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Includes detailed chapters devoted to each of the five major cultural regions of the Pacific: Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, and the islands of Southeast Asia.
For thousands of years across mainland and island Southeast Asia, the deification of significant ancestors and the veneration of spirits of nature has formed the basis of traditional beliefs. These beliefs are in turn the impetus for the creation of splendid and extraordinary works of art in fiber, stone, metal, wood, and clay--made to protect and give pleasure to the living, to honor the ancestors, and to secure safe passage for the human soul between this world and the afterlife. Life, Death and Magic provides an evocative overview of Southeast Asia's ancestral arts and culture, from prehistoric times to the twenty-first century. Beautifully designed, it is illustrated with works of art from countries and regions including Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, East Timor, Brunei, Thailand, Cambodia, and southern China, drawn from museums around the world.
Numinous Fields has its roots in a phenomenological understanding of perception. It seeks to understand what, beyond the mere sensory data they provide, landscape, nature, and art, both separately and jointly, may mean when we experience them. It focuses on actual or potential experiences of the numinous, or sacred, that such encounters may give rise to. This volume is multi-disciplinary in scope. It examines perceptions of place, space, nature, and art as well as perceptions of place, space, and nature in art. It includes chapters written by art curators, and historians and scholars in the fields of landscape, architecture, cultural geography, religious studies, philosophy, and art. Its cha...
This book describes artisans from South Sulawesi, Indonesia, as they attempt to overcome poverty and communicate ethnic identity through participation in fluctuating silk and tourist souvenir industries. Morrell assesses the significance and long-term sustainability of their activities. The discussion addresses broad questions about economic development, as microenterprises such as these are vital sources of non-farm incomes in rural areas with high unemployment.
‘Authenticity’ and authentication is at the heart of museums’ concerns in displays, objects, and interaction with visitors. These notions have formed a central element in early thought on culture and collecting. Nineteenth century-explorers, commissioned museum collectors and pioneering ethnographers attempted to lay bare the essences of cultures through collecting and studying objects from distant communities. Comparably, historical archaeology departed from the idea that cultures were discrete bounded entities, subject to divergence but precisely therefore also to be traced back and linked to, a more complete original form in de (even) deeper past. Much of what we work with today in ...
Volume I surveys the long history of fashion from the ancient world to c. 1800. The volume seeks to answer fundamental questions on the origins of fashion, challenging Eurocentric explanations that the emergence of fashion was a European phenomenon and shows instead that fashion found early expressions across the globe well before the age of European colonialism and imperialism. It sheds light on how fashion was experienced in a multitude of ways depending on class, gender, and race, and despite geographical distance, fashion connected populations across the globe. Fashions flowered and were reseeded, through entanglements of empire, forced and voluntary migration, evolving racial systems, burgeoning sea travel and transcontinental systems.
The Princess of the Flaming Womb, the Javanese legend that introduces this pioneering study, symbolizes the many ambiguities attached to femaleness in Southeast Asian societies. Yet, despite these ambiguities, the relatively egalitarian nature of male-female relations in Southeast Asia is central to arguments claiming a coherent identity for the region. This challenging work by senior scholar Barbara Watson Andaya considers such contradictions while offering a thought-provoking view of Southeast Asian history that focuses on women's roles and perceptions. Andaya explores the broad themes of the early modern era (1500-1800) - the introduction of new religions, major economic shifts, changing patterns of state control, the impact of elite lifestyles and behaviors - drawing on an extraordinary range of sources and citing numerous examples from Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese, Philippine, and Malay societies.