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Early European histories of India frequently reflected colonialist
agendas. The idea that Indian society had declined from an earlier
Golden Age helped justify the colonial presence. It was said, for
example, that modern Buddhism had fallen away from its original
identity as a purely rational philosophy that arose in the mythical
5th-century BCE Golden Age unsullied by the religious and cultural
practices that surrounded it. In this book Robert DeCaroli seeks to
place the formation of Buddhism in its appropriate social and
political contexts. It is necessary, he says, to acknowledge that
the monks and nuns who embodied early Buddhist ideals shared many
beliefs held by the communities in which they were raised. In
becoming members of the monastic society these individuals did not
abandon their beliefs in the efficacy and the dangers represented
by minor deities and spirits of the dead. Their new faith, however,
gave them revolutionary new mechanisms with which to engage those
supernatural beings. Drawing on fieldwork, textual, and
iconographic evidence, DeCaroli offers a comprehensive view of
early Indian spirit-religions and their contributions to
Buddhism-the first attempt at such a study since Ananda
Coomaraswamy's pioneering work was published in 1928. The result is
an important contribution to our understanding of early Indian
religion and society, and will be of interest to those in the
fields of Buddhist studies, Asian history, art history, and
anthropology.
Post-Enlightenment notions of culture, which have been naturalized
in the West for centuries, require that art be autonomously
beautiful, universal, and devoid of any practical purpose. The
authors of this multidisciplinary volume seek to complicate this
understanding of art by examining art objects from across Asia with
attention to their functional, ritual, and everyday contexts. From
tea bowls used in the Japanese tea ceremony to television
broadcasts of Japanese puppet theater; from Indian wedding chamber
paintings to art looted by the British army from the Chinese
emperor's palace; from the adventures of a Balinese magical dagger
to the political functions of classical Khmer images - the authors
challenge prevailing notions of artistic value by introducing new
ways of thinking about culture. The chapters consider art objects
as they are involved in the world: how they operate and are
experienced in specific sites, collections, rituals, performances,
political and religious events and imagination, and in individual
peoples' lives; how they move from one context to another and
change meaning and value in the process (for example, when they are
collected, traded, and looted or when their images appear in art
history textbooks); how their memories and pasts are or are not
part of their meaning and experience. Rather than lead to a single
universalizing definition of art, the essays offer multiple,
divergent, and case-specific answers to the question ""What is the
use of art?"" and argue for the need to study art as it is used and
experienced.
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