Logo

0
Your cart is empty empty bag

Free Worldwide Delivery on orders over $50

Х

Kucha & Beyond, Divine & Human Landscapes from Central Asia to the Himalaya

 
Eli Franco (Author) Charles Ramble (Author) Monika Zin (Author) Leipzig Kucha Studies
Synopsis

This volume is the outcome of a collaboration between the European Society for the Study of Central Asian and Himalayan Civilisations (SEECHAC) and the Leipzig-based research project “Buddhist Murals of Kucha on the Northern Silk Road.” The conference, with the same title as the present proceedings, was held over the course of three days in November 2021 at the Bibliotheca Albertina in Leipzig. The sixteen articles that make up the collection explore aspects of the concept of landscape in the civilisations of Central Asia and the Himalayas from the perspectives of art history, archaeology, religious studies and anthropology. As the historian Simon Schama reminds us, “landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto the wood and water and rock.” In this volume, landscape is understood in both senses, as the external environment but also, and more often, as the culturally mediated representation of the natural world. To the extent that such creations are constructs of the imagination, the meaning of “landscape” need not be confined to the category of painting that it conventionally designates. Heavenly realms and divine interventions in this world are widely reproduced in murals, scroll paintings and architectural forms, but their depiction is often founded on textual authority, and further perpetuated in secondary writings as well as oral narratives. Most of the papers in this collection explore landscapes that are simultaneously divine and human in that they embrace the this-worldly and the beyond, an extended space of humans, animals and praeternatural beings rendered on a variety of supports. The areas covered include Tibet, Dunhuang, the Tangut Empire, Khotan, Ladakh, Sikkim, Gandhara and Mongolia. As the sixth volume in a series dedicated to studies of Kucha, the collection also presents four contributions on the art and archaeology of that

Read more
297.00 267.3 $ 330.00 $
Free delivery Wolrdwidе in 10-18 days Ships in 1-2 days from New Delhi Membership for 1 Year $35.00
Get it now and save 10%
Members SAVE 10% every day
BECOME A MEMBER
About the authors

Charles Ramble

Charles Ramble is Diecteur d etudes at the Ecole Pratique des hautes Etudes, Paris. From 2000 to 2010 he held the position of Lecturer in tibetan and Himalayan Studies at the University of Oxford.

In the spotlight

Monika Zin

Monika Zin taught Indian art history at the Ludwig-Maximilans-Universitat in Munich and the Freie Universität Berlin from 1994 to 2016. Among her research contributions are monographs such as Ajanta: Handbook of the Paintings. Devotional and Ornamental Paintings, Harrassowitz 2003 (English edition currently pending publication at the IGNCA); Compassion and Miracles: Difficult Conversions and Their Icono­graphy in Indian Buddhism (in German, Harrassowitz 2006); Samsaracakra: The Wheel of Rebirth in the Indian Tradition (together with Dieter Schlingloff, in German, EKŌ House of Japanese Culture, 2007) and numerous articles on the identification of narrative art and Indian drama. Since 2016, Prof. Zin has led the research team of the Centre ‘Buddhist Murals of Kucha on the Northern Silk Road’ at the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig/Leipzig University.

Write a review
Reviews 5in total
 

Bibliographic information

Title Kucha & Beyond, Divine & Human Landscapes from Central Asia to the Himalaya
Format Hardcover
Date published: 01.01.2025
Edition 1st ed.
Language: English
isbn 9789387496880
length 328p., 28cm.