Böcker av David Shulman

This is the first book of the New Ecology of Expressive Modes in Early-Modern South India (NEEM Series), edited by David Shulman.Introspection and Insight explores the literature, music, and graphic arts of south India between the late fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and focuses on their theoretical and philosophical foundations as well as the distinctive features that reveal a newly emergent concept of the individual self and novel models of the mind. This is contextualized as part of a wider civilizational shift throughout the southern regions of India, involving radical changes in taste and sensibility-signifying moments of major cultural innovation. Of these, music was, perhaps, the most eloquent vehicle for personal introspection at this time.

Kūṭiyāṭṭam, the only surviving live Sanskrit theatre in the world, was defined by UNESCO as 'a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity'. Full performances-almost always a single act taken from a multi-act Sanskrit play-range from 12 to 150 hours (in daily or nightly segments of several hours each) and display an aesthetic brilliance and dizzying complexity that are almost beyond description. Each such act constitutes an artistic whole with its own conceptual and thematic unity. The Rite of Seeing reflects the work of the Hebrew University Kūṭiyāṭṭam team and of our colleagues from Tübingen, Paris, Groningen, and elsewhere, over many years of annual pilgrimages to Kerala to watch and study this art in action. It offers interpretations of seven classical performances in the light of the actors' traditional handbooks (Āṭṭaprakāram), the Sanskrit base text, and the artists' oral commentary that emerged naturally in the course of many days of attentive viewing. The essays are accompanied by links to extended performance moments, so that readers can see with their own eyes something of what we have seen in Mūḻikkuḷam and Kiḷḷimaṅgalam. Interpretative essays of this kind, although plentiful in studies of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Chekhov, have never been attempted for Kūṭiyāṭṭam. The book is thus meant to introduce Kūṭiyāṭṭam to new audiences and to offer pathways for beginning to explore the riches of this unique and still vital tradition.

This book takes the approach of Erving Goffman - and its fundamental concepts including frames, stigma, definition of the situation, front and back stages, role distance, communication out of character, interaction rituals - as its focus, and shows how it can be applied in contemporary social contexts

From the late fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the imagination came to be recognized in South Indian culture as the defining feature of human beings. Shulman elucidates the distinctiveness of South Indian theories of the imagination and shows how they differ radically from Western notions of reality and models of the mind.