Northwestern Events Calendar

May
17
2024

World of Signs: Coins and the Tree Shrines of Bharhut (ca. 200 B.C.E.-100 C.E.)

When: Friday, May 17, 2024
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM CT

Where: Kresge Hall, 2-410, 1880 Campus Drive , Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Blaze Marpet  

Group: Global Antiquities

Co-Sponsor: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

Category: Academic, Fine Arts, Lectures & Meetings, Religious, Multicultural & Diversity, Global & Civic Engagement

Description:

Please join the Global Antiquities Group as they host Charlotte Gorant, PhD Candidate, Columbia University.

She will speak on how the lack of any depicted body of the Buddha during the centuries before the common era is an extraordinary innovation by the artists of South Asia. She argues that narrative visual signs of the Buddha are rooted in a preexisting world of signs. The perception of the Buddha’s absence was of great significance for these artists, and monastics considered this to be crucial for worshipers at the time. Charlotte Gorant makes the case that this visual mode did not suddenly emerge in stone but developed within a preexisting world of signs enmeshed in ancient systems of knowledge production in South Asia, which is in part exemplified by ancient punch-marked coins and the social roles of their usages. 

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