Before Religion

Before Religion
Author: Brent Nongbri
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2013-01-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300154178

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Examining a wide array of ancient writings, Brent Nongbri dispels the commonly held idea that there is such a thing as ancient religion. Nongbri shows how misleading it is to speak as though religion was a concept native to pre-modern cultures.

Workers and Intelligentsia in Late Imperial Russia

Workers and Intelligentsia in Late Imperial Russia
Author: Reginald E. Zelnik
Publisher: International and Area Studies University of California B El
Total Pages: 376
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN:

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Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity

Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity
Author: Jaś Elsner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 533
Release: 2020-03-19
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1108473075

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Explores the problems for studying art and religion in Eurasia arising from ancestral, colonial and post-colonial biases in historiography.

The Invention of Tradition

The Invention of Tradition
Author: Eric Hobsbawm
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 1992-07-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521437738

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This book explores examples of this process of invention and addresses the complex interaction of past and present in a fascinating study of ritual and symbolism.

The Topkapi Scroll

The Topkapi Scroll
Author: Gülru Necipoğlu
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 414
Release: 1996-03-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0892363355

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Since precious few architectural drawings and no theoretical treatises on architecture remain from the premodern Islamic world, the Timurid pattern scroll in the collection of the Topkapi Palace Museum Library is an exceedingly rich and valuable source of information. In the course of her in-depth analysis of this scroll dating from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, Gülru Necipoğlu throws new light on the conceptualization, recording, and transmission of architectural design in the Islamic world between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. Her text has particularly far-reaching implications for recent discussions on vision, subjectivity, and the semiotics of abstract representation. She also compares the Islamic understanding of geometry with that found in medieval Western art, making this book particularly valuable for all historians and critics of architecture. The scroll, with its 114 individual geometric patterns for wall surfaces and vaulting, is reproduced entirely in color in this elegant, large-format volume. An extensive catalogue includes illustrations showing the underlying geometries (in the form of incised “dead” drawings) from which the individual patterns are generated. An essay by Mohammad al-Asad discusses the geometry of the muqarnas and demonstrates by means of CAD drawings how one of the scroll’s patterns could be used co design a three-dimensional vault.

The Taming of Chance

The Taming of Chance
Author: Ian Hacking
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 1990-08-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521388849

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This book combines detailed scientific historical research with characteristic philosophic breadth and verve.

The Dialectics of Seeing

The Dialectics of Seeing
Author: Susan Buck-Morss
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 512
Release: 1991-07-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780262521642

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Walter Benjamin's magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form. Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth. The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose "materialist metaphysics" he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century "ur-form" of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time—from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons—as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique. Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south—Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples—and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of "dialectics at a standstill." She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of "afterimages" to have the last word.

Wooden Eyes

Wooden Eyes
Author: Carlo Ginzburg
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780231119603

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Ginzburg, "the preeminent Italian historian of his generation [who] helped create the genre of microhistory" ("New York Times"), ruminates on how perspective affects what we see and understand. 26 illustrations.

From Empire to Republic

From Empire to Republic
Author: Collectif
Publisher: innsbruck University Press
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2016-09-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 3903122394

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After the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Austria transformed itself from an empire to a small Central European country. Formerly an important player in international affairs, the new republic was quickly sidelined by the European concert of powers. The enormous losses of territory and population in Austria's post-Habsburg state of existence, however, did not result in a political, economic, cultural, and intellectual black hole. The essays in the twentieth anniversary volume of Contemporary Austrian Studies argue that the small Austrian nation found its place in the global arena of the twentieth century and made a mark both on Europe and the world. Be it Freudian psychoanalysis, the “fin-de-siècle” Vienna culture of modernism, Austro-Marxist thought, or the Austrian School of Economics, Austrian hinkers and ideas were still wielding a notable impact on the world. Alongside these cultural and intellectual dimensions, Vienna remained the Austrian capital and reasserted its strong position in Central European and international business and finance. Innovative Austrian companies are operating all over the globe. This volume also examines how the globalizing world of the twentieth century has impacted Austrian demography, society, and political life. Austria's place in the contemporary world is increasingly determined by the forces of the European integration process. European Union membership brings about convergence and a regional orientation with ramifications for Austria's global role. Austria emerges in the essays of this volume as a highly globalized country with an economy, society, and political culture deeply grounded in Europe. The globalization of Austria, it appears, turns out to be in many instances an “Europeanization”.