|
Barbara Frale, in her history of the Knights Templar, argues that the Crusades were largely triggered by a surplus of young nobles without access to decent income, who turned to banditry to support the lifestyle, and that the Pope promoted the Crusades as a way to channel their desires for wealth. Is this a fairly reasonable argument for the first few Crusades, and how did areas without large-scale involvement in the Crusades deal with that social pressure?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2013 03:50
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 1, 2024 19:28 |
|
cheerfullydrab posted:What exactly has caused the modern-day phenomenon of people thinking katanas were the greatest and best sword ever ever ever? This is sort of a combat question and sort of a history question, because I'm sure the roots go back at least two if not three decades. How does an idea like this get started? Japan exported a lot of cheesy chanbara movies to the US, so people got more exposure to the katana and other Japanese stuff than they did to other cultures (Hong Kong also exported a lot of cheesy movies, so you see similar stuff about Chinese martial arts too). So stuff extolling the katana was something people were more likely to find when they started reading more about Japan. This combined with the overall disdain for the medieval period in the broad culture to further puff up this exoticized version of Japanese culture as a superior version of our tawdry past. It is worth noting that a lot of specific stuff about the katana is fairly recent in pop culture- although people took back imitation katana from the Pacific Theater, the mythology in the US doesn't really start to spring up until the 1980s as far as I'm aware. Of course, katana also have the advantage of a well-described manufacturing process that has bits of endogenous mythology and legends attached, so even if, say, Iran or Pakistan had exported its own equivalent films, we probably wouldn't see the same level of awe attached to talwars and shamshirs today either. But in general, exotic things tend to be fetishized by the consumer. This happens for more than just katana, and extends all the way to people fetishizing other people because of their presumed exotic status. I would suggest reading Edward Said's Orientalism for further information, but it is a long read and more concerned with the effects of such fetishization.
|
|
|
#
¿
Apr 17, 2013 14:05
|
|