Geography and Ethnography

Perceptions of the World in Pre-Modern Societies
Herausgeber: Raaflaub, Kurt A; Talbert, Richard J A

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

This fascinating volume brings together leading specialists, who have analyzed the thoughts and records documenting the worldviews of a wide range of pre-modern societies. Presents evidence from across the ages; from antiquity through to the Age of DiscoveryProvides cross-cultural comparison of ancient societies around the globe, from the Chinese to the Incas and Aztecs, from the Greeks and Romans to the peoples of ancient IndiaExplores newly discovered medieval Islamic materials

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Societies have typically reflected upon their place in the world in relation to the space in which they live, those who surround them, the universe, and divine forces that they believe determine their fate. In this fascinating volume, the editors bring together leading specialists who have analyzed the thoughts and records of a wide range of pre-modern societies from around the globe and across the ages. Some societies, like the Chinese, Greeks, and Arabs, have left extensive written cultural and scientific documentation. Others, as in India and Mesopotamia, used myth and epic for memory and understanding. Still others, such as the Incas and Aztecs, did not write, but their ideas and beliefs can be recovered from later narratives, as well as from their artwork, monuments, and shaping of the landscape. A wide range of common questions are examined, from evidence, interpretations, and methodology, to the way geographic and ethnographic concepts and views of the cosmos were developed and expressed. The resulting cross-cultural comparisons clearly describe the specific characteristics of these societies, how they differ and overlap. What emerges is a rich and astonishing variety of responses developed to meet universal challenges.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Wiley
• Seitenzahl: 384
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Februar 2010
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 246mm x 178mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 798g
• ISBN-13: 9781405191463
• ISBN-10: 1405191465
• Artikelnr.: 31702271

Autorenporträt

Kurt A. Raaflaub is David Herlihy University Professor, and Professor of Classics and History, at Brown University. His numerous publications include The Discovery of Freedom (2004) and Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece (2007, co-authored with Josiah Ober and Robert Wallace). He is also the editor of Social Struggles in Archaic Rome (Blackwell, 2005), and War and Peace in the Ancient World (Blackwell, 2007), and co-editor of A Companion to Archaic Greece (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Richard J.A. Talbert is William Rand Kenan, Jr, Professor of History and Classics at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the editor of the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (2000), and co-editor of Space in the Roman World: Its Perception and Presentation (2004), as well as of Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Fresh Perspectives, New Methods (2008). His major study Rome's World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered will appear in 2010.

Inhaltsangabe

* Introduction (Kurt Raaflaub, Brown University, and RichardTalbert, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

* Early Imperial China and Its Knowledge of the Outside World(Michael Loewe, Cambridge University)

* Nonary Cosmography in Ancient China (John Henderson, LouisianaState University)"

* Perceptions of Real Space and Imagined Landscape in EarlyWestern Han (Hsin-Mei Agnes Hsu, Stanford University)

* Isolation Does Not Preclude Cosmopolitanism: Paradoxes inClassical (and later) Japanese History (Mary Elizabeth Berry,University of California, Berkeley)

* Populating the Terrain: Indian Anthropologies and Their SpatialDimension (Christopher Minkowski, Oxford University)

* Humans, Ancestors, Gods, and Their Worlds: The Sacred andScientific Cosmologies of India (Kim Plofker, Union College)

* Masters of the Four Corners of the Heavens: Views of theUniverse in Early Mesopotamian Writings (Piotr Michalowski,University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)

* The World and the Geography of Otherness in Ancient EgyptianCulture (Gerald Moers, University of Göttingen)

* On Earth As in Heaven: The Apocalyptic Vision of WorldGeography from Urzeit to Endzeit according to the Book of Jubilees(James M. Scott, Trinity Western University, Canada)

* 'I Know the Number of the Sand and the Measure of theSea': Geography and Difference in Early Classical Greece(Susan G. Cole, State University New York, Buffalo)

* When Worlds Collide: The Europe-Asia Antithesis in Classicaland Early Medieval Thought (James Romm, Bard College)

* The Roman World View: Beyond Recovery? (Richard Talbert,University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

* Strabo and the Geographical Narrative (Daniela Dueck, Bar IlanUniversity)

* The Book of Curiosities: An Eleventh-Century Egyptian View ofthe World (Emilie Savage-Smith, Oxford University)

* The Medieval Islamic Worldview: Arabic Geography in ItsHistorical Context (A.J. Silverstein, University of Oxford)

* New World Renaissance: Imperial and Local Geography inMesoamerica before the Conquest (Barbara Mundy, FordhamUniversity)

* Geography, Ethnography, and the World of the Sixteenth-CenturyAndes (Catherine Julien, Western Michigan University)

* The Mississippian Worldview (Kathleen DuVal, University ofNorth Carolina, Chapel Hill)

* Geography and Ethnography in Medieval Europe: ClassicalTraditions and Contemporary Concerns (Natalia Lozovsky)

* Europeans plot the wider world, 1500-1750 (David Buisseret,Newbury Library)

Rezensionen

"The basic premise, not to be dismissed, is that other'ancient' or 'pre-modern' societies can inform us about theClassical and Near Eastern progenitors of our own, if we areprepared to look and learn." (Ancient West and East,2014)"In sum, the editors, and the publisher, are to be congratulated onproducing, a stimulating volume which provides expert guidance tomany aspects of the foreign country which is the past."(Aestimatio: Critical Reviews in the History of Science, 2011)

"The 20 papers originated in a workshop held at Brown Universityin March 2006 and fully reflect the series' world focus and broaddefinition of ancient societies." (CHOICE, July 2010)"Inspirational in conception, seamless in execution, andexemplary in cohesion, this book of twenty well-written essays onthe diversity of world views from antiquity to the sixteenthcentury has an important message for modern 'one world'globalism."
Catherine Delano-Smith, Institute of Historical Research,University of London