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Archaeoastronomy and the Maya
Archaeoastronomy and the Maya illustrates archaeoastronomical approaches to ancient Mayan cultural production. The book is contextualized through a history of archaeoastronomical investigations into Mayan sites, originating in the 19th century discovery of astronomical tables within hieroglyphic books. Early 20th century archaeological excavations revealed inscriptions carved into stone that also preserved astronomical records, along with architecture that was built to reflect astronomical orientations. These materials provided the basis of a growing professionalized archaeoastronomy, blossoming in the 1970s and expanding into recent years. The chapters here exemplify the advances made in th...
A Teacher for All Generations (2 vols.)
This collection of essays honors James C. VanderKam on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday and twentieth year on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame. An international group of scholars—including peers specializing in Second Temple Judaism and Biblical Studies, colleagues past and present, and former students—offers essays that interact in various ways with ideas and themes important in VanderKam's own work. The collection is divided into five sections spanning two volumes. The first volume includes essays on the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near East along with studies on Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Essays in the second volume address topics in early Judaism, Enoch traditions and Jubilees, and the New Testament and early Christianity.
On Vision and Being Human: Exploring the Menstrual, Neurological and Symbolic Origins of Religious Experience
Visionary and religious experiences are ubiquitous among human beings, but why do we experience them as coming from a hidden reality beyond the senses? Why should we believe in the existence of deities despite the mundane evidence of our own eyes? Why do we as intelligent primates ascribe any importance to these 'imaginary' realities at all? This creative and speculative thesis seeks to answer these questions in a new way, gazing into the content of visions themselves and exploring the various inner realities that gave rise to these transformative and meaningful aspects of our humanity. Focusing upon symbolic cognition as a fundamental organising principle of human experience, a diverse series of musings upon the nature of reality, consciousness, and our evolutionary origins seeks to transcend our modern artificial boundaries to arrive at a holistic, and delightfully playful, human image for the twenty-first century. An original visionary thesis illustrated with 30 beautiful drawings.
Substance of the Ancient Maya
Substance of the Ancient Maya: Kingdoms and Communities, Objects and Beings collects twelve essays by top scholars that highlight what is new in research pertaining to the ancient Maya. Subjects range from updated political histories of major kingdoms in the southern Maya Lowlands to explorations of the nature of Maya writing and materiality. These essays were inspired by the scholarship of Stephen Houston and celebrate his transdisciplinary commitment to research in anthropological archaeology, epigraphy, and art history. The contributions in this volume are organized into two sections that respectively reflect different scales from which to approach the substance of the ancient Maya—from...
Mesoamerican Mythology
Illustrated with scores of drawings and halftone photos, this guidebook to the mythology of Mexico and Central America focuses mainly on Mexican Highland and Maya areas, due to their importance in Mesoamerican history.
Leibniz and Confucianism
In the closing years of the seventeenth century, one of the most brilliant of modern European philosophers became actively involved in the search for intellectual and spiritual accord between Europe and China. In his search, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz entered the “Rites Controversy” on the side of the Jesuits, who had achieved positions of remarkable proximity to the Chinese throne. Yet less than forty years later, the optimism of their cause had dummed. Leibniz died in isolation in Hanover, the papacy ruled against the Jesuits at Rome, and in China there was a growing distrust of the Christian missionaries by the monarchy. In contrast to past neglect of this subject as an intriguing but ...
Engaged Observer
"Anthropology has long been associated with an ethos of "engagement." The field's core methods and practices involve long-term interpersonal contact between researchers and their study participants, giving major research topics in the field a distinctively human face. The fact that these interactions frequently cross social parameters, including class, race, ethnicity, and gender, raises important questions. Can research findings be authentic and objective? Are anthropologists able to use their data to aid the participants of their study, and is that aid always welcome? In this book, authors bring together an international array of scholars who have been embedded in some of the most conflict-ridden and dangerous zones in the world to reflect on the role and responsibility of anthropological inquiry. They explore issues of truth and objectivity, the role of the academic, the politics of memory, and the impact of race, gender, and social position on the research process. Through ethnographic case studies, they offer models for conducting engaged research and illustrate the contradictions and challenges of doing so".--BOOKJACKET.
Unwriting Maya Literature
Unwriting Maya Literature provides an important decolonial framework for reading Maya texts that builds on the work of Maya authors and intellectuals such as Q’anjob’al Gaspar Pedro González and Kaqchikel Irma Otzoy. Paul M. Worley and Rita M. Palacios privilege the Maya category ts’íib over constructions of the literary in order to reveal how Maya peoples themselves conceive of artistic creation. This offers a decolonial departure from theoretical approaches that remain situated within alphabetic Maya linguistic and literary creation. As ts’íib refers to a broad range of artistic production from painted codices and textiles to works composed in Latin script, as well as plastic ar...
Cosas
Love and friendship, art and craft, language and culture are the subjects of this look back at one woman's experiences in Mexico over a period of twenty years. What first propels Linda Grant Niemann south are the migrants she encounters in her job as a railroad brakeman in the Southwest. She decides to learn Spanish, and in Mexico she soon meets some surprising kindred spirits. An admirer of craft and expertise, Niemann seeks out individual artists who make exquisite things--Otomi papermakers, the families who produce the famous ceramics of Mata Ortiz, the man in Michoacán who knows how to fashion full-size jaguar thrones in bent cane. Some of her searches lead her to tiny villages and to artists who seldom get to meet their own fans. Niemann wonders if she is experiencing an ordinary shopaholic's obsession or if this is something more. The something more reveals itself as the connection of one artist to another.
The Essential David Everett Reader
David Everett wrote the way he played the piano for the sheer joy of entertaining. His stories are unfailingly funny. Everett's memoirs tell of growing up in east Texas during WWII, the military after Korea but before Viet Nam, gays at UT in the 50s, Winedale and Johnson City in the 60s, playing the piano behind the iron curtain in Europe, and much, much more. Diagnosed with Parkinson s at 45, Everett continued to enjoy life for another 28 years, first working on campus and then retiring to Mexico. This book tells in droll detail the story of the coming of age of a gay Texan, the pleasures and traumas of the 60s, the heroic struggles of an unrepentant iconoclast, beset with a degenerative disease, who faced the world with intelligence, sensitivity, and humor. This book is a song with many verses and a single underlying theme: art as a form of salvation, writing as a pure act of love.
