Haunting the buddha: indian popular religions and the formation of buddhism DeCaroli,Robert

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the presence of “images” in the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé. In many traditional houses of Candomblé it is often said that it is not allowed to photograph or film rituals. On the other hand, in recent years, the presence of Catholic and other figurative images in Candomblé shrines has been questioned by recent “purification” movements—often led by these traditional houses—who fight syncretism, separating Catholicism from African religion. Still, in many cases figurative images are present in shrines, and rituals are photographed and filmed. This article argues that, beyond syncretism, images in Candomblé are contentious because they can be powerful: they can be indexes of the presence of Candomblé santos, they can become instances of a “distributed person.”     

浅析德州的城市开放空间

联系国外、国内两个著名开放空间——纽约中央公园和杭州西湖,以德州市本地具有代表性的四个开放空间为例,旨在分析德州城区如何依靠城市开放空间营造城市特色,指出不同的城市开放空间应具有不同的场所精神,而多样性的场所精神则组成了城市文化的多样性,从而能够塑造出鲜明的城市特色。     

Making spirits,making art,Nat carving and contemporary painting in pre-transition Myanmar (Burma)

ABSTRACT

Embodiment, materiality, and technology intersect in the production of sacred images where tools, media, and intangible studio protocols inform the production of efficacious things. In Myanmar nat spirits appear in the bodies of costumed spirit mediums and in the intimately tended statues that adorn their altars. Prior to the recent democratic transition, nats appeared as the subjects of paintings, sometimes offering sociopolitical commentaries. This article explores the resonances between technologies of nat making in workshops that produce images for mediums and the techniques deployed by contemporary artists who have made nats the subjects of their paintings. In the Burmese religious world view, nats are lesser entities than the Buddha; their troubled histories of injustice account for their continuing agency as spirits in the human world. Appropriately, nat images are cruder than Buddha images; carvers are less likely to use precious wood or to observe Buddhist precepts and aesthetic guidelines while carving. A similar sense of the unrefined, unsettled nat is conveyed through the daring representational techniques and liberties of artists. We argue that connections between media, technique, and object agency can have resonance when sacred subjects are deployed in secular art.     

现象学视角下的当代城市景观体验

当代城市景观在以空间生产为主导的快速城市化下,由地域和文化的融合转为全球化的时空分异。现象学的出现反映了城市环境中主体的失落和缺失,是对城市象征资本生产和消费的批判。在全球化宏观叙事下城市景观符号的生产和消费中,非线性的叙事方式、＂超空间＂的城市场景,以及视觉化的知觉系统导致城市体验中＂场所精神＂产生消解。因此,以现象学方法重构新的都市生活体验成为一条颇有意义的道路。     

Infiltrated city,augmented space: information and communication technologies,and representations of contemporary spatialities

Augmented reality and augmented spaces have recently been linked to the widespread use of sophisticated technologies. This can also be described as the intensification of our communication skills which have been related to apparent unlimited possibilities of experimenting with and perceiving space with our bodies and minds, when connected with technological tools. However, by contrast with expanded experiences of the past at a personal level (such as in religion, magic, metaphysics or the arts), contemporary technological augmentation is becoming embedded into our daily lives to such an extent that we are starting to take this mixture of digital technologies and the built environment for granted.

In this essay, we argue that, because of this influence on our interactional capabilities, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) might act as catalysing forces transforming various experimental and spatial dimensions of cities and urban places. In order to capture, interpret and understand these transformations in urban spaces, places and territories, we tentatively articulate the experimental and epistemological works of two contemporary Brazilian thinkers about urban studies. Lucrécia Ferrara and Nelson Brissac Peixoto inspire our arguments with their critical views about how urban space can be understood through its various interpretations, and how perceptions of it can be stimulated through artistic provocations of disquieting feelings of strangeness.     

A spirit of urban capitalism: market cities,people cities,and cultural justifications

ABSTRACT

Diverse urban theories discuss how economic processes shape conceptions of a city, but less research focuses on how pragmatic situations of urban life contribute to the characterisation of cities. We argue that pragmatic justifications reify socially constructed meanings of cities by creating a ‘spirit of urban capitalism.’ This framework conceives of two spirits: the market city, which aligns with neoliberal assumptions, and the people city, which foregrounds a resident-focused model. Using case studies of Copenhagen and Houston, we showcase how these conceptions of cities are justified by elites and residents, and thereby build empirical scaffolding connecting urban economies and cultures.     

青浦营造的过程意义

文章通过对上海青浦近年城市营造过程的典型研究,剖析其城市经营方式及如何营造富于城市精神的城市内容。青浦城市建筑的过程营造,是政府、开发商以及建筑师协同工作的结果,这种源于政治、商业以及伦理文化的深度合作富有深远的当代意义。     

Natural ventilation design for houses in Thailand

This paper explores the potential of using natural ventilation as a passive cooling system for new house designs in Thailand. The characteristics of past and present Thai houses are analyzed in terms of climate, culture, and technology. Based on the thermal comfort requirements for the Thai people and the climate conditions in Bangkok, the study found that it is possible to use natural ventilation to create a thermally comfortable indoor environment in houses in a Bangkok suburb during 20% of the year. This study also develops comprehensive design guidelines for natural ventilation at both the site planning and individual house levels by using computational fluid dynamics.     

The materialization of religious structures in the time of stonehenge

ABSTRACT

Both ritual and religion share a common ontology, in that they are materialized through practice—they are technologies of the body and material world as much as of the mind and immaterial. Acknowledging such offers considerable prospect for archaeology, inasmuch as it implies that the generation, reproduction, and transformation of religion will be worked through and given dimension by material forms that are recoverable. The latter might include the construction of shrines, temples, and other architectural foci for veneration and spirit communication, attendant practices of deposition, and ceremony itself as embodied within architectural forms. Working through details of architectural form, cosmology, materiality, and the sequence of monument construction in the Stonehenge region of Wiltshire, this paper provides an interpretation of the history of religious practice during the later Neolithic (c.3000–2300 bc) of central southern England.     

基于开放建筑理论的东北寒地村镇住宅设计策略

本文通过对东北寒地村镇住宅的现实问题进行剖析,以全寿命周期的可持续为目标,针对东北寒地的客观气候特点和当代村镇住宅的实际需求变化,以开放建筑理论为基础,探讨寒地村镇住宅的全过程设计方法和该理论应用于东北寒地村镇住宅设计的可行性策略,并通过理论分析和实际案例,提出利于可持续发展的适合东北寒地村镇住宅的开放住宅设计模式及流程.     

重回城市的场所精神

二十世纪是个数字的世纪,城市空间亦成了更纯自然科学的产物,众多现代建筑理论对城市中具体的生活环境及其意义忽视或冷漠,从而不能从精神的高度把握城市的本质意义.本文通过对建筑现象学场所精神概念的探讨,试图将场所精神结合到现代城市空间的塑造中去,展现给人们一个本真的好的城市空间的可能:城市就是"场所"的创造与组合.     

Intending the Spirits: Experiencing Vodu Through the “Fetish” in Togo

Abstract

Early encounters with Africa initiated a European fascination with the “fetish.” Though this term has been extensively problematized, anthropologists have kept the term, reading fetishes as cultural texts and searching to untangle the material assemblages and deep symbols that comprise them. This article contributes to our knowledge of fetishes by applying a practitioner-centric approach to their use and meaning in the matrices of Vodu. First, I elucidate meanings of these spiritual embodiments using ethnography of prayer and sacrifice in Gorovodu as practiced by ethnic Ewe and Mina communities in southern Togo. I then deploy the language of phenomenological anthropology to argue that fetishes bring intentionality into being and focus. Their filled presence directs consciousness towards the spirits and allows practitioners to sensuously experience spirituality and spiritual being. Rituals surrounding material fetishes are a means of intending reciprocal relationships with the divine into perceptual consciousness, and it is through these relationships that life and success are made possible.     

“The Right to Shrine”: Global Celebrity,Colonial Logics,and Local Knowledge in Aspen’s Mountainside Memorials

Abstract

On the mountains surrounding Aspen, Colorado, skiers build shrines dedicated to celebrities, pastimes, and deceased loved ones. Charmed journalists and local promoters describe these shrines as homespun and quaint reminders of the human factor in recreational tourism. As this paper demonstrates, however, these shrines represent a more complex space-marking practice of outdoor alpine culture. Embedded within ski resorts, these Aspen shrines are part of the global spatial products—the banal, familiar, and predictable architectural forms—of a leisure economy that deflect a suspicious gaze. By looking at the shrines as spatial products of a neoliberal global economy, we may come to better understand how materiality creates claims to space. In this capacity the shrines make visible the continuity of settler-colonial logics that facilitate practices of territorial entitlement and accumulation. The shrines challenge us to interrogate the innocence of our objects, and to move beyond surface readings to find what is otherwise obscured.     

现代城市公园平淡朴实的审美与景观规划

古代园林的最初设计,是从景观意境出发,其中没有商业目的.现代国内某些园林用地,被作为商业赢利场地,大兴土木,充斥着商业竞争气息,扭曲了园林本身应该具有的生态本质.在国外,大多数园林用地都是没有围墙的,城市与公园景观融为一体,园林绿地是公众社会福利事业,公园以绿化景观为主,表面看起来,似乎比中国的公园设计简单,但这是由于对"现代园林"的理解不同.     

And Unto Dust Shalt Thou Return” Death and the Semiotics of Remembrance in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Village

Abstract

This ethnographic article discusses funerary practice, Orthodox Christian ideas of body and spirit, and the ways in which people make memorials for each other on the Zege Peninsula in northwest Ethiopia. I pay special attention to gravestones because, here as in many other places, physical memorials to the dead become locations where latent uncertainties and conflicts about the relationship between spirit and matter, body and soul, and this world and the next, tend to crystallize. I show that material memorials highlight ambiguities in Orthodox attitudes to human embodiment and challenge priestly monopolies over relations between the living and the dead. Because of material chains of mediation and memorialization, the disaggregating practices of Orthodox funerary ritual can never fully untangle the deceased from their worldly social entanglements.     

A Journey to the Heart: Affecting Engagement at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park

Abstract

This paper examines how Indigenous cultures and their connections to country are presented to the public in protected areas through a textual analysis of interpretive signage. In protected areas, different representational tropes are used to interpret colonial/settler, natural heritage and Indigenous landscapes and places. This paper begins by exploring the extent to which these contrasting interpretive strategies signify to visitors a hierarchy of place value in protected areas. It then asks whether the signage at Indigenous places alienates contemporary communities from country and history through a distant and detached view of culture, authorised via the template of scientific objectivity. These questions will be explored through an account that concludes with a consideration of the affective registers afforded to visitors within the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park.     

Learning from the past: Historic Districts and the New Urbanism in the United States

Until recently in the United States, as in many other countries, the past was not considered a usable guide for town planning. This situation has dramatically changed with the advent of scrupulously restored and maintained Historic Districts. The past as interpreted and presented in these has been a major influence on the movement in urban planning and design known as the New Urbanism. A wellknown example of this is Seaside, Florida, where the codes used to define acceptable styles of house design and the relationships of houses to the overall townscape bear close resemblances to the regimes of control that have developed in connection with local Historic Districts. The article draws parallels with writers on town planning earlier in the twentieth century who drew inspiration from the past as depicted in plans and maps. Although the inspiration may now appear to come from actual places, this process of idealization of the past is very similar because Historic Districts themselves are very tidied-up, idealized versions of their pasts and have, in their conceptualization, been influenced by ideas of what is good city form.     

Restricted Mobilities: Access to,and Activities in,Public and Private Spaces

Privatization of public spaces in the contemporary city has increased over the past few decades, but only a few studies have approached this trend from a mobility perspective. Therefore, this article seeks to make a contribution to the field by exploring two Australian examples of private spaces in the city, gated communities and shopping centres, through the ‘mobility’ lenses. The article illustrates how different mobility systems enable and/or restrict public access to private–public spaces, and it points out that proprietary communities create an unequal potential for human movement and access in the city. The main argument in the article is that many mobility systems enable specialization of places that are targeted at a special section of the population. This means that various forms of mobilities (e.g. automobility, virtual mobile communication technologies) not only create new opportunities for urban life, but also serve as one of the most critical components in the production of new exclusion and stratification. In conclusion, the article therefore suggests that future urban research and planning also need to apply the mobility perspective in order to understand the mechanisms between flows of movement and the understanding fixed spaces in the cities, and how different mobility systems play an important role in sustaining the exclusiveness that often characterizes private/public spaces. Likewise, from a mobility perspective, the specific consequences that the proprietary communities have on the surrounding communities seem to be an important further question for research and planning.     

Contemporary Production and Urban Change: The Case of Milan

ABSTRACT

How do new sites of production and workplaces relate to the making of urban change in Milan’s peripheral areas? The paper answers this question by looking at two different fields of investigation related to peripheral areas. On one hand, the paper examines the policies promoted by the public administration at the municipal level to enhance urban innovation through new workplaces within the smart city agenda. On the other hand, the urban innovation brought by the establishment of cultural and creative industries promoted by private actors will be examined, ranging from the new geography of creative places to the creation of temporary transformations. Starting from these two fields of analysis, the paper identifies areas of difference and potential combined effects between public action and private initiative. These are placed against the backdrop of a conception of contemporary production that has worked as a tool for social inclusion and place-making in peripheral contexts in Milan.