Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay – författare

Uto-Aztecan iconic practices are primarily conditioned by the consciousness of the snake as a death-dealing power, and as such, an animal that displays the deepest fears and anxieties of the individual. The attempt to study a snake simulacrum thus constitutes the basic objective of this volume. A long, all-embracing iconicity of snakes and related snake motifs are evident in different cultural expressions ranging from rock art templates to other cultural artifacts like basketry, pottery, temple architecture and sculptural motifs. Uto-Aztecan iconography demonstrates a symbolic memorial order of emotional valences, as well as the negotiations with death and a belief in rebirth, just as the skin-shedding snake reptile manifests in its life cycle.

Uto-Aztecan iconic practices are primarily conditioned by the consciousness of the snake as a death-dealing power, and as such, an animal that displays the deepest fears and anxieties of the individual. The attempt to study a snake simulacrum thus constitutes the basic objective of this volume. A long, all-embracing iconicity of snakes and related snake motifs are evident in different cultural expressions ranging from rock art templates to other cultural artifacts like basketry, pottery, temple architecture and sculptural motifs. Uto-Aztecan iconography demonstrates a symbolic memorial order of emotional valences, as well as the negotiations with death and a belief in rebirth, just as the skin-shedding snake reptile manifests in its life cycle.

This book posits ‘orientophilia’ as a committed tendency among European Enlightenment philosophers to admire and appropriate the aesthetics of Asiatic religions—especially Indic, Chinese, and Far Eastern iconography—as a kind of art that could be understood with the help of a homegrown, mainly Northern-European spiritualist ontology. The author evinces references from Herder, Hegel, and impassioned orientalists like Schopenhauer and Ernest Fenollosa, to expose how European idealistic hermeneutics of Asiatic iconography suffers from limitations imposed by its own rational aesthetics and how it fails to connect with the deepest and most nuanced mythical ontology that defines these depictions. Yet, European philosophers provoked their Asian counterparts in the Anglophone world to write a neonarrative of pan-Asian hermeneutics. Philosophically astute, historical orientophilia bridges the immense philosophical traditions that Western thinkers have long imagined. In this bold and enlightening book, the author reminds us that the West could strive to truly “know” the East only by uniting ways of knowing.