Sentient Relics explores museums through cinema and challenges the dominant focus of museum theory as an inclusion–exclusion debate. The author responds to the Enlightenment, ‘rational’ museum of reason contrasting this with the museum of affect and reveals these ‘two museums’ operating alongside one another in a productive paradox. In structuralist-orientated museum theory the affective realm is often subsumed within the imperatives of Marxist theory and practice, identity politics, semiology and psychoanalysis. Sentient Relics, while valuing the insights of ideologically focused meaning-making, turns to the capacity of the affective realm of experience to transform the passive subject and object relation. The author uses museum encounters and cinematic affect to engage with problems of difference, temporality, emotion and the sublime. In so doing the book advances research in museum studies by demonstrating what is at stake in pragmatically working toward a deeper understanding of the museum socially, culturally and philosophically.
“MacLeod is a brilliant writer.” —Tim Powers “Ian MacLeod writes like an angel. He strings together ideally chosen words into sentences that are variously lush, sparse, subtle, bold, joyous, mournful, comic and tragic.” —Paul Di Filippo Welcome to the first half of the collected worlds of one of fiction’s great myth-makers. Blending naturalistic settings with real—and unreal—histories, dark presents, strange pasts and star-flung futures, Ian R. MacLeod’s multi award-winning stories defy easy classification, but are always vividly elegant, compelling, and filled with wonder. In Grownups, a young boy discovers the strange facts of life in a very different—yet also alarmingly recognizable—world, whilst New Light on the Drake Equation focusses on one man’s quest to prove there is still a chance of intelligent life existing beyond Earth, and in Ephemera a very strange librarian has final charge of all the world’s knowledge and culture, and The Master Miller’s Tale tells of obsessive love as a bucolic past dissolves into the magics of industry, iron and steam. Nothing in MacLeod’s visions is ever quite what it seems, yet they remain deeply real and involving. If you haven’t read MacLeod before, you can expect to be moved and surprised. If you have, then you need no further introduction other than to say that Everywhere—and its companion volume Nowhere, which features many of his best shorter stories—represent a generous and wide-ranging summary of his work, along with many insights into the creative process which are provided by the fresh introductions and afterwords. Praise for Ian R. MacLeod “Ian R. MacLeod is rapidly becoming one of the contemporary stars of the genre.” —Brian Aldiss “MacLeod is set to become a writer of the magnitude of Dickens and Tolkien.” —G. P. Taylor “I have no idea what he looks like, but I picture an angle with polychrome wings, dirty hands and a well-chewed pencil.” —Gene Wolf “...in many ways the mature culmination of the New Wave’s aggressive appropriation of literary tropes and techniques and the skillful integration of them into subtle, penetrating fiction that, like all true and dangerous art, can pierce and transform the reader.” —Jack Dann “Stands beside the achievements of China Mieville.” —Jeff VanderMeer “There are moments when you see a life entire... in a moment. And you smile, because you recognize that smell of the world, that capsule of living.” —John Clute “Ian R. MacLeod is one hell of a writer—literary, inventive, always surprising. Pay attention: this guy is important.” —Michael Swanwick
The Symposium on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence (UCAmI) began as a workshop held in 2003 in San Sebastián (Spain) under the Spanish Artificial Intelligence Conference. This event gathered 32 attendees and 18 papers were p- sented. The second edition, already as a Symposium, took place in Granada (Spain) under the first Spanish Computer Science Conference (CEDI). Later, in 2006, a s- ond workshop was celebrated in Ciudad Real and, in 2007; the second Symposium was organized in Zaragoza by the CEDI conference. Now we continue to work on the organization of this event in Salamanca, a beautiful Spanish city. The European Community and the Sixth and Seventh Framework Programs - courage researchers to explore the generic scope of the AmI vision. In fact, some researchers have a crucial role in this vision. Emile Aarts from Philips describes - bient Intelligence as "the integration of technology into our environment, so that p- ple can freely and interactively utilize it". This idea agrees with the proposal of Mark Weiser regarding the Ubiquitous Computing paradigm.
This book brings together essays by anthropologists, scholars of religion, and art historians to explore some of the most fundamental challenges that religious groups face as they expand from their homeland or confront the demands of modernity. The chapters span a broad geographical area that includes India, Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia, and China, and address issues from the classical and medieval period to the present. They show how sacred places have a plurality of meanings for all religious communities and how in their construction, secular politics, private religious experience, and sectarian rivalry can all intersect. A Buddha Dharma Kyokai Foundation Book on Buddhism and Comparative Literature.
This book studies the complex attitude of late ancient Christians towards classical education. In recent years, the different theoretical positions that can be found among the Church Fathers have received particular attention: their statements ranged from enthusiastic assimilation to outright rejection, the latter sometimes masking implicit adoption. Shifting attention away from such explicit statements, this volume focuses on a series of lesser-known texts in order to study the impact of specific literary and social contexts on late ancient educational views and practices. By moving attention from statements to strategies this volume wishes to enrich our understanding of the creative engagement with classical ideals of education. The multi-faceted approach adopted here illuminates the close connection between specific educational purposes on the one hand, and the possibilities and limitations offered by specific genres and contexts on the other. Instead of seeing attitudes towards education in late antique texts as applications of theoretical positions, it reads them as complex negotiations between authorial intent, the limitations of genre, and the context of performance.
For more than a thousand years, Buddhism has dominated Japanese death rituals and concepts of the afterlife. The nine essays in this volume, ranging chronologically from the tenth century to the present, bring to light both continuity and change in death practices over time. They also explore the interrelated issues of how Buddhist death rites have addressed individual concerns about the afterlife while also filling social and institutional needs and how Buddhist death-related practices have assimilated and refigured elements from other traditions, bringing together disparate, even conflicting, ideas about the dead, their postmortem fate, and what constitutes normative Buddhist practice. The idea that death, ritually managed, can mediate an escape from deluded rebirth is treated in the first two essays. Sarah Horton traces the development in Heian Japan (794–1185) of images depicting the Buddha Amida descending to welcome devotees at the moment of death, while Jacqueline Stone analyzes the crucial role of monks who attended the dying as religious guides. Even while stressing themes of impermanence and non-attachment, Buddhist death rites worked to encourage the maintenance of emotional bonds with the deceased and, in so doing, helped structure the social world of the living. This theme is explored in the next four essays. Brian Ruppert examines the roles of relic worship in strengthening family lineage and political power; Mark Blum investigates the controversial issue of religious suicide to rejoin one’s teacher in the Pure Land; and Hank Glassman analyzes how late medieval rites for women who died in pregnancy and childbirth both reflected and helped shape changing gender norms. The rise of standardized funerals in Japan’s early modern period forms the subject of the chapter by Duncan Williams, who shows how the Soto Zen sect took the lead in establishing itself in rural communities by incorporating local religious culture into its death rites. The final three chapters deal with contemporary funerary and mortuary practices and the controversies surrounding them. Mariko Walter uncovers a "deep structure" informing Japanese Buddhist funerals across sectarian lines—a structure whose meaning, she argues, persists despite competition from a thriving secular funeral industry. Stephen Covell examines debates over the practice of conferring posthumous Buddhist names on the deceased and the threat posed to traditional Buddhist temples by changing ideas about funerals and the afterlife. Finally, George Tanabe shows how contemporary Buddhist sectarian intellectuals attempt to resolve conflicts between normative doctrine and on-the-ground funerary practice, and concludes that human affection for the deceased will always win out over the demands of orthodoxy. Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism constitutes a major step toward understanding how Buddhism in Japan has forged and retained its hold on death-related thought and practice, providing one of the most detailed and comprehensive accounts of the topic to date. Contributors: Mark L. Blum, Stephen G. Covell, Hank Glassman, Sarah Johanna Horton, Brian O. Ruppert, Jacqueline I. Stone, George J. Tanabe, Jr., Mariko Namba Walter, Duncan Ryuken Williams.
After the demise of the historical Buddha, His teachings spread in two main directions, southward (Theravada tradition) and eastward into China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan (Mahayana tradition). In East Asia, these teachings developed into ten different schools, several of which remained important to this day: Zen, Tantric and Pure Land. Pure Land is by far the most widespread form of Buddhism in East Asia.
"This Handbook provides a state-of-the-art exploration of several key dynamics in current studies of the Buddhist tradition with a focus on practice. Embodiment, materiality, emotion, and gender shape the way most Buddhists engage with their traditions, in contrast to popular representations of Buddhism as spiritual, disembodied, and largely devoid of ritual. This volume highlights how practice often represents a fluid, dynamic, and strategic means of defining identity and negotiating the challenges of everyday life. Essays explore the transformational aims of practices that require practitioners to move, gesture, and emote in prescribed ways, including the ways that scholars' own embodied practices are integral to their research methodology. The chapters are written by acknowledged experts in their respective subject areas and taken together offer an overview of current thinking in the field. The volume is of particular value to scholars who seek an orientation to current perspectives on important conceptual, theoretical, and methodological concerns that are shaping the field in areas outside their primary expertise. The inclusion of substantial, up-to-date bibliographies also makes the volume an important guide to current scholarship"--
Urza Triumphant The war between Urza and Mishra is over. Brooding on the death of his brother at the hands of extraplanar forces, Urza drifts among the planes. But the end of the Brothers’ War has transformed him into something greater. Deep within his heart, a spark has been kindled to a flame that cannot be quenched. Urza has become a planeswalker.
