BiblioVault

The Management of the Matobo Hills in Zimbabwe

Perceptions of the Indigenous Communities on Their Involvement and Use of Traditional Conservation Practices

Simon Makuvaza

Leiden University Press, 2017

Since 1992, when the World Heritage Committee established its category of “cultural landscapes,” scholarly debates have ensued as to how they could best be managed. One approach, which appears to have gained significance over the past two decades, considers using traditional conservation practices in addition to engaging local indigenous communities in the stewardship of these exemplary sites. Based on the perspectives of the indigenous people of the Matobo Hills, this investigation studies the extent to which both traditional conservation practices and local involvement can be germane to the administration of World Heritage Cultural Landscapes.

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The Mesoamerican Codex Re-entangled

Production, Use and Re-use of Pre-colonial Documents

Ludo Snijders

Leiden University Press, 2017

This innovative work aims to piece together the cultural biography of Mesoamerica’s precolonial codices. Today, fewer than twenty manuscripts are all that remain of the Mesoamerican book-making tradition. These pictographic and hieroglyphic texts have often been researched according to their content, but such studies have ignored their nature as material objects. By tracing the paths these books have followed over the past five hundred years, Ludo Snijders offers fascinating insights into their production, use and reuse, destruction, rediscovery, and reinvention.

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Middle High German Legends in English Translation

Edited by Jef Jacobs, Kenny Louwen, Bart Veldhoen, and Barend Verkerk

Leiden University Press, 2022

Five medieval German legends, freshly translated with accessible reading guides.

This volume collects five medieval German legends—the story of Veronica, Vespasian, Theophilus, Mary Magdalene, and the True Cross—in both the Middle High German original and modern English translation alongside unique guides to the relevant Germanic research and the principal themes of each text.

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Mirrors of Entrapment and Emancipation

Forugh Farrokhzad and Sylvia Plath

Leila Rahimi Bahmany

Leiden University Press, 2015

Images of mirrors and reflection have long played a substantial role in literature by women, used to convey ineffable psychological states, the countless images that define and complicate women’s lives, and much more. In Mirrors of Entrapment and Emancipation, Leila Rahimi Bahmany focuses in particular on the work of two major women writers, Persian poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1935–67) and the American Sylvia Plath (1932–63), exploring the various ways that these two artists deployed mirrors and reflections as sites of entrapment or emancipation.

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Monsoon Asia

A reader on South and Southeast Asia

David Henley

Leiden University Press, 2023

Monsoon Asia was the first venue of global trade, a zone of encounters, exchanges, and cultural diffusion. This book demonstrates the continuing fertility of the Monsoon Asia perspective as an aid to understanding what South/Southeast Asia, as a connected space, has been in the past and is today. Sixteen tightly knit chapters, written by experts from perspectives ranging from Indology and philology to postcolonial and transnational studies, offer a captivating view of the region, with its rich and variegated history shaped by commonalities in human ecology, cultural forms, and religious practices. The contributions draw upon extensive research and a thorough command of the most recent scholarship. This volume will be an invaluable text for anyone interested in South and Southeast Asia, and for more specialized students in the fields of global and Indian Ocean history, transcultural studies, archaeology, linguistics, and politics.

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