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Sense of Emptiness: An Interdisciplinary Approach
Editor: Junichi Toyota, Pernilla Hallonsten and Marina Shchepetunina
Date Of Publication: Mar 2012
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-3583-1
Isbn: 1-4438-3583-8
Human perception is often believed to function holistically, especially in the tradition of Gestalt psychology, involving a focused item and its surrounding. This holistic approach can allow us to explain something that is not directly experienced in our perception, meaning that the absence as well as the presence of something can have a significant impact on how we perceive the world. The way we perceive the presence is more or less the same cross-culturally, but the prominence of the absence, or what is termed emptiness in this volume, varies considerably from one culture to another. The aim of this volume is to identify what emptiness is like and how different cultures incorporate this concept from various perspectives. It turns out that emptiness plays a key role in identifying socio-cultural diversity in a broader sense, including arts and languages.

This volume consists of contributions from different fields covering a wide range of topics such as history, literary studies, mythology, film studies, architecture, linguistics, social-anthropology, ethnology and cognitive science. Due to the range covered in this volume, studies presented here are highly interdisciplinary, but all chapters deal with the sense of emptiness, which suggest that the underlying idea of the significance of emptiness is pervasive. Yet, this topic has not previously been systematically compared across different disciplines. It is hoped that this volume will offer a first overview of the pervasiveness and integration of disciplines concerning the sense of emptiness.

Junichi Toyota is an Associate Professor at Lund University (Sweden) and a Visiting Professor at the University of Belgrade (Serbia). His research interests cover a wide range of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology and cognitive science. He has published several monographs and numerous articles on historical linguistics and cognitive linguistics.

Pernilla Hallonsten is a PhD Student in Linguistics at Stockholm University (Sweden). Her research interests primarily cover typology, historical linguistics, and cognitive linguistics, and she is currently focusing on typological studies of lexical categories. She has published articles on historical linguistics.

Marina Shchepetunina is a Lecturer at Osaka University (Japan). She works within a field of cultural anthropology, and her research interests are mainly concerned with mythology and gender studies. She has worked on ancient Japanese mythology, focusing on two manuscripts, Kojiki and Nihon shoki. She has written several journal articles.

Price Uk Gbp: 39.99
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Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)

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