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Ten Thousand Things

2012-03-01
Ten Thousand Things

Author: Judith Farquhar

Publisher: Princeton University Press

ISBN: 9781935408314

Category: Social Science

Page: 352

View: 336

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Ten Thousand Things explores the many forms of life, or, in ancient Chinese parlance “the ten thousand things” that life is and is becoming, in contemporary Beijing and beyond. Coauthored by an American anthropologist and a Chinese philosopher, the book examines the myriad ways contemporary residents of Beijing understand and nurture the good life, practice the embodied arts of everyday wellbeing, and in doing so draw on cultural resources ranging from ancient metaphysics to modern media. Farquhar and Zhang show that there are many activities that nurture life: practicing meditative martial arts among friends in a public park; jogging, swimming, and walking backward; dancing, singing, and keeping pet birds; connoisseurship of tea, wine, and food; and spiritual disciplines ranging from meditation to learning a foreign language. As ancient life-nurturing texts teach, the cultural practices that produce particular forms of life are generative in ten thousand ways: they “give birth to life and transform the transformations.” This book attends to the patterns of city life, listens to homely advice on how to live, and interprets the great tradition of medicine and metaphysics. In the process, a manifold culture of the urban Chinese everyday emerges. The lives nurtured, gathered, and witnessed here are global and local, embodied and discursive, ecological and cosmic, civic and individual. The elements of any particular life — as long as it lasts, and with some skill and determination — can be gathered, centered, and harmonized with the way things spontaneously go. The result, everyone says, is pleasure.

Chinese Propaganda Seducing the World

2019-02-22
Chinese Propaganda Seducing the World

Author: Jeanne Boden

Publisher: PUNCT

ISBN: 9789082336450

Category: Business & Economics

Page:

View: 484

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Chinese Propaganda Seducing the World offers a fascinating analysis of the Chinese Communist Party's use of propaganda to legitimize its position and strengthen its power in China and the world. The author presents a unique insider’s view of how political propaganda infiltrates private life in China. Propaganda is also the Party’s strongest tool for building China’s global power. Thanks to both Chinese and non-Chinese spreading China’s national myth, the Communist Party of China is fast seducing people all around the world. Jeanne Boden holds a PhD in Oriental Languages and Cultures (Sinology). In her 30 years of engagement with China, she has assembled an impressive archive of photographs depicting propaganda slogans in places across China, from Jilin in the Northeast to Tibet and Xinjiang in the West, from Beijing in the North to Guangdong in the South. This book presents exclusive photographs, revealing China’s extensive use of propaganda, and its deep impact domestically and internationally.

Imperial Co-histories

2003
Imperial Co-histories

Author: Julie F. Codell

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

ISBN: 0838639739

Category: History

Page: 336

View: 964

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This book explores the creation of imperial identities in Britain and several of its colonies - South Africa, India, Australia, Wales - and the ways in which the Victorian press around the world shaped and reflected these identities. The concept of co-histories, borrowed from Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, helps explain how the press shaped the imperial and national identities of Britain and of the colonies into co-histories that were thoroughly intertwined and symbiotic. Exploring a variety of press media, this book argues that the press was a site of resistance and revision by colonized authors and publishers, as well as a force of colonial authority for the British government. editors, and publishers, who projected a view of the empire to their British, colonial, and colonized readers. Topics include The Journal of Indian Art and Industry produced by the British art schools in India, women's periodicals, Indian writers in the British press, The Imperial Gazetteer published in Scotland, the rise of telegraphic news agencies, the British press's images of China seen through exhibitions of its art, the Tory periodical Blackwood's Magazine, and the Imperial Press Conference of 1909. University.

Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things

2008-03
Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things

Author: Gary Geddes

Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.

ISBN: 9781402753442

Category: Travel

Page: 404

View: 226

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From war-torn Afghanistan, through the snow-capped Himalayas and across the burning sands of the Taklamakan desert, to a rapidly modernizing China and on to the Central American jungles: it seems an impossible journey, but one that Gary Geddes eagerly undertook in order to retrace the voyage of the legendary 5th-century Buddhist monk Huishen. Geddes was long fascinated with stories of Huishen’s life and travels: this Afghan holy man fled Kabul for China and may have crossed the Pacific to North America 1,000 years before Columbus. The length and breadth of this expedition, and its difficulty, would have been amazing enough on its own, but Geddes’s trip takes on an added dimension and poignancy due to its timing: he reaches Afghanistan one month before September 11, 2001 and arrives in China as the tragic events unfold. Along the way, Geddes encounters Afghan refugees, Pakistani dissidents, Tibetan monks, Buddhist scholars, a KFC outlet in Luoyang, mysterious cairns in Haida Gwaii, and ghostly remains in Mexico. As the Silk Road morphs into superhighways, ancient sculptures turn into military targets, Geddes glimpses, in the collision of past and present history, important clues for imagining a workable future.

Ten Thousand Things

2000-01
Ten Thousand Things

Author: Lothar Ledderose

Publisher: Bollingen Foundation

ISBN: 0691006695

Category: Art

Page: 265

View: 638

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Chinese workers in the third century b.c. created seven thousand life-sized terracotta soldiers to guard the tomb of the First Emperor. In the eleventh century a.d., Chinese builders constructed a pagoda from as many as thirty thousand separately carved wooden pieces. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, China exported more than a hundred million pieces of porcelain to the West. As these examples show, the Chinese throughout history have produced works of art in astonishing quantities--and have done so without sacrificing quality, affordability, or speed of manufacture. How have they managed this? Lothar Ledderose takes us on a remarkable tour of Chinese art and culture to explain how artists used complex systems of mass production to assemble extraordinary objects from standardized parts or modules. As he reveals, these systems have deep roots in Chinese thought--in the idea that the universe consists of ten thousand categories of things, for example--and reflect characteristically Chinese modes of social organization. Ledderose begins with the modular system par excellence: Chinese script, an ancient system of fifty thousand characters produced from a repertoire of only about two hundred components. He shows how Chinese artists used related modular systems to create ritual bronzes, to produce the First Emperor's terracotta army, and to develop the world's first printing systems. He explores the dazzling variety of lacquerware and porcelain that the West found so seductive, and examines how works as diverse as imperial palaces and paintings of hell relied on elegant variation of standardized components. Ledderose explains that Chinese artists, unlike their Western counterparts, did not seek to reproduce individual objects of nature faithfully, but sought instead to mimic nature's ability to produce limitless numbers of objects. He shows as well how modular patterns of thought run through Chinese ideas about personal freedom, China's culture of bureaucracy, Chinese religion, and even the organization of Chinese restaurants. Originally presented as a series of Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Ten Thousand Things combines keen aesthetic and cultural insights with a rich variety of illustrations to make a profound new statement about Chinese art and society.

Do Museums Still Need Objects?

2010
Do Museums Still Need Objects?

Author: Steven Conn

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

ISBN: 9780812221558

Category: History

Page: 272

View: 249

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In this broadly conceived study Steven Conn examines the development of American museums across the twentieth century with a historian's attention and a critic's eye. He focuses on an array of museum types and asks illuminating questions about the relationship between museums and American cultural life.

The Crafting of the 10,000 Things

2011-04-15
The Crafting of the 10,000 Things

Author: Dagmar Schäfer

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

ISBN: 9780226735856

Category: Science

Page: 352

View: 910

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The last decades of the Ming dynasty, though plagued by chaos and destruction, saw a significant increase of publications that examined advances in knowledge and technology. Among the numerous guides and reference books that appeared during this period was a series of texts by Song Yingxing (1587–1666?), a minor local official living in southern China. His Tiangong kaiwu, the longest and most prominent of these works, documents the extraction and processing of raw materials and the manufacture of goods essential to everyday life, from yeast and wine to paper and ink to boats, carts, and firearms. In The Crafting of the 10,000 Things, Dagmar Schäfer probes this fascinating text and the legacy of its author to shed new light on the development of scientific thinking in China, the purpose of technical writing, and its role in and effects on Chinese history. Meticulously unfolding the layers of Song’s personal and cultural life, Schäfer chronicles the factors that motivated Song to transform practical knowledge into written culture. She then examines how Song gained, assessed, and ultimately presented knowledge, and in doing so articulates this era’s approaches to rationality, truth, and belief in the study of nature and culture alike. Finally, Schäfer places Song’s efforts in conjunction with the work of other Chinese philosophers and writers, before, during, and after his time, and argues that these writings demonstrate collectively a uniquely Chinese way of authorizing technology as a legitimate field of scholarly concern and philosophical knowledge. Offering an overview of a thousand years of scholarship, The Crafting of the 10,000 Things explains the role of technology and crafts in a culture that had an outstandingly successful tradition in this field and was a crucial influence on the technical development of Europe on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.

New York Before Chinatown

2001-09-21
New York Before Chinatown

Author: John Kuo Wei Tchen

Publisher: JHU Press

ISBN: 0801867940

Category: History

Page: 422

View: 985

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"This fascinating book by Professor Tchen is required reading for anyone interested in the history of New York City." -- Dolores Hayden, author of The Power of Place

This Craft of Verse

2002-03-30
This Craft of Verse

Author: Jorge Luis Borges

Publisher: Harvard University Press

ISBN: 9780674008205

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 161

View: 385

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Transcribed from recently discovered tapes, this work stands as a deeply personal yet far-reaching introduction to the pleasures of the word, and as a first-hand testimony to the life of literature. 1 halftone.