Modern Archaics

After the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the rise of a vernacular language movement, most scholars and writers declared the classical Chinese poetic tradition to be dead. But how could a longstanding high poetic form simply grind to a halt, even in the face of tumultuous social change? In this groundbreaking book, Shengqing Wu explores the transformation of Chinese classical-style poetry in the early twentieth century. Drawing on extensive archival research into the poetry collections and literary journals of two generations of poets and critics, Wu discusses the continuing significance of the classical form with its densely allusive and intricately wrought style. She combines close readings of poems with a depiction of the cultural practices their authors participated in, including poetry gatherings, the use of mass media, international travel, and translation, to show how the lyrical tradition was a dynamic force fully capable of engaging with modernity. By examining the works and activities of previously neglected poets who maintained their commitment to traditional aesthetic ideals, Modern Archaics illuminates the splendor of Chinese lyricism and highlights the mutually transformative power of the modern and the archaic.

Archaic Instruments in Modern West Java: Bamboo Murmurs explores how current residents of Bandung, Indonesia, have (re-)adopted bamboo musical instruments to forge meaningful bridges between their past and present—between traditional and modern values. Although it focuses specifically on Bandung, the cosmopolitan capital city of West Java, the book grapples with ongoing issues of global significance, including musical environmentalism, heavy metal music, the effects of first-world hegemonies on developing countries, and cultural “authenticity.” Bamboo music's association with the Sundanese landscape, old agricultural ceremonies, and participatory music making, as well as its adaptability to modern society, make it a fertile site for an ecomusicological study.

This is the first ever documented study of the 1,035 identifiable Greek city states (poleis) of the Archaic and Classical periods (c.650-325 BC). Previous studies of the Greek polis have focused on Athens and Sparta, and the result has been a view of Greek society dominated by Sophokles', Plato's, and Demosthenes' view of what the polis was. This study includes descriptions of Athens and Sparta, but its main purpose is to explore the history andorganization of the thousand other city states.The main part of the book is a regionally organized inventory of all identifiable poleis covering the Greek world from Spain to the Caucasus and from the Crimea to Libya. This inventory is the work of 47 specialists, and is divided into 46 chapters, each covering a region. Each chapter contains an account of the region, a list of second-order settlements, and an alphabetically ordered description of the poleis. This description covers such topics as polis status,territory, settlement pattern, urban centre, city walls and monumental architecture, population, military strength, constitution, alliance membership, colonization, coinage, and Panhellenic victors.The first part of the book is a description of the method and principles applied in the construction of the inventory and an analysis of some of the results to be obtained by a comparative study of the 1,035 poleis included in it. The ancient Greek concept of polis is distinguished from the modern term `city state', which historians use to cover many other historic civilizations, from ancient Sumeria to the West African cultures absorbed by the nineteenth-century colonializingpowers. The focus of this project is what the Greeks themselves considered a polis to be.

The work is concerned with the contradiction between the gift and the commodity and the essentials of the corresponding modes of human being. An answer is sought to how and why the gift is constituted as the essence of archaic mode of being and production. A paradigm focusing on internal causes of underdevelopment is also presented. According to that perspective the gift becomes a ghost in the modern machinery of the commodity in the present-day Third World, disturbing economy and administration from within. In this alien context, the gift effects a displacement of essence of economic relationships and appears, now as corruption, theft, nepotism, bribe. deals shortly with basic archaic gift-structures as expressed in various terms, ranging from relations of sexes to those of ritual natures. A key issue is the difference between archaic and modern mind and labour. It is argued that the different modalities of archaic organization possess a different potency for development of the materially based relations. The course of development runs towards relative independency of the economic from mentally based relations as erected on communication of social meaning and norms or petrified rules. The gift society finally gives rise to its negation, the commodity, which through the dynamism and accomplishments of capital will, hopefully, give way to its own negation in human ethics, ownness and reason as the principles of socio-economic organization and planning. and history, and is concerned with basic rather than applied research. The illustration of theoretical points often derives from the authors' fieldwork among the Sinhalese and their experience of Bangladeshian society. Besides, some major normative-communicative relationships of the Sinhalese, including the marriage system, the traditional property system and the caste system, are dealt with separately in selected fieldnotes towards the end of the work.

What is distinctive about Greek lyric? How should we conceptualize it in relation to literature, song, music, rhetoric, history? This discussion investigates such questions, analysing a range of influential methodologies that have shaped the recent history of the field.