Books by "Kim Hunter Gordon"
3 books found
In the Southern Song dynasty, Hechuan was the wealthiest county in the Sichuan basin, sat at a strategic point at the confluence of three major river routes. The two spectacular relics left here from the period demonstrate how two outside influences, one cultural and one military, left their mark not just in Sichuan but changed the face of the whole Chinese empire. The lucid sculpture at Laitan’s Erfo temple is the only three-dimensional representation of the Chan school’s defining transmission narrative. The emphasis on monastic lineage, real personages and achievable enlightenment for the laity is clearly expressed in the sculpture here and was designed to conform to, and court, the Chinese Confucian elite. This book gives a statue-by-statue guide to the iconography at this unique cliff site plus an introduction to the Chan school and its relationship with local elites. The Song stronghold at Diaoyu fortress is lauded in patriotic historiography as the ‘Mecca of the East’, credited to have broken the dreaded ‘flail of God’ (that is, the Mongol war machine) as it poised to ravish Europe and the Islamic world. But with Europe and Islam at war with one another and the Mongols set to establish a glorious but short-lived new dynasty in China, the narrative is reassessed in this the first English language work on the subject.
A historical exploration of scientific disputes on the causation of so-called ‘prion diseases’, this fascinating book covers diseases including Scrapie, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). Firstly tracing the twentieth-century history of disease research and biomedicine, the text then focuses on the relations between scientific practice and wider social transformations, before finally building upon the sociologically informed methodological framework. Incisive and thought-provoking, The Social Construction of Disease provides a valuable contribution to that well-established tradition of social history of science, which refers primarily to the theoretical works of the sociology of scientific knowledge.
In modern times the coal capital of China, Datong was once the capital of empire and one of the most important cultural centres of northern China. A controversial reconstruction of its old city has attracted recent attention, but Datong’s lasting attraction is its artistic and architectural heritage. The Northern Wei (386-535), a dynasty founded by outsiders, established its capital in capital in Datong from 398 until 494. The artistic legacy of that period, the Buddhist carvings at the Yungang Grottoes, illustrates how foreign motifs and styles interacted with native Chinese aesthetics to establish forms that would dominate the iconography of East Asia. The city remained an important military, religious and mercantile centre throughout imperial China, with spectacular wooden temple architecture from the Liao and Jin dynasties (907–1271) is preserved to a greater extent here than in any other region of China.