The Politics of Animal Images in Iron-Age Nomadic Alliances: Case Studies from China to Crimea

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• Petya Andreeva (The New School, New York)
• Friday 21 October 2022, 14:00-15:00
• Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEpfu-tqTMrGNBp8ydSKAVv4kBIbBkck4qT?_x_zm_rtaid=QUIM-iCjRQ6wgQUnF-SFeA.1665059089317.a15672f8ae984ba0c73dbb8d2767a2e1&_x_zm_rhtaid=692 .

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Katie Campbell.

Petya Andreeva is an assistant professor of Asian art and design history at the Parsons School of Art and Design, The New School, New York. This lecture aims to contribute to the flourishing post-humanist discourse in Silk Road and Ancient Studies. The Iron-Age nomadic societies of the Eurasian steppe route produced and circulated metalworks and textiles adorned with images of counterintuitive composites. In nomadic visual rhetoric, animal bodies existed in a perpetual state of flux and at the edge of cognitive chaos, defying taxonomical classifications and biological conventions. The talk will explore how and why nomadic artisans constructed an alternative biota that was filled with fantastic fauna rooted in a distorted version of ecological reality. I will demonstrate that such zoomorphic fabrications were the byproduct of a certain psychology of mobility and the elite’s political aspirations in diverse and often reluctant political alliances. This discussion will view animal-inspired images as viable contributors to the formation of collective memory and situational identity in early pastoral societies. Based on the speaker’s fieldwork, the study will present case studies from tombs and wealth deposits across North China, Mongolia, North Korea, Kazakhstan, South Russia, Crimea, Hungary.

This talk is part of the King's Silk Roads series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• King's Silk Roads
• Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEpfu-tqTMrGNBp8ydSKAVv4kBIbBkck4qT?_x_zm_rtaid=QUIM-iCjRQ6wgQUnF-SFeA.1665059089317.a15672f8ae984ba0c73dbb8d2767a2e1&_x_zm_rhtaid=692

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