Search results for "Vedic"
showing 10 items of 34 documents
In the footsteps of the cows The ritual of gavāmayana between ancient and contemporary India
2022
Codified in classical Vedic times (8th-4th century BCE), the gavāmayana (‘the cow path’) was a year-long ritual session (sāmvatsarikasattra), which accompanied the succession of months of the Vedic religious calendar and ended with the celebration of mahāvrata (‘the great vow’) during the winter solstice. Marking the conclusion of the arduous ritual journey, it celebrated rebirth and consecrated the beginning of the new year. The book investigates gavāmayana based on a philological analysis of the texts and on a historical-religious and anthropological perspective, focusing on ancient India and some contemporary practices. The mahāvrata, in particular, seems to preserve the memory of very a…
Ragazze folli di miele, Il miele e la celebrazione della parola nel rito del mahāvrata
2021
In these pages, we will explore the rite of mahāvrata, a Vedic rite connected to the celebration of the new year, from a study perspective aimed at the performative dimension. Specifically, I will focus on the final scene of the rite, because it is only at this moment that the actors and the ritual dynamics compose a particular scenario, evocative of fertility, in which some maidens, the ritual fire, and honey are the protagonists. The maidens are called upon to dance around the mārjālīya hearth and to intone a chant in which they repeat the word madhu ("honey") in an increasingly frenzied manner. The words spoken, in some cases meaningless formulas, reveal a unitary sense and hint at the f…
Le molteplici risonanze di Vāc
2021
introduction to the publication of the works of the conference held on 25 and 26 June in Palermo
Spatial Cognition and Frames of Reference in Indo-European
2022
The development of Frames of Reference (FoRs) as coordinate systems in space language has gained increasing attention in current linguistic, neurolinguistic, and psycholinguistic research (Diessel 2013: 687; Kemmerer 2010). Previous studies on typology of spatial expressions have traditionally been based on the universal status of the egocentric or relative FoR found in the Indo- European languages, in which the relation between Figure and Ground is specified by the deictic observer’s viewpoint (Mühlhäusler 2001). However, there is growing crosslinguistic evidence that many non-Indo-European languages do not make use of such deictic or ternary FoR, but interpret spatial relations by referri…
All’origine della deissi indoeuropea. Un approccio linguistico cognitivo
2020
This paper focuses on the existence of temporal deixis in Indo-European, questioning the traditional view according to which metaphors of time in ancient Indo-European languages originated from projecting the human body coordinates onto space. In particular, it aims at interpreting data from historical-comparative linguistics by using the cognitive linguistic framework, without disregarding the most recent results from typological studies, spatial language acquisition, and neurolinguistic research on spatiotemporal deixis. Contrary to what previously assumed, the comparative analysis between the Rigveda and the Homeric poems shows that earlier spatial metaphors of time are still deictically…
Il corpo della parola. Inni, poemi e performance nell'India antica e contemporanea
2021
Nella storia culturale dell’India la riflessione sulla Parola e sui suoi molteplici significati attraversa ambiti e discipline diversi, intersecantisi a loro volta tra loro, nelle riflessioni che riguardano il mito, il rituale, la poesia, la scienza, la storia, il teatro, in una serie incessante di implicazioni e di allusioni che potremmo descrivere come un albero, le cui vertiginose ramificazioni abbracciano un arco di tempo che si estende dal corpus vedico all’India contemporanea. I diversi aspetti e i vari usi della parola investono sia il contesto pubblico sia quello privato, la sfera politica così come quella religiosa, dove performance, dottrine, riti e speculazioni fissano i confini …
Queer types in ancient India. The categorisation and representation of non-heterosexual individuals in some passages of Vedic literature
2022
Vedic culture has used a variety of terms to denote male individuals who do not fit within the canons of the heterosexual norm. Often, in the past, Vedic philology has provided homologating translations of these terms from outdated cultural constructs and imagery, which have often reduced differences to univocal meanings. In order to understand non-heteronormative sexualities and sexual practices, I have adopted in this study an approach based on the idea of the construction of the concept of gender and which aims to describe behaviour beyond definitions. The analysis of the semantic and conceptual domains identified by the different terms within the Vedic texts, as well as of the history o…
L'irruzione del corpo femminile sulla scena sacrificale. Tra sessualità esibita e sessualità interiorizzata
2021
A study of women's roles and performances in Vedic rites
Aksamala. Studi di indologia
2016
Indological Studies about Vedic and Indian Myths, Anthropology, History of Religions, Philosophy
Divinità e colori nell'universo vedico
2008
Color symbolism in Vedic Deities