Ancestor Of The West

Download or read book Ancestor of the West written by Jean Bottéro and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2000-06-15 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the same time Ancestor of the West reminds us that these cultures were precursors of our own precisely because they possessed an intelligence that we still recognize. The ancients, even in their earliest writings, thought like us."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Way Out West written by Michael Shaw Bond and published by M&S. This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1862, a British lord named Viscount Milton and his friend from Cambridge, Dr. Cheadle, set out to travel across what is now western Canada. Not only did they want to explore the possibilities of a usable land-route through the Rockies to the Cariboo goldfields, but they craved the adventure an untouched land could provide. Starting their journey in the Red River Colony (Winnipeg), they hired guides and proceeded across the prairie, encountering both Natives and Hudson's Bay Company traders, and enduring a gruelling journey through the Yellowhead Pass, in terrible conditions, down the Thompson River to Kamloops. They moved down the Fraser River from the B.C. interior to New Westminster and took a steamer to Victoria, from which they visited the Cariboo goldfields, and then headed home from Victoria by ship via Panama. Their book about the trip, "The North-West Passage by Land," published in England in 1865, was a huge success. Now Michael Shaw Bond - a great-great-grandson of Viscount Milton, and a London journalist - has also travelled from Winnipeg west in the footsteps of his distinguished ancestor. Hitch-hiking and walking across the prairies, searching near Prince Albert for the descendants of the natives who helped Milton and Cheadle survive their first winter, and encountering both grandeur and extreme discomfort on horseback through the mountains, Bond tackles his experience with curiosity, good humour, and a good deal of Milton's own courage. In the process he discovers not only Milton's trail, but much about Milton - and himself. On his Canadian adventure Milton was able to escape the pressures and expectations of his position, and come to an awareness of what he did well. So too did Bond, dealing with a difficult relationship and a time of uncertainty in his life, find in his adventure a time in which life is reduced to essentials, and priorities are clarified - through the centuries the reward of pilgrimage.

Download or read book Voices from the Ancestors written by Lara Medina and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Voices from the Ancestors brings together the reflective writings and spiritual practices of Xicanx, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx womxn and male allies in the United States who seek to heal from the historical traumas of colonization by returning to ancestral traditions and knowledge. This wisdom is based on the authors’ oral traditions, research, intuitions, and lived experiences—wisdom inspired by, and created from, personal trajectories on the path to spiritual conocimiento, or inner spiritual inquiry. This conocimiento has reemerged over the last fifty years as efforts to decolonize lives, minds, spirits, and bodies have advanced. Yet this knowledge goes back many generations to the time when the ancestors understood their interconnectedness with each other, with nature, and with the sacred cosmic forces—a time when the human body was a microcosm of the universe. Reclaiming and reconstructing spirituality based on non-Western epistemologies is central to the process of decolonization, particularly in these fraught times. The wisdom offered here appears in a variety of forms—in reflective essays, poetry, prayers, specific guidelines for healing practices, communal rituals, and visual art, all meant to address life transitions and how to live holistically and with a spiritual consciousness for the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Ancestor of the West written by Jean Bottéro and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the same time Ancestor of the West reminds us that these cultures were precursors of our own precisely because they possessed an intelligence that we still recognize. The ancients, even in their earliest writings, thought like us."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Divine Consumption written by Stephen A. Dueppen and published by Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kirikongo is an archaeological site composed of thirteen remarkably well-preserved discrete mounds occupied continually from the early first to the mid second millennium AD. It spans a dynamic era that saw the growth of large settlement communities and regional socio-political formations, development of economic specializations, intensification in interregional commercial networks, and the effects of the Black Death pandemic. The extraordinary preservation of architectural units, activity areas and industrial zones provides a unique opportunity to discern the cultural practices that created stratified mounds (tells) in this part of West Africa. Building from a new detailed zooarchaeological analysis and refinements in stratigraphic precision, this book argues that repeated ritual activity was a significant factor in the accumulation of stratified archaeological deposits. The book details consistencies in form and content of discrete loci containing animal bones, food remains, and broken and unbroken objects and suggests that these are the remnants of sequential ancestor shrines created when domestic spaces were converted to tombs or dedicated mortuary monuments were constructed. Continuities and transformations in ancestral rituals at Kirikongo inform on earlier West African ritual practices from the second millennium BC as well as political and social transformations at the site. More broadly, this case study provides new insights on anthropogenic mound (tell) formation processes, social zooarchaeology, material culture theory, historical ontology, and the analysis of ritual and religion in the archaeological record.

Download or read book Ancestor Stones written by Aminatta Forna and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2014-03-18 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning author: A “wonderfully ambitious” novel of West Africa, told through the struggles and dreams of four extraordinary women (The Guardian). When a cousin offers Abie her family’s plantation in the West African village of Rofathane in Sierra Leone, she leaves her husband, children, and career in London to reclaim the home she left behind long ago. With the help of her four aunts—Asana, Mariama, Hawa, and Serah—Abie begins a journey to uncover the past of her family and her home country, buried among the neglected coffee plants. From rivalries between local chiefs and religious leaders to arranged marriages, manipulative unions, traditional desires, and modern advancements, Abie’s aunts weave a tale of a nation’s descent into chaos—and their own individual struggles to claim their destiny. Hailed by Marie Claire as “a fascinating evocation of the experience of African women, and all that has been gained—and lost—with the passing of old traditions,” Ancestor Stones is a powerful exploration of family, culture, heritage, and hope. “This is [Forna’s] first novel, but it is too sophisticated to read like one.” —The Guardian

Download or read book Mesopotamia written by Jean Bottéro and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995-06-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our ancestors, the Mesopotamians, invented writing and with it a new way of looking at the world. In this collection of essays, the French scholar Jean Bottero attempts to go back to the moment which marks the very beginning of history. To give the reader some sense of how Mesopotamian civilization has been mediated and interpreted in its transmission through time, Bottero begins with an account of Assyriology, the discipline devoted to the ancient culture. This transmission, compounded with countless discoveries, would not have been possible without the surprising decipherment of the cuneiform writing system. Bottero also focuses on divination in the ancient world, contending that certain modes of worship in Mesopotamia, in their application of causality and proof, prefigure the "scientific mind."