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Lecture and Book Signing with Esther Jacobson-Tepfer

Wednesday, April 29, 2015 at 7:00pm to 8:30pm

Knight Library, Browsing Room
1501 Kincaid Street, Eugene, OR

Lecture and Book Signing with Esther Jacobson-Tepfer: The Hunter, the Stag, and the Mother of Animals: Image, Monument, and Landscape in Ancient North Asia

About the Book:

The ancient landscape of North Asia gave rise to a mythic narrative of birth, death, and transformation that reflected the hardship of life for ancient nomadic hunters and herders. Of the central protagonists, we tend to privilege the hero hunter of the Bronze Age and his re-incarnation as a warrior in the Iron Age. But before him and, in a sense, behind him was a female power, half animal, half human. From her came permission to hunt the animals of the taiga, and by her they were replenished. She was, in other words, the source of the hunter’s success. The stag was a latecomer to this tale, a complex symbol of death and transformation embedded in what ultimately became a struggle for priority between animal mother and hero hunter.

About the Author:

Esther Jacobson-Tepfer is Maude I. Kerns Professor Emeritus of Art History, University of Oregon, and author or co-author of four books.

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