Iconicity of sacralized human body: Its evolution in mediaeval Inner Asian visual depictions and metaphorical descriptions
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Human body and its specific parts like a head or hands are often serving as an important focus of iconic artistical depictions and metaphorical descriptions. In this directional aspect (Pinna 2015) head and hands are ideally attested on the examples of various forms of visualization and sacralization (Anati & Fradkin 2016, Barnes 2017). The most natural cases are the depictions of human body of historical rulers, saints and deities. Specific sets of collected data from Inner Asian Buddhist cultures are on the scale of material-linguistical data of A) artistic depictions, B) lexical theonyms and royal titles, and C) textual descriptions with metaphorical meanings. Ad A) The first set of visual (Taylor et al. 2019) and visualized data can be attested by chronological occurrences of sacralized human body on petroglyphs also in relation to funerals and heaven (Kubarev 2006, Kortum 2014/2018, Kortum & Fitzhugh 2019, Clottes & Smith 2019, Rozwadowski 2019, Tseng 2011), ceramics (Anderson 2011, Li & Chen 2012, Diakova 2018, Hung 2021), stone statues (Wang & Qi 1996), clothes (Shin 2004), coins and mainly on iconographic paintings. The iconographic data will be mainly documented on examples from Inner Asian Buddhist art from Xinjiang and Dunhuang in the first millennium AD. Especially mentioned can be the motifs of a hallo around the head or ritual gestures of hands related to Buddhist teaching (namely Huo & Qi 2006) Ad B) The second set of onomastic lexical data can be attested by specific royal titles, where some of them are naturally related to words for “head” (Hucker 1985, Beckwith 2007). Ad C) The third set of literary textual attestations is illustrated by examples from Central Asian Buddhist and other religious manuscripts (Ma & Wang 2018, Gabain & Winter 1958, Kloetzli 1997, Durkin-Meisterernst 2006, Lagerwey & Kalinowski 2009, Liu 2009) with direct or metaphorical descriptions related to sacralized human body – a typical example might be the description of a Buddha and usually 32 special physical marks of a Buddha attested in more Inner Asian languages. All mentioned three datasets indicate 1) particular interconnections among all three sets, 2) gradual development of standardized forms of their iconicity and 3) gradual co-evolution of visual pictures, lexical names and literary texts in their relation to historical persons/deities, human speech (Taylor et al. 2019) and iconic expressions. These data allow more complex understanding regarding evolutionary processes (Alcorta & Sosis 2005) and various aspects of iconicity (Kounios et al. 2001) on examples from Buddhism and Buddhist art in mediaeval Inner Asia. |
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