In this presentation, I outline and reposition the entangled histories of certain objects, technologies, and rhetoric, to show how consumption and consumer identity are reflected in their combination and that each category is never far from the other two.

A narrated iteration of a recent presentation. I consider this an interim version as I…[Read more]

This is the new and final version of the book, Performing Prowess: Essays on Localized Hindu Elements in Southeast Asian Art from Past to Present. It explores Hindu elements which have been localized in Southeast Asian art and culture from the ancient to contemporary periods.

This research it isn’t confined to António Joaquim Padrão (c. 1730-71) – marginal personality in the portuguese capital artistic scene, yet with a independent workshop operating in the city during the third quarter of the eighteenth century, working has a painter and engraver – historical-biographical reconstruction, nor to his artistic corpu…[Read more]

Paul Klee, a German artist, highlighted the eternal struggle of human beings to synthesize the “inner vision” with “outside experience.” “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”-Michelangelo “Beauty is the illumination of the soul!”-Poet-Theologian O’Donohue, Art & the Unconscious Psyche-Psychic Life Carl Jung…[Read more]

This essay shows that physicians of early Āyurveda adopted a pragmatic approach to the challenges dharma imposed on them. While the concept and its importance is generally accepted in the medical compendia, various passages stress the fact that good health is an indispensable precondition to pursue dharma and other goals of life. In the interests…[Read more]

Karen Armstrong, In her book, The Case For God, opens with the discussion of the 300 plus caves in Southern France and Northern Spain which have amazingly artistic ‘prehistoric’ cave paintings of prehistoric animals many of whom are now extinct, some dating to 30,000 years ago. “In all there are about six hundred frescoes and fifteen hundred engra…[Read more]

article + 6 photographs from the Manuscriptistan Project

Sicily – and especially Syracuse – seems to have had an ongoing preoccupation with paired eyes as an apotropaic or magico-religious symbol. This brief paper explores some signature pieces and speculates that the excised eyes of Santa Lucia, patron saint of Syracuse, may be but a recent embodiment of a propensity that dates back to the Neolithic era.

Abstract: The causes of suffering are a central topic in Buddhism as well as in Ayurveda. The Pāli Canon and other early Buddhist texts like the Milindapañha mention eight specific causes resulting in disease or suffering at several places. In contrast, early Ayurveda, as presented in the Carakasaṃhitā, knows a threefold causal complex of dise…[Read more]