people with different civilizational histories. In this essay I argue that a particular racial idea inflected this encounter. One of the ways in which this happened was through the dominance of late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century positivism. In setting up the argument for this essay, I begin with a characterization of the nature of early South Africa's modernity, the period in which the country's political and intellectual leadership began to outline the kinds of knowledges they valued. I argue that a scientism, not unlike the positivism that emerges in many parts of the world at this time, came to inform discussions of progress and development in the country at the end of the nineteenth century. This was continued into the early twentieth century, and was evident in important interventions in the country such as the establishment of the higher education system and initiatives like the Carnegie Inquiry of 1933. The key effect of this scientism, based as it was on the conceits of objectivity and neutrality, was to institute suspicion of all other forms of knowing, and most critically that of indigenous knowledge. In the second part of the paper, I show that this scientism persists in the post-apartheid curriculum project. Finally, I make an exploratory argument, drawing on the concept of the 'transaction' in John Dewey, for a new approach to knowing.

Ugliness, Underground, Queer Difference

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Yetta Howard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Theoretical Overview

The introductory chapter of Ugly Differences provides a theoretical overview of the book and its central interventions on the concepts of ugliness and the underground. It turns to early-twentieth-century examples by Gertrude Stein and Claude McKay to frame genealogical connections between ugliness and queer female difference. This literary history highlights the roles that avant-garde, experimental, primitivist, and vernacular approaches to cultural production play in reflecting nondominant subjects whose differences are routed through de-privileged sites of the aesthetic.

Buddhist Salvation Armies as Vanguards of the Sāsana: Sorcerer Societies in Twentieth-Century Burma

2016 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 1083-1104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Patton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Buddha

Since the early twentieth century, groups of Burmese Buddhist sorcerers and their followers have taken on the duty of guarding the Buddha's sāsana from colonial, ideological, and Islamic threats. Sāsana (broadly, the teachings of the Buddha and the institutions and practices that support them) and how it should be sustained in the face of its inevitable demise have been central concerns of these societies, expressed in both their textual and oral representations. To illustrate this tension between endurance and change, this article explores ideas of the life cycle of the sāsana and how ideas about its responsibility to wider communities of Burmese Buddhists became expressed through the intersection of sāsana and sorcery. Examining the ways these associations understood themselves to be protecting and propagating the sāsana through various means demonstrates how sāsana vitality gave their beliefs and actions a distinct collective and collectively ethical tone.

Curious Modernities: Early Twentieth-Century Balinese Textual Explorations

2007 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 723-758 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Creese
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The West ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Textual Representation ◽  
Dutch Colonial

The engagement of Balinese writers and intellectuals with the modern world began well before the final incorporation of the island into the Dutch colonial state in 1906–8. This essay analyzes three Balinese texts, each belonging to a different traditional Balinese literary genre, that were written around the beginning of the twentieth century. These texts, which deal with world events and geography, are Balinese reworkings of material from printed sources into indigenous forms of textual representation. They represent some of the earliest documented shifts toward modernity by indigenous Balinese writers and embody attempts to engage with modernity as a way of both understanding the West and coming to terms with new technologies. As examples of a localized translation of the foreign and the modern, they provide insights into how elite Balinese understandings of modernity were being constituted at the turn of the century.

scholarly journals The Modern Woman in The Mirror: Modernity and the New Zealand Women's Magazine, 1922-1932

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jessie Annett-Wood
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Political Discussion ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Women's Magazine ◽  
The Relationship

<p>In 1922 a new women’s magazine, The Ladies’ Mirror, was launched in Auckland. The first magazine of its kind in New Zealand, The Mirror sought to provide New Zealand women with their own space in print, and contained a wide array of content, including fashion notes, housekeeping advice, and social and political discussion pieces. This thesis uses The Mirror’s first decade to explore the relationship between New Zealand women and modernity in the early twentieth century. The Mirror appeared at a time that was conspicuously and self-consciously modern, and it presented itself as a magazine for the modern woman in an era of change. Women and modernity are often presented as having a fraught relationship, but The Mirror presented a modern world in which women’s lives were being improved and enhanced.</p>

Introduction: The Ottoman Empire and its Frontiers

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. C. S. PEACOCK
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Middle Ages

Stretching across Europe, Asia and Africa for half a millennium bridging the end of the Middle Ages and the early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire was one of the major forces that forged the modern world. The chapters in this book focus on four key themes: frontier fortifications, the administration of the frontier, frontier society and relations between rulers and ruled, and the economy of the frontier. Through snapshots of aspects of Ottoman frontier policies in such diverse times and places as fifteenth-century Anatolia, seventeenth-century Hungary, nineteenth-century Iraq or twentieth-century Jordan, the book provides a richer picture than hitherto available of how this complex empire coped with the challenge of administering and defending disparate territories in an age of comparatively primitive communications. By way of introduction, this chapter seeks to provide an overview of these four themes in the history of Ottoman frontiers.

French and Jewish

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadia Malinovich
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Cultural Innovation ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
New Energy ◽  
French National Identity

This study of Jewish cultural innovation in early twentieth-century France highlights the complexity and ambivalence of Jewish identity and self-definition in the modern world. Following the Dreyfus affair, French Jews increasingly began to question how Jewishness should be defined in a society where Jews enjoyed full political equality. Writers began to explore biblical themes, traditional Jewish folklore, and issues of identity and assimilation. A plethora of new journals focusing on Jewish religion, history, and culture came into being, as did a multitude of associations that emphasized Jewish distinctiveness. This book explores this blossoming of Jewish cultural life in France. It shows that the interface between the various groups was as important as the differences between them: it was the process of debate and dialogue that infused new energy into French Jewish identity and culture. The book analyses the Jewish press and literature to develop a typology of themes, providing a panoramic view of how Jewish identity and culture were discussed and debated among Jews and non-Jews of varying ideological, cultural, and political orientations. The analysis also provides a vantage point from which to explore the complex ways in which French national identity was re-negotiated in the early twentieth-century. During this period, French Jews in effect reshaped the category of Frenchness itself, and in so doing created new possibilities for being both French and Jewish.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document