Ian Jared Miller's Books

The Nature of the Beasts

Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo

By: Ian Jared Miller

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Nature of the Beasts

Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo

By: Ian Jared Miller

It is widely known that such Western institutions as the museum, the university, and the penitentiary shaped Japan’s emergence as a modern nation-state. Less commonly recognized is the role played by the distinctly hybrid institution—at once museum, laboratory, and prison—of the zoological garden. In this eye-opening study of Japan’s first modern zoo, Tokyo’s Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens, opened in 1882, Ian Jared Miller offers a refreshingly unconventional narrative of Japan’s rapid modernization and changing relationship with the natural world. As the first zoological garden in the world not built under the sway of a Western imperial regime, the Ueno Zoo served not only as a staple attraction in the nation’s capital—an institutional marker of national accomplishment—but also as a site for the propagation of a new “natural” order that was scientifically verifiable and evolutionarily foreordained. As the Japanese empire grew, Ueno became one of the primary sites of imperialist spectacle, a microcosm of the empire that could be traveled in the course of a single day. The meaning of the zoo would change over the course of Imperial Japan’s unraveling and subsequent Allied occupation. Today it remains one of Japan’s most frequently visited places. But instead of empire in its classic political sense, it now bespeaks the ambivalent dominion of the human species over the natural environment, harkening back to its imperial roots even as it asks us to question our exploitation of the planet’s resources.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

352

Publisher

University of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520377524

ISBN 13

9780520377523

The Nature of the Beasts

Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo

By: Ian Jared Miller

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Nature of the Beasts

Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo

By: Ian Jared Miller

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

352

Publisher

University of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520377524

ISBN 13

9780520377523

Hittite Texts and Greek Religion

Contact, Interaction, and Comparison

By: Ian Rutherford

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Hittite Texts and Greek Religion

Contact, Interaction, and Comparison

By: Ian Rutherford

Our knowledge of ancient Greece has been transformed in the last century by an increased understanding of the cultures of the Ancient Near East. This is particularly true of ancient religion. This book looks at the relationship between the religious systems of Ancient Greece and the Hittites, who controlled Turkey in the Late Bronze Age (1400-1200 BC). The cuneiform texts preserved in the Hittite archives provide a particularly rich source for religious practice, detailing festivals, purification rituals, oracle-consultations, prayers, and myths of the Hittite state, as well as documenting the religious practice of neighbouring Anatolian states in which the Hittites took an interest. Hittite religion is thus more comprehensively documented than any other ancient religious tradition in the Near East, even Egypt. The Hittites are also known to have been in contact with Mycenaean Greece, known to them as Ahhiyawa. The book first sets out the evidence and provides a methodological paradigm for using comparative data. It then explores cases where there may have been contact or influence, such as in the case of scapegoat rituals or the Kumarbi-Cycle. Finally, it considers key aspects of religious practices shared by both systems, such as the pantheon, rituals of war, festivals, and animal sacrifice. The aim of such a comparison is to discover clues that may further our understanding of the deep history of religious practices and, when used in conjunction with historical data, illuminate the differences between cultures and reveal what is distinctive about each of them.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

320

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

019259995X

ISBN 13

9780192599957

Anatolian Interfaces

Hittites, Greeks and their Neighbours

By: Billie Jean Collins,Mary R. Bachvarova,Ian Rutherford

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Anatolian Interfaces

Hittites, Greeks and their Neighbours

By: Billie Jean Collins,Mary R. Bachvarova,Ian Rutherford

The papers in this collection are the product of the conference "Hittites, Greeks and Their Neighbors in Ancient Anatolia: An International Conference on Cross-Cultural Interaction," hosted by Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. They cover an impressive range of issues relating to the complex cultural interactions that took place on Anatolian soil over the course of two millennia, in the process highlighting the difficulties inherent in studying societies that are multi-cultural in their make-up and outlook, as well as the role that cultural identity played in shaping those interactions. Topics include possible sources of tension along the Mycenaean-Anatolian interface; the transmission of mythological and religious elements between cultures; the change across time and space in literary motifs as they are adapted to new milieus and new audiences; the ways in which linguistic data can refine our understanding of the interrelations between the various peoples who lived in Anatolia; and the role that the Anatolian kingdoms of the first millennium played as cultural filters and conduits through which North Syrian or Near Eastern ideas or materials were transmitted to the Greeks.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

657

Publisher

Oxbow Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

178297475X

ISBN 13

9781782974758

Fir and Empire

The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China

By: Ian M. Miller

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Fir and Empire

The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China

By: Ian M. Miller

The disappearance of China’s naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country’s history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. China’s early modern forest history is typically viewed as a centuries-long process of environmental decline, culminating in a nineteenth-century social and ecological crisis. Pushing back against this narrative of deforestation, Ian Miller charts the rise of timber plantations between about 1000 and 1700, when natural forests were replaced with anthropogenic ones. Miller demonstrates that this form of forest management generally rested on private ownership under relatively distant state oversight and taxation. He further draws on in-depth case studies of shipbuilding and imperial logging to argue that this novel landscape was not created through simple extractive pressures, but by attempts to incorporate institutional and ecological complexity into a unified imperial state. Miller uses the emergence of anthropogenic forests in south China to rethink both temporal and spatial frameworks for Chinese history and the nature of Chinese empire. Because dominant European forestry models do not neatly overlap with the non-Western world, China’s history is often left out of global conversations about them; Miller’s work rectifies this omission and suggests that in some ways, China’s forest system may have worked better than the more familiar European institutions.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

297

Publisher

University of Washington Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

029574734X

ISBN 13

9780295747347

Book's by Ian Jared Miller

The Nature of the Beasts

The Nature of the Beasts

The Nature of the Beasts

The Nature of the Beasts

Hittite Texts and Greek Religion

Hittite Texts and Greek Religion

Anatolian Interfaces

Anatolian Interfaces

Fir and Empire

Fir and Empire

Username

Password

Username

Password

Password again

Birthday

Email