Ranging across the longue durée of Thailand’s history, Monastery, Monument, Museum is an eminently readable and original contribution to the study of the kingdom’s art and culture. Eschewing issues of dating, style, and iconography, historian Maurizio Peleggi addresses distinct types of artifacts and artworks as both the products and vehicles of cultural memory. From the temples of Chiangmai to the Emerald Buddha, from the National Museum of Bangkok to the prehistoric culture of Northeast Thailand, and from the civic monuments of the 1930s to the political artworks of the late twentieth century, even well-known artworks and monuments reveal new meanings when approached from this perspective. Part I, “Sacred Geographies,” focuses on the premodern era, when religious credence informed the cultural alteration of landscape, and devotional sites and artifacts, including visual representation of the Buddhist cosmology, were created. Part II, “Antiquities, Museums, and National History,” covers the 1830s through the 1970s, when antiquarianism, and eventually archaeology, emerged and developed in the kingdom, partly the result of a shift in the elites’ worldview and partly a response to colonial and neocolonial projects of knowledge. Part III, “Discordant Mnemoscapes,” deals with civic monuments and artworks that anchor memory of twentieth-century political events and provide stages for both their commemoration and counter-commemoration by evoking the country’s embattled political present. Monastery, Monument, Museum shows us how cultural memory represents a kind of palimpsest, the result of multiple inscriptions, reworkings, and manipulations over time. The book will be a rewarding read for historians, art historians, anthropologists, and Buddhism scholars working on Thailand and Southeast Asia generally, as well as for academic and general readers with an interest in memory and material culture.

Buddhism, often described as an austere religion that condemns desire, promotes denial, and idealizes the contemplative life, actually has a thriving leisure culture in Asia. Creative religious improvisations designed by Buddhists have been produced both within and outside of monasteries across the region—in Nepal, Japan, Korea, Macau, Hong Kong, Singapore, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. Justin McDaniel looks at the growth of Asia’s culture of Buddhist leisure—what he calls “socially disengaged Buddhism”—through a study of architects responsible for monuments, museums, amusement parks, and other sites. In conversation with noted theorists of material and visual culture and anthropologists of art, McDaniel argues that such sites highlight the importance of public, leisure, and spectacle culture from a Buddhist perspective and illustrate how “secular” and “religious,” “public” and “private,” are in many ways false binaries. Moreover, places like Lek Wiriyaphan’s Sanctuary of Truth in Thailand, Suối Tiên Amusement Park in Saigon, and Shi Fa Zhao’s multilevel museum/ritual space/tea house in Singapore reflect a growing Buddhist ecumenism built through repetitive affective encounters instead of didactic sermons and sectarian developments. They present different Buddhist traditions, images, and aesthetic expressions as united but not uniform, collected but not concise: Together they form a gathering, not a movement. Despite the ingenuity of lay and ordained visionaries like Wiriyaphan and Zhao and their colleagues Kenzo Tange, Chan-soo Park, Tadao Ando, and others discussed in this book, creators of Buddhist leisure sites often face problems along the way. Parks and museums are complex adaptive systems that are changed and influenced by budgets, available materials, local and global economic conditions, and visitors. Architects must often compromise and settle at local optima, and no matter what they intend, their buildings will develop lives of their own. Provocative and theoretically innovative, Architects of Buddhist Leisure asks readers to question the very category of “religious” architecture. It challenges current methodological approaches in religious studies and speaks to a broad audience interested in modern art, architecture, religion, anthropology, and material culture. An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.

This magnificent volume explores the epochal transformations and unexpected continuities in the Byzantine Empire from the 7th to the 9th century. At the beginning of the 7th century, the Empire's southern provinces, the vibrant, diverse areas of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, were at the crossroads of exchanges reaching from Spain to China. These regions experienced historic upheavals when their Christian and Jewish communities encountered the emerging Islamic world, and by the 9th century, an unprecedented cross- fertilization of cultures had taken place. This extraordinary age is brought vividly to life in insightful contributions by leading international scholars, accompanied by sumptuous illustrations of the period's most notable arts and artifacts. Resplendent images of authority, religion, and trade—embodied in precious metals, brilliant textiles, fine ivories, elaborate mosaics, manuscripts, and icons, many of them never before published— highlight the dynamic dialogue between the rich array of Byzantine styles and the newly forming Islamic aesthetic. With its masterful exploration of two centuries that would shape the emerging medieval world, this illuminating publication provides a unique interpretation of a period that still resonates today.

This landmark, interdisciplinary publication of the Red Monastery church, the most important Christian monument in Egypt's Nile Valley, highlights its remarkable and newly conserved paintings and architectural sculpture.

Forges innovative connections between monastic archaeology and heritage studies, revealing new perspectives on sacred heritage, identity, medieval healing, magic and memory. This title is available as Open Access.

This book presents up-to-date information about museums and museology in present-day Asia, focusing on Japan, Mongolia, Myanmar, and Thailand.Asian countries today have developed or are developing their own museology and museums, which are not simple copies of European or North American models. This book provides readers with carefully chosen examples of museum activities—for example, exhibition and sharing information, database construction, access to and conservation of museum collections, relationships between museums and local communities, and international cooperation in the field of cultural heritage. Readers are expected to include museum professionals and museology students.Throughout the course of this book, the reader will understand that a museum is not only a place for collecting, representing, and preserving cultural heritage but also plays a fundamental role in community development. This book is highly recommended to readers who seek a worldwide vision of museum studies.The peer-reviewed chapters in this volume are written versions of the lectures delivered by selected speakers at the international symposium "New Horizons for Asian Museums and Museology" held in February 2015 at the National Museum of Ethnology, Japan.

Lords of Things offers a fascinating interpretation of modernity in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Siam by focusing on the novel material possessions and social practices adopted by the royal elite to refashion its self and public image in the early stages of globalization. It examines the westernized modes of consumption and self-presentation, the residential and representational architecture, and the public spectacles appropriated by the Bangkok court not as byproducts of institutional reformation initiated by modernizing sovereigns, but as practices and objects constitutive of the very identity of the royalty as a civilized and civilizing class. Bringing a wealth of new source material into a theoretically informed discussion, Lords of Things will be required reading for historians of Thailand and Southeast Asia scholars generally. It represents a welcome change from previous studies of Siamese modernization that are almost exclusively concerned with the institutional and economic dimensions of the process or with foreign relations, and will appeal greatly to those interested in transnational cultural flows, the culture of colonialism, the invention of tradition, and the relationship between consumption and identity formation in the modern era.

The Rough Guide to Moscow is the definitive guide to one of Europe's most fascinating and rewarding cities. The full-colour introduction covers the awe-inspiring Kremlin and The Red Square and includes the essential list of 'what not to miss'. There are lively explorations of all the sights, from Moscow's lavish palaces to world-class museums, as well as detailed accounts of Russian history and politics that have formed this intriguing city. You'll find two full-colour sections that highlight the New Moscow Style - contemporary art, design, fashion, galleries, boutiques, bars and clubs - and the magnificent art-deco metro, famous for its arts, murals, mosaics and ornate chandeliers. With updated and easy-to-use maps, expanded listings of nightlife, restaurants and hotels in Moscow for all budgets, The Rough Guide to Moscow is the must-have item to this colourful and spirited city.