Author: Tamysn Barton File Type: pdf An account of astrology from its beginnings in Mesopotamia, focusing on the Greco-Roman world, Ancient Astrology examines the theoretical development and changing social and political role of astrology. **html
Author: Richard S Weiss
File Type: pdf
Despite the global spread of Western medical practice, traditional doctors still thrive in the modern world. In Recipes for Immortality, Richard Weiss illuminates their continued success by examining the ways in which siddha medical practitioners in Tamil South India win the trust and patronage of patients. While biomedicine might alleviate a patients physical distress, siddha doctors offer their clientele much more affiliation to a timeless and pure community, the fantasy of a Tamil utopia, and even the prospect of immortality. They speak of a golden age of Tamil civilization and of traditional medicine, drawing on broader revivalist formulations of a pure and ancient Tamil community. Weiss analyzes the success of siddha doctors, focusing on how they have successfully garnered authority and credibility. While shedding light on their lives, vocations, and aspirations, Weiss also documents the challenges that siddha doctors face in the modern world, both from a biomedical system that claims universal efficacy, and also from the rival traditional medicine, ayurveda, which is promoted as the national medicine of an autonomous Indian state. Drawing on ethnographic data premodern Tamil texts on medicine, alchemy, and yoga government archival resources college textbooks and popular literature on siddha medicine and on the siddhar yogis, he presents an in-depth study of this traditional system of knowledge, which serves the medical needs of millions of Indians. Weiss concludes with a look at traditional medicine at large, and demonstrates that siddha doctors, despite resent trends toward globalization and biomedicine, reflect the wider political and religious dimensions of medical discourse in our modern world. Recipes for Immortality proves that medical authority is based not only on physical effectiveness, but also on imaginative processes that relate to personal and social identities, conceptions of history, secrecy, loss, and utopian promise. **
Author: Richard Kearney
File Type: epub
Has the passing of the old God paved the way for a new kind of religious project, a more responsible way to seek, sound, and love the things we call divine? Has the suspension of dogmatic certainties and presumptions opened a space in which we can encounter religious wonder anew? Situated at the split between theism and atheism, we now have the opportunity to respond in deeper, freer ways to things we cannot fathom or prove.Distinguished philosopher Richard Kearney calls this condition ana-theos, or God after God-a moment of creative not knowing that signifies a break with former sureties and invites us to forge new meanings from the most ancient of wisdoms. Anatheism refers to an inaugural event that lies at the heart of every great religion, a wager between hospitality and hostility to the stranger, the other& mdashthe sense of something more. By analyzing the roots of our own anatheistic moment, Kearney shows not only how a return to God is possible for those who seek it but also how a more liberating faith can be born.Kearney begins by locating a turn toward sacred secularity in contemporary philosophy, focusing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur. He then marks epiphanies in the modernist masterpieces of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf. Kearney concludes with a discussion of the role of theism and atheism in conflict and peace, confronting the distinction between sacramental and sacrificial belief or the God who gives life and the God who takes it away. Accepting that we can never be sure about God, he argues, is the only way to rediscover a hidden holiness in life and to reclaim an everyday divinity.**
Author: James Crawford
File Type: epub
Buildings are more like us than we realise. They can be born into wealth or poverty, enjoying every privilege or struggling to make ends meet. They have parents -- gods, kings and emperors, governments, visionaries and madmen -- as well as friends and enemies. They have duties and responsibilities. They can endure crises of faith and purpose. They can succeed or fail. They can live. And, sooner or later, they die. In Fallen Glory, James Crawford uncovers the biographies of some of the worlds most fascinating lost and ruined buildings, from the dawn of civilisation to the cyber era. The lives of these iconic structures are packed with drama and intrigue. Soap operas on the grandest scale, they feature war and religion, politics and art, love and betrayal, catastrophe and hope. Frequently their afterlives have been no less dramatic -- their memories used and abused down the millennia for purposes both sacred and profane. They provide the stage for a startling array of characters, including Gilgamesh, the Cretan Minotaur, Agamemnon, Nefertiti, Genghis Khan, Henry VIII, Catherine the Great, Adolf Hitler, and even Bruce Springsteen. Ranging from the deserts of Iraq, the banks of the Nile and the cloud forests of Peru, to the great cities of Jerusalem, Istanbul, Paris, Rome, London and New York, Fallen Glory is a unique guide to a world of vanished architecture. And, by picking through the fragments of our past, it asks what history s scattered ruins can tell us about our own future. **
Author: Immi Tallgren
File Type: pdf
The language of international criminal law has considerable traction in global politics, and much of its legitimacy is embedded in apparently axiomatic historical truths. This innovative edited collection brings together some of the worlds leading international lawyers with a very clear mandate in mind to re-evaluate (retry) the dominant historiographical tradition in the field of international criminal law. Carefully curated, and with contributions by leading scholars, The New Histories of International Criminal Law pursues three research objectives to bring to the fore the structure and function of contemporary histories of international criminal law, to take issue with the consequences of these histories, and to call for their demystification. The essays discern several registers on which the received historiographical tradition must be retried tropology inclusionsexclusions gender race representations of the victim and the perpetrator history and memory ideology and master narratives international criminal law and hegemonic theories and more. This book intervenes critically in the fields of international criminal law and international legal history by bringing in new voices and fresh approaches. Taken as a whole, it provides a rich account of the dilemmas, conundrums, and possibilities entailed in writing histories of international criminal law beyond, against, or in the shadow of the master narrative.About the AuthorbImmi Tallgrenb is Senior Lecturer of Public International Law at the University of Helsinki Research Fellow at the Erik Castren Institute of International Law and Human Rights and Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for International Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science. She is also associated member at the Centre de droit international, Universite Libre de Bruxelles. She currently directs collaborative research on history of international law as well as on international law and media. bThomas Skouterisb is Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Ibrahim Shihata Memorial LLM Program in International and Comparative Law at the American University in Cairo. He has also taught at Leiden University, the Melbourne Law Masters Program, and the Central European University. Skouteris has served as Founding Secretary General of the European Society of International Law, Editor-in-Chief of the Leiden Journal of International Law, and Senior Fellow at the European Law Research Center of Harvard University.
Author: Marco Ruffini
File Type: pdf
Why is the history of art so often construed as a history of artists, when its alleged focus is art? This book responds to this question by examining Giorgio Vasaris Lives and the artist it features most centrally, Michelangelo. Printed in Florence in 1550 and republished in a substantially enlarged form in 1568, the Lives is a compendium of biographies of the most noteworthy artists, from the late Middle Ages to Vasaris time. Perhaps no other text has exerted such a formidable influence on the discipline of art history, shaping its historical and conceptual categories-principally as an effect of its biographical format and the biological model it follows, charting artistic development from birth through decline.More than any other artist in the Lives, Michelangelo exemplifies art as an expression of the individual. Yet at the same time, as this book aims to show, the Lives fashions Michelangelo as the founder of a new academic era in which art develops collectively as a discipline. Paradoxically, Vasaris celebration of Michelangelo mobilizes a conception of art as teachable and transmissible that is antithetical to Michelangelos aesthetic ideals and unique style.Each of the five chapters of this book examines the notion of art without an author, whereby art is teachable and not the inimitable product of a genius, or a corporate rather than an individualistic venture. By tracing Vasaris transformation of Michelangelo from an artist into a figure who legitimates a new age in art, the book bridges a longstanding dichotomy in our understanding not only of Vasari but also of Renaissance culture and art.The claims Art Without an Author makes are integrally supported by art historical research and textualphilological analysis. By way of close study, this book reaches entirely new conclusions about Michelangelo, the production and significance of Vasaris Lives, and the role authorialvalues play in Italian Renaissance culture.
Author: John Tagg
File Type: pdf
div contentInfoDiv Spring 2012, No. 47, Pages 24-37 Posted Online May 2, 2012. div (doi10.1162GREY_a_00068) 2012 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. div htmlContentp fulltexth1 arttitlediv hlFld-TitleThe Archiving Machine or, The Camera and the Filing Cabineth1div artAuthorsdiv hlFld-ContribAuthorspan hlFld-ContribAuthor John Taggspanp fulltext nospacebJohn Taggb is Professor of Art History and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, State University of New York. His latest book is The Disciplinary Frame Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
Author: Emma Tennant
File Type: epub
Adolf Hitlers secret mistress, an upstanding member of the British aristocracy, gives birth to a daughter. The child is whisked away at infancy and raised as an orphan. She is protected from the truth concerning her origins, but that doesnt prevent the remnants of Hitlers scattered empire from seeking her out as part of a plot to reignite their dream of conquering Europe. Enter into our drama the starchy, conservative Jean Hastie, an art historian and official for the Scottish National Trust. When her best friend Monica is murdered she is determined to avenge her death and to rescue Monicas granddaughter, Mel, who is missing and the prime suspect in the crime. She soon finds herself embroiled in the neo-Nazis conspiracy. Jean sets off to find Mel, traversing crime-ridden London housing projects, the Paris apartment of a former Nazi lawyer, and a chateau in the South of France where a quaint village camouflages a sinister political conclave. In Hitlers Girls, Emma Tennant and Hilary Baileys wry, atmospheric prose conjures a whirlwind adventure full of international intrigue, subtle humor, and terrifying, timely, political speculation.**
Author: George Gheverghese Joseph
File Type: pdf
This book traces the first faltering steps taken in the mathematical theorization of infinity which marks the emergence of modern mathematics. It analyzes the part played by Indian mathematics through the Kerala conduit, which is an important but neglected part of the history of mathematics.