David Shulman

Spoken by eighty million people, Tamil is one of the great world languages, and one of the few ancient languages that survives as a mother tongue. David Shulman presents a comprehensive cultural history of Tamil, emphasizing how its speakers and poets have understood the unique features of their language over its long history.

Tamil

Velcheru Narayana Rao

V_lc_ru N_r_ya_ar_vu

"An amazing book . . . There is nothing remotely like it anywhere in the world. I am in awe at the skill with which the many different voices in this collection have been kept alive. It is a terrific and stunningly interesting read."—Wendy Doniger, author of The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade "This is a superb collection, which presents to the English reading public for the first time a literature of great beauty and importance. There is no similar or comparable anthology for any Indian language let alone Telugu. All of the translations of the poems are exquisite and learned. The introduction is both a much needed history of Telugu poetry and also a guide to the aesthetics of Telugu poetry and the art of reading it."—Phyllis Granoff, translator of The Journey: Stories by K.C. Das

An Anthology

Classical Telugu Poetry

From the late fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the imagination came to be recognized in South Indian culture as the defining feature of human beings. Shulman elucidates the distinctiveness of South Indian theories of the imagination and shows how they differ radically from Western notions of reality and models of the mind.

A History of the Imagination in South India

More Than Real

Lately, it seems as if we wake up to a new atrocity each day. Every morning is now a ritual of scrolling through our Twitter feeds or scanning our newspapers for the latest updates on fresh horrors around the globe. Despite the countless protests we attend, the phone calls we make, or the streets we march, it sometimes feels like no matter how hard we fight, the relentless crush of injustice will never abate. David Shulman knows intimately what it takes to live your beliefs, to return, day after day, to the struggle, despite knowing you are often more likely to lose than win. Interweaving powerful stories and deep meditations, Freedom and Despair offers vivid firsthand reports from the occupied West Bank in Palestine as seen through the eyes of an experienced Israeli peace activist who has seen the Israeli occupation close up as it impacts on the lives of all Palestinian civilians. Alongside a handful of beautifully written and often shocking tales from the field, Shulman meditates deeply on how to understand the evils around him, what it means to persevere as an activist decade after decade, and what it truly means to be free. The violent realities of the occupation are on full display. We get to know and understand the Palestinian shepherds and farmers and Israeli volunteers who face this situation head-on with nonviolent resistance. Shulman does not hold back on acknowledging the daily struggles that often leave him and his fellow activists full of despair. Inspired by these committed individuals who are not prepared to be silent or passive, Shulman suggests a model for ordinary people everywhere. Anyone prepared to take a risk and fight their oppressive political systems, he argues, can make a difference—if they strive to act with compassion and to keep hope alive. This is the moving story of a man who continues to fight for good in the midst of despair. An indispensable book in our era of reactionary politics and refugee crises, political violence and ecological devastation, Freedom and Despair is a gripping memoir of struggle, activism, and hope for peace.

Notes from the South Hebron Hills

Freedom and Despair

David Shulman analyses the motives, tactics, rationalizations, and ethical ramifications of acting deceptively in the workplace. He offers readers both detailed accounts of workplace lies and new ways to think about the important effects of everyday workplace deceptions.

The Role of Deception in the Workplace

From Hire to Liar

Don Handelman

This book offers a new exploration of the mythology of the Hindu god Siva, who spends his time playing dice with his wife, to whom he habitually loses. The result of the game is our world, which turns the god inside-out and changes his internal composition. Hindus maintain that Siva is perpetually absorbed in this game, which is recreated in innumerable stories, poems, paintings, and sculptural carvings. This notion of the god at play, arguee Handelman and Shulman, is one of the most central and expressive veins in the metaphysics elaborated through the centuries, in many idioms and modes, around the god. The book comprises three interlocking essays; the first presents the dice-game proper, in the light of the texts and visual depictions the authors have collected. The second and third chapters take up two mythic "sequels" to the game. Based on their analysis of these sequels, the authors argue that notions of "asceticism" so frequently associated with Siva, with Yoga, and with Hindu religion are, in fact, foreign to Hinduism's inherent logic as reflected in Siva's game of dice. They suggest an alternative reading of this set of practices and ideas, providing startling new insights into Hindu mythology and the major poetic texts from the classical Sanskrit tradition.

'Siva's Game of Dice

God Inside Out

Galit Hasan-Rokem

This book collects eighteen previously unpublished essays on the riddle--a genre of discourse found in virtually every human culture. Hasan-Rokem and Shulman have drawn these essays from a variety of cultural perspectives and disciplines; linguists, anthropologists, folklorists, and religion and literature scholars consider riddling practices in Hebrew, Finnish, Indian languages, Chinese, and classical Greek. The authors seek to understand the peculiar expressive power of the riddle, and the cultural logic of its particular uses; they scrutinize the riddle's logical structure and linguistic strategies, as well as its affinity to neighboring genres such as enigmas, puzzles, oracular prophecy, proverbs, and dreams. In this way, they begin to answer how riddles relate to the conceptual structures of a particular culture, and how they come to represent a culture's cosmology or cognitive map of the world. More importantly, these essays reveal the human need for symbolic ordering--riddles being one such form of cultural ritual.

On Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes

Untying the Knot

An Annotated Bibliography of Cryptography

“Rocks. Goats. Dry shrubs. Buffaloes. Thorns. A fallen tamarind tree.” Such were the sights that greeted David Shulman on his arrival in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh in the spring of 2006. An expert on South Indian languages and cultures, Shulman knew the region well, but from the moment he arrived for this seven-month sojourn he actively soaked up such simple aspects of his surroundings, determined to attend to the rich texture of daily life—choosing to be at the same time scholar and tourist, wanderer and wonderer. Lyrical, sensual, and introspective, Spring, Heat, Rains is Shulman’s diary of that experience. Evocative reflections on daily events—from explorations of crumbling temples to battles with ineradicable bugs to joyous dinners with friends—are organically interwoven with considerations of the ancient poetry and myths that remain such an inextricable part of life in contemporary India. With Shulman as our guide, we meet singers and poets, washermen and betel-nut vendors, modern literati and ancient gods and goddesses. We marvel at the “golden electrocution” that is the taste of a mango fresh from the tree. And we plunge into the searing heat of an Indian summer, so oppressive and inescapable that when the monsoon arrives to banish the heat with sheets of rain, we understand why, year after year, it is celebrated as a miracle. An unabashedly personal account from a scholar whose deep knowledge has never obscured his joy in discovery, Spring, Heat, Rains is a passionate act of sharing, an unforgettable gift for anyone who has ever dreamed of India.

A South Indian Diary

Spring, Heat, Rains

"There are always clients to please, rules to subvert, difficult tasks to perform, work to shirk, and upward mobility to seek.... Most people with work experience have encountered at least some version of exaggerated resumes, exploitative bosses, self-interested shirking, collusion against disliked colleagues, lying to clients, and countless other variants of lies on the job. This book tells the tale of such lies in the workplace and examines their impact on ethics, administrating work, and productivity."—from the Introduction According to David Shulman, deception is a pervasive element of daily working life. Sometimes it is an official part of one's work-as in the case study he offers of private detectives, who lie for a living-but more often it is simply part of the fabric of life on the job. Shulman argues that workplace cultures socialize individuals into using deception as a tool in performing their everyday work. To make his point he focuses not on extreme cases but rather on less obvious forms of deception, such as pretending to show deference, shirking one's work, crafting misleading accounting reports, making false claims to customers and coworkers, and covering up business transgressions. Shulman analyzes the motives, tactics, rationalizations, and ethical ramifications of acting deceptively in the workplace. From Hire to Liar offers readers both detailed accounts of workplace lies and new ways to think about the important effects of everyday workplace deceptions.

Kālidāsa

One of the three surviving plays by Kali dasa (fifth century), universally acknowledged as the supreme poet in classical Sanskrit, How Urvashi Was Won, like the other two, is a masterpiece of lyricism, subtle characterization, and the working through of a bold theme. How Urvashi Was Won is the story of King Puru ravas and his love for an immortal, the dancer Urvashi, who normally lives in the heaven of the gods but who has come down to earth in order to realize her passion for the alltoo- mortal king. The tragic love of this asymmetrical couple was described already in the ancient "Rig Veda" and later often expanded. Kali dasa has reworked the narrative so as to depict a goddess in the process of becoming fully, and dangerously, human—since only human beings (at their best) are, in Kali dasa’s vision, truly capable of the depths and intricacies of loving. This great work of love, loss, and eventual restoration speaks to the human condition generally in highly nuanced verses, accessible to any modern reader.

How Urvashi was Won

The classical tradition in Telugu, the mellifluous language of Andhra Pradesh in southern India, is one of the richest yet least explored of all South Asian literatures. In this volume, Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman have brought together mythological, religious, and secular texts by twenty major poets who wrote between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries, providing an authoritative volume overview of one of the world's most creative poetic traditions. An informative, engaging introduction fleshes out the history of Telugu literature, situating its poets in relation to significant literary themes and historical developments and discussing the relationship between Telugu and the classical literature and poetry of Sanskrit.

This book offers a groundbreaking cultural biography of Srinatha, arguably the most creative figure in the thousand-year history of Telugu literature. Their study, which includes extensive translations of Srinatha's major works, shows the poet's place in a great classical tradition in a moment of profound cultural transformation.

The Poet who Made Gods and Kings

Srinatha

Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies David Shulman

India's folklore and classical literature abound with stories of parents who sacrifice their children. In The Hungry God, David Shulman examines one set of such tales—Hindu texts that bear similarities to the biblical aqedah, the account of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac. In all the stories that Shulman explores, the sacrifice proceeds from a divine command and has no utilitarian explanation or rationale.

Hindu Tales of Filicide and Devotion

The Hungry God

David Shulman and Velcheru Narayana Rao offer a groundbreaking cultural biography of Srinatha, arguably the most creative figure in the thousand-year history of Telugu literature. Their study, which includes extensive translations of Srinatha's major works, shows the poet's place in a great classical tradition in a moment of profound cultural transformation.

The Presentation of Self in Contemporary Social Life covers the popular theories of Erving Goffman, and shows modern applications of dramaturgical analysis in a wide range of social contexts. David Shulman’s innovative new text demonstrates how Goffman’s ideas, first introduced in 1959, continue to inspire research into how we manage the impressions that others form about us. He synthesizes the work of contemporary scholars who use dramaturgical approaches from several disciplines, who recognize that many values, social norms, and laws have changed since Goffman’s time, and that contemporary society offers significant new forms of impression management that we can engage in and experience. After a general introduction to dramaturgical sociology, readers will see many examples of how Goffman’s ideas can provide powerful insights into familiar aspects of contemporary life today, including business and the workplace, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and the digital world.

The Presentation of Self in Contemporary Social Life

Guy G. Stroumsa

This volume offers a comparative, cross-cultural history of dreams. The essays examine a wide range of texts concerning dreams, as culled from a rich variety of religious contexts: China, India, the Americas, classical Greek and Roman antiquity, early Christianity, and medieval Judaism and Islam. Taken together, these pieces constitute an important first step toward a new understanding of the differences and similarities between the ways in which different cultures experience the universal yet utterly unique world of dreams.

Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming

Dream Cultures

For decades, we've been shocked by images of violent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But for all their power, those images leave us at a loss: from our vantage at home, it's hard for us to imagine the struggles of those living in the midst of the fighting. Now, American - born Israeli David Shulman takes us right into the heart of the conflict with Dark Hope, an eye - opening chronicle of his work as a member of the peace group Ta'ayush, which takes its name from the Arabic for ''living together.'' With Dark Hope, Shulman has written a book of deep moral searching, an attempt to discover how his beloved Israel went wrong - - and how, through acts of compassionate disobedience, it might still be brought back.

David Shulman

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