Tag: Cultural History

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Books

Culinary and Dining Practices in the Greater Iranian World

Farridnejad, Shervin, and Touraj Daryaee (eds). 2022. Food for gods, food for mortals. Culinary and dining practices in the greater Iranian world. University of California, Irvine.

Preparing, serving, and consuming food can be political, as it was arranged in the royal banquet of the great kings. It could also be considered as a ritual, both in the frame of the greater ritual practices in the banquets for the gods, as well as according to a set of family costumes and gestures, which endures from one generation to the next. All these aspects have been one of the major human’s activates during the history of the civilizations and have fascinated the scholars to investigate and decode the culinary customs of the peoples during the history. The contributions of this volume present a small collection of writings, which put focus on various aspects of culinary and dining practices in the Greater Iranian World from the ancient period to the contemporary religious feast of Sufi Orders in the Balkans. They aim to overview the recent developments in the field and discuss selected aspects of the rich variety of culinary practices.

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Books

Studien zur Kulturgeschichte des Alten Orients

Kleber, Kristin, Georg Neumann & Susanne Paulus (eds.). 2018. Grenzüberschreitungen. Studien zur Kulturgeschichte des alten Orients. Festschrift für Hans Neumann zum 65. Geburtstag am 9. Mai 2018 (DUBSAR 5). Münster: Zaphon Verlag. Unter Mitarbeit von Christin Möllenbeck.

Vierzig Beiträge in deutscher, englischer und französischer Sprache sind dem Assyriologen Hans Neumann (Universität Münster) gewidmet. Korrespondierend mit den breit gefächerten Forschungen des Jubilars bieten sie einen aktuellen Überblick über Themen der Assyriologie, der Vorderasiatischen Archäologie und der Kulturgeschichte des Alten Orients.

With contributions by Bruno Jacobs and Daniel Potts on Achaemenids and Elamites, respectively.
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Books

Dance in Iran: Past and Present

Gholami, Saloumeh (ed.). 2016. Dance in Iran: Past and Present. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag.

 

Dance is one of the cultural topics facing some of the greatest challenges in Iran. Culturally, dance constitutes one of the richest and most extensive branches of art, having a long tradition and history. But in today’s Iran, dance is automatically regarded to be a political issue, even though dancers have no intention for it to be thought of in this way. In spite of the fact that Iran is considered to be one of the most ancient centers of dance culture, dance has still faced many challenges in its long history, particularly after the arrival of Islam in Iran.
This volume is an extraordinary history of dance, full of mystery and humor. The various developments in the history of this art in Iran have never before been presented in a single book, making “Dance in Iran: Past and Present” the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. The book examines the major branches of Iranian regional, ethnic, and national dances as well as Iranian ballet and describes their history to the present. The videos are available at the website www.reichert-verlag.de and contain unique historical dance material from the pre-revolutionary period and examples of Iranian ballet from the contemporary era.
The book is suitable for anyone involved or interested in the dance history of Iran.

See the table of contents here.

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Events

Conference Program | societyforiranianstudies.org

The eleventh biennal conference of the International Society for Iranian Studies will take place in Vienna from 2 to 5 August 2016.

For more information on the conference, see this link. And here is the conference programme.

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Events

Arabic and Persian Printing History and Culture

Arabic and Persian Printing History and Culture

A symposium organised by the Centre for Printing History & Culture

Date: Monday, June 6, 2016
Time: 9:00am to 5:00pm
Venue: University of Birmingham

For more information, see here. Visit this link to book tickets.

This one-day symposium looks at the history of printing across both Arabic and Persian-speaking worlds from block printing in the fourteenth century to twenty-first century digital type design, and includes talks on calligraphy, type and typography, printing history, newspapers, books and printed ephemera and the cultural impact of the printed word.

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Reviews

Reforming Zoroastrianism in India and Iran

Zoroastrianism: modern Zoroastrian priest tending a temple fire. Image © Encyclopædia Britannica

Sheffield, Daniel. 2015. Review of Monica Ringer, Pious Citizens: Reforming Zoroastrianism in India and Iran (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2011). International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) 47(4). 833–835.

Pious Citizens trace ideas of “true” and “rational” religion in Western India and Iran between the years 1830 and 1940. Her story begins in the city of Bombay, where in the early 19th century traditional networks of Parsi authority were disrupted by the rise of merchant capital in the metropole and emigration away from older centers of communal hierarchy. This forms the backdrop for the beginning of the Zoroastrian reform movement, in which religious and social reform were linked.
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Books

A Cultural History of Zoroastrianism

Gheiby, Bijan. 2014. Zarathustras Feuer: Eine Kulturgeschichte des Zoroastrismus. Darmstadt: Philipp von Zabern.
This volume amis to present a culture-historical introduction to Zoroastrianism. The author dicusses the emergence, the development, the decline and the current status of this religion. It also deals with the neo–Zoroastrian movement(s), that is formed in response to the Islamization of Iran, and according to the author, assessed the chances of a revival of Zoroastrianism in the future. The book is divided into ten chapters. The first three chapters deal more with historical aspects of the faith, among others, the history of the Persian empire and the life of Zaraθuštra. In the fourth and fifth chapters, the contents and principles of religion are explained. The sixth section is dealing with the siruation of Zoroastrianism under the Sassanian. The chapters seven and eight deal with the Zoroastrian scriptures, literature and cults. The ninth chapter deals with the decline of religion and the final chapter dicusses the phenomenon of neo-Zoroastrianism.
About the Author:
Bijan Gheiby was born in Teheran in 1954. He studied media in Tehran and in Long Beach as well as Iranian Studies in Hamburg and Göttingen, where he received his doctorate. He is an independent researcher of Zoroastrianism and ancient Iranian Studies.
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Online resources

History of Iran Podcast

History of Iran Podcast

The History of Iran Podcast project is an ongoing chronological attempt to trace the History of Iran in an innovative way of keeping the “dynastic framework as a useful way of organising the narrative”, but also “going to stop at certain points and explain and elaborate on certain points”. Starting with some general questions and topics on geography in the very first episodes, this series hosted by Khodadad Rezakhani is an ongoing account of the people, events, historic monents, political and cultural remarks that shaped the History of Iran. An invaluable resource for anyone that needs a ground level survey of the Iranian History.

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Books

The comprehensive history of Iran

Mousavi-Bojnourdi, Kazem (General Editor). 2015. The comprehensive history of Iran. 20. Vols. Tehran: The Centre for the Great Islamic Encyclopaedia.

The Comprehensive History of Iran, a multi-volume survey of Iranian history in Persian language is published by The Centre for the Great Islamic Encyclopaedia (CGIE). The twenty volumes cover the history and historical geography, politic, culture and arts of the greater Iran, including all territories inhabited by or staying under the cultural influence of peoples of Iranian descent , from prehistoric times up to the Qajar dynasty. Many aspects of the religious, philosophical, economic, scientific, and artistic elements in Iranian civilization are studied in this series.

For more information, see the official website and the list of the contributors and the detailed Table of Contents (all in Persian).

The series consists of 20 volumes:

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