China's Economic Rise
China's Economic Rise

Author: Sangaralingam Ramesh

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-08-29

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 3030498115

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This book examines the economic and political rise of China from the perspective of Japan’s economic development. Beginning with Japan’s rise to statehood in the Kamakura Period (1185 to 1333) and detailing the evolution of its economy through to 2018, parallels are drawn with the economic development of China. Many of the challenges Japan faced in the first decades of the 20th century, including nationalism, militarism, income disparities, social deprivation, and economic crisis are applicable to modern day China. China’s Economic Rise: Lessons from Japan’s Political Economy aims to detail the possible economic and political upheavals that could accompany the slowing of the Chinese economy from the experience of Japan. The book will be of interest to researchers and students in Political Economy, Economic History, Economic Transition, and Development Economics. The book supplements the other publications of the author: China’s Lessons for India: Volume 1 – The Political Economy of Development, China’s Lessons for India: Volume 2 – The Political Economy of Change and The Rise of Empires: The Political Economy of Innovation.

The Cambridge History of Atheism
The Cambridge History of Atheism

Author: Michael Ruse

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-09-16

Total Pages: 1307

ISBN-13: 1009040219

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The two-volume Cambridge History of Atheism offers an authoritative and up to date account of a subject of contemporary interest. Comprised of sixty essays by an international team of scholars, this History is comprehensive in scope. The essays are written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including religious studies, philosophy, sociology, and classics. Offering a global overview of the subject, from antiquity to the present, the volumes examine the phenomenon of unbelief in the context of Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish societies. They explore atheism and the early modern Scientific Revolution, as well as the development of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and its continuing implications. The History also includes general survey essays on the impact of scepticism, agnosticism and atheism, as well as contemporary assessments of thinking. Providing essential information on the nature and history of atheism, The Cambridge History of Atheism will be indispensable for both scholarship and teaching, at all levels.

Essentials of Shinto
Essentials of Shinto

Author: Stuart Picken

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 1994-11-22

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 0313369798

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Shinto is finally receiving the attention it deserves as a fundamental component of Japanese culture. Nevertheless, it remains a remarkably complex and elusive phenomenon to which Western categories of religion do not readily apply. A knowledge of Shinto can only proceed from a basic understanding of Japanese shrines and civilization, for it is closely intermingled with the Japanese way of life and continues to be a vital natural religion. This book is a convenient guide to Shinto thought. As a reference work, the volume does not offer a detailed critical study of all aspects of Shinto. Instead, it overviews the essential teachings of Shinto and provides the necessary cultural and historical context for understanding Shinto as a dynamic force in Japanese civilization. The book begins with an historical overview of Shinto, followed by a discussion of Japanese myths. The volume then discusses the role of shrines, which are central to Shinto rituals. Other portions of the book discuss the various Shinto sects and the evolution of Shinto from the Heian period to the present. Because Japanese terms are central to Shinto, the work includes a glossary.

Material Images of Humans from the Natufian to Pottery Neolithic Periods in the Levant
Material Images of Humans from the Natufian to Pottery Neolithic Periods in the Levant

Author: Estelle Orrelle

Publisher: BAR International Series

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781407312231

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This dissertation demonstrates that the surprising iconography of human images in the archaeological assemblages of the Levantine Neolithic indicates that they were gods. An analysis of the iconography of the human-like artifacts of my data reveals genital shapes used metaphorically to portray androgynous images as well as elements of therianthropic imagery and red pigment. This iconography meets the predictions of the evolutionary anthropological hypothesis, the 'Female Cosmetic Coalition model' (FCC), which describes the first supernatural symbols as fused male: female, human: animal and red, and predicts that the iconography of early gods would bear this same symbolic syntax, y thesis shows that the material images of the Natufian and Neolithic in the Levant fit this model closely, confirming their identity as gods. The hunter-gatherer socio-economic structure established by the strategies of the FCC was expressed as the first social contract, by which humans lived for thousands of years. The FCC model provides an underlying unchanging syntax in the face of changing political-economy and sexual politics. I interpret my data as revealing a process of male ritual elites increasingly appropriating this syntax, incorporating it in a new social contract. At the end of the last Ice Age, I predict that in the Near East male elites competedto circumvent the onerous burden of the first social contract, to appropriate female ritual power and to establish hierarchical religion legitimizing a new social contract between humans and supernatural beings. This new contract bound gods and humans in a partnership of exchange. I suggest that this process can be identified in the increasingly elaborate ritual activity using costly signalling theory. This work contributes to the decipherment of the iconography of this assemblage of human images, and proposes a model for the origins of religion and social differentiation in the Levant.

Mysteries and Discoveries of Archaeoastronomy
Mysteries and Discoveries of Archaeoastronomy

Author: Giulio Magli

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2009-04-09

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 0387765662

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The book is divided into two parts. In the first, the reader is taken on an ideal ‘world tour’ of many wonderful and enigmatic places in almost every continent, in search of traces of astronomical knowledge and lore of the sky. In the second part, Giulio Magli uses the elements presented in the tour to show that the fundamental idea which led to the construction of the astronomically-related giant monuments was the foundation of power, a foundation which was exploited by ‘replicating’ the sky. A possible interpretive model then emerges that is founded on the relationship the ancients had with “nature”, in the sense of everything that surrounded them, the cosmos. The numerous monumental astronomically aligned structures of the past then become interpretable as acts of will, expressions of power on the part of those who held it; the will to replicate the heavenly plane here on earth and to build sacred landscapes. Finally, having formulated his hypothesis, Professor Magli returns to visit one specific place in detail, searching for proof. This in-depth examination studies the most compelling, the most intensively studied, the most famous and, until recently, the most misunderstood sacred landscape on the planet - Giza, in Egypt. The archaeoastronomical analysis of the orientation of the Giza pyramids leads to the hypothesis that the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren belong to the same construction project.

The Origins of the World's Mythologies
The Origins of the World's Mythologies

Author: Michael Witzel

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 688

ISBN-13: 0199812853

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Michael Witzel persuasively demonstrates the prehistoric origins of most of the mythologies of Eurasia and the Americas ('Laurasia').