Transforming Bodies And Religions

Author : Mariecke van den Berg,Lieke Schrijvers,Jelle Wiering,Anne-Marie Korte
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2020-10-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781000195811

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Transforming Bodies and Religions by Mariecke van den Berg,Lieke Schrijvers,Jelle Wiering,Anne-Marie Korte Pdf

This book sheds an interdisciplinary light on ‘transforming bodies’: bodies that have been subjected to, contributed to, or have resisted social transformations within religious or secular contexts in contemporary Europe. It explores the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and religion that underpin embodied transformations. Using post-secularist, postcolonial and gender/queer perspectives, it aims to gain a better understanding of the orchestrations and effects of larger social transitions related to religion. This volume is the outcome of the intensive collaboration of the authors, who for years have been meeting regularly in Utrecht, the Netherlands, to discuss themes related to religion and ‘the challenge of difference’, with an added afterword by Prof. Pamela Klassen from the University of Toronto. The book is divided in three subsections that focus on particular types of embodiment: body politics in governmental and NGO organisations; the role of the body in literary and/or autobiographical narratives; and ethnographic case studies of bodies in daily life. Doing so, it provides an innovative exploration of contemporary religion and the body. It will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Theology, and Philosophy.

Author : George Pati,Katherine C. Zubko
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2019-10-28
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781000735444

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Transformational Embodiment in Asian Religions by George Pati,Katherine C. Zubko Pdf

This volume examines several theoretical concerns of embodiment in the context of Asian religious practice. Looking at both subtle and spatial bodies, it explores how both types of embodiment are engaged as sites for transformation, transaction and transgression. Collectively bridging ancient and modern conceptualizations of embodiment in religious practice, the book offers a complex mapping of how body is defined. It revisits more traditional, mystical religious systems, including Hindu Tantra and Yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, Bon, Chinese Daoism and Persian Sufism and distinctively juxtaposes these inquiries alongside analyses of racial, gendered, and colonized bodies. Such a multifaceted subject requires a diverse approach, and so perspectives from phenomenology and neuroscience as well as critical race theory and feminist theology are utilised to create more precise analytical tools for the scholarly engagement of embodied religious epistemologies. This a nuanced and interdisciplinary exploration of the myriad issues around bodies within religion. As such it will be a key resource for any scholar of Religious Studies, Asian Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, and Gender Studies.

Author : Anna Fedele,Ruy Llera Blanes
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2011-09-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780857452085

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Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religious Practices by Anna Fedele,Ruy Llera Blanes Pdf

Social scientists and philosophers confronted with religious phenomena have always been challenged to find a proper way to describe the spiritual experiences of the social group they were studying. The influence of the Cartesian dualism of body and mind (or soul) led to a distinction between non-material, spiritual experiences (i.e., related to the soul) and physical, mechanical experiences (i.e., related to the body). However, recent developments in medical science on the one hand and challenges to universalist conceptions of belief and spirituality on the other have resulted in “body” and “soul” losing the reassuring solid contours they had in the past. Yet, in “Western culture,” the body–soul duality is alive, not least in academic and media discourses. This volume pursues the ongoing debates and discusses the importance of the body and how it is perceived in contemporary religious faith: what happens when “body” and “soul” are un-separated entities? Is it possible, even for anthropologists and ethnographers, to escape from “natural dualism”? The contributors here present research in novel empirical contexts, the benefits and limits of the old dichotomy are discussed, and new theoretical strategies proposed.

Author : Barbara A. Holdrege,Karen Pechilis
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 378 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2016-12-28
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781438463155

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Refiguring the Body by Barbara A. Holdrege,Karen Pechilis Pdf

Examines how embodiment is conceived and experienced in South Asian religions. Refiguring the Body provides a sustained interrogation of categories and models of the body grounded in the distinctive idioms of South Asian religions, particularly Hindu and Buddhist traditions. The contributors engage prevailing theories of the body in the Western academy that derive from philosophy, social theory, and feminist and gender studies. At the same time, they recognize the limitations of applying Western theoretical models as the default epistemological framework for understanding notions of embodiment that derive from non-Western cultures. Divided into three sections, this collection of essays explores material bodies, embodied selves, and perfected forms of embodiment; divine bodies and devotional bodies; and gendered logics defining male and female bodies. The contributors seek to establish theory parity in scholarly investigations and to re-figure body theories by taking seriously the contributions of South Asian discourses to theorizing the body.

Author : Amanda Porterfield
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2001-04-05
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780190284978

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The Transformation of American Religion by Amanda Porterfield Pdf

As recently as a few decades ago, most people would have described America as a predominantly Protestant nation. Today, we are home to a colorful mix of religious faiths and practices, from a resurgent Catholic Church and a rapidly growing Islam to all forms of Buddhism and many other non-Christian religions. How did this startling transformation take place? A great many factors contributed to this transformation, writes Amanda Porterfield in this engaging look at religion in contemporary America. Religious activism, disillusionment with American culture stemming from the Vietnam war, the influx of Buddhist ideas, a heightened consciousness of gender, and the vastly broadened awareness of non-Christian religions arising from the growth of religious studies programs--all have served to undermine Protestant hegemony in the United States. But the single most important factor, says Porterfield, was the very success of Protestant ways of thinking: emphasis on the individual's relationship with God, tension between spiritual life and religious institutions, egalitarian ideas about spiritual life, and belief in the practical benefits of spirituality. Distrust of religious institutions, for instance, helped fuel a religious counterculture--the tendency to define spiritual truth against the dangers or inadequacies of the surrounding culture--and Protestantism's pragmatic view of spirituality played into the tendency to see the main function of religion as therapeutic. For anyone interested in how and why the American religious landscape has been so dramatically altered in the last forty years, The Transformation of Religion in America offers a coherent and persuasive analysis.

Author : Gerhard Marcel Martin,Katja Triplett
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Mind and body
ISBN : 147255129X

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Purification by Gerhard Marcel Martin,Katja Triplett Pdf

Author : Turid Karlsen Seim,Jorunn Økland
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Page : 408 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2009-05-05
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9783110202991

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Metamorphoses by Turid Karlsen Seim,Jorunn Økland Pdf

How were ideas and experiences of transformation expressed in early Christianity and early Judaism? This volume explores the social and philosophical frameworks within which transformative ideas such as resurrection and practices of becoming “a new being” were shaped. It also explores the analogies and parameters by which transformation was being observed, noted and asserted. The focus on transformation helps to connect topics that tend to be studied separately, such as cosmology, resurrection, aging, gender, and conversion. The textual material is wide-ranging and there are new readings of core passages. Ideas and experiences of transformations in early Christianity and early Judaism Connects topics that tend to be studied seperately (cosmology, resurrection, aging, gender, conversion) With wide-ranging textual material

Author : Philip A Mellor,Chris Shilling
Publisher : SAGE Publications Limited
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 1997-05-06
Category : Social Science
ISBN : STANFORD:36105019358279

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Re-forming the Body by Philip A Mellor,Chris Shilling Pdf

Through an analysis of successive re-formations of the body, this innovative and penetrating book constructs a fascinating and wide-ranging account of how the creation and evolution of different patterns of human community are intimately related to the somatic experience of the sacred. The book places the relationship between the embodiment and the sacred at the crux of social theory, and casts a fresh light on the emergence and transformation of modernity. It critically examines the thesis that the rational projects of modern embodiment have `died and gone to cyberspace', and suggests that we are witnessing the rise of a virulent, effervescent form of the sacred which is changing how people `see' and `keep in touch' with t

Author : Donna M. Glowacki,Scott Van Keuren
Publisher : University of Arizona Press
Page : 326 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2012-02-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780816503988

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Religious Transformation in the Late Pre-Hispanic Pueblo World by Donna M. Glowacki,Scott Van Keuren Pdf

The mid-thirteenth century AD marks the beginning of tremendous social change among Ancestral Pueblo peoples of the northern US Southwest that foreshadow the emergence of the modern Pueblo world. Regional depopulations, long-distance migrations, and widespread resettlement into large plaza-oriented villages forever altered community life. Archaeologists have tended to view these historical events as adaptive responses to climatic, environmental, and economic conditions. Recently, however, more attention is being given to the central role of religion during these transformative periods, and to how archaeological remains embody the complex social practices through which Ancestral Pueblo understandings of sacred concepts were expressed and transformed. The contributors to this volume employ a wide range of archaeological evidence to examine the origin and development of religious ideologies and the ways they shaped Pueblo societies across the Southwest in the centuries prior to European contact. With its fresh theoretical approach, it contributes to a better understanding of both the Pueblo past and the anthropological study of religion in ancient contexts This volume will be of interest to both regional specialists and to scholars who work with the broader dimensions of religion and ritual in the human experience.

Author : David Dean Shulman,Guy G. Stroumsa
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Electronic books
ISBN : 9780195148169

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Self and Self-transformation in the History of Religions by David Dean Shulman,Guy G. Stroumsa Pdf

This book brings together scholars of a variety of the world's major civilizations to focus on the universal theme of inner transformation. The idea of the "self" is a cultural formation like any other, and models and conceptions of the inner world of the person vary widely from one civilization to another. Nonetheless, all the world's great religions insist on the need to transform this inner world. Such transformations, often ritually enacted, reveal the primary intuitions, drives, and conflicts active within the culture. The individual essays study dramatic examples of these processes in a wide range of cultures, including China, India, Tibet, Greece and Rome, Late Antiquity, Islam, Judaism, and medieval and early-modern Christian Europe.

Author : Alan Wolfe
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2005-04
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780226905181

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The Transformation of American Religion by Alan Wolfe Pdf

In this astounding account, a leading sociologist demonstrates that religion in America has become so tamed and softened that it hardly serves any of its original functions.

Author : Srilata Raman
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2022-04-26
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781317744733

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The Transformation of Tamil Religion by Srilata Raman Pdf

This book analyses the religious ideology of a Tamil reformer and saint, Ramalinga Swamigal of the 19th century and his posthumous reception in the Tamil country and sheds light on the transformation of Tamil religion that both his works and the understanding of him brought about. The book traces the hagiographical and biographical process by which Ramalinga Swamigal is shifted from being considered an exemplary poet-saint of the Tamil Śaivite bhakti tradition to a Dravidian nationalist social reformer. Taking as a starting point Ramalinga’s own writing, the book presents him as inhabiting a border zone between early modernity and modernity, between Hinduism and Christianity, between colonialism and regional nationalism, highlighting the influence of his teachings on politics, particularly within Dravidian cultural and political nationalism. Simultaneously, the book considers the implication of such an hagiographical process for the transformation of Tamil religion in the period between the 19th –mid-20th centuries. The author demonstrates that Ramalinga Swamigal’s ideology of compassion, cīvakāruṇyam, had not only a long genealogy in pre-modern Tamil Śaivism but also that it functioned as a potentially emancipatory ethics of salvation and caste critique not just for him but also for other Tamil and Dalit intellectuals of the 19th century. This book is a path-breaking study that also traces the common grounds between the religious visions of two of the most prominent subaltern figures of Tamil modernity – Iyothee Thass and Ramalingar. It argues that these transformations are one meaningful way for a religious tradition to cope with and come to terms with the implications of historicization and the demands of colonial modernity. It is, therefore, a valuable contribution to the field of religion, South Asian history and literature and Subaltern studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315794518 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Author : David Shulman,Guy G. Stroumsa
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2002-04-18
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780195349337

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Self and Self-Transformations in the History of Religions by David Shulman,Guy G. Stroumsa Pdf

This book brings together scholars of a variety of the world's major civilizations to focus on the universal theme of inner transformation. The idea of the "self" is a cultural formation like any other, and models and conceptions of the inner world of the person vary widely from one civilization to another. Nonetheless, all the world's great religions insist on the need to transform this inner world, however it is understood, in highly expressive and specific ways. Such transformations, often ritually enacted, reveal the primary intuitions, drives, and conflicts active within the culture. The individual essays--by such distinguished scholars as Wai-yee Li, Janet Gyatso, Wendy Doniger, Christiano Grottanelli, Charles Malamoud, Margalit Finkelberg, and Moshe Idel--study dramatic examples of these processes in a wide range of cultures, including China, India, Tibet, Greece and Rome, Late Antiquity, Islam, Judaism, and medieval and early-modern Christian Europe.

Author : Anya Bernstein
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 277 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2013-11-27
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780226072692

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Religious Bodies Politic by Anya Bernstein Pdf

Religious Bodies Politic examines the complex relationship between transnational religion and politics through the lens of one cosmopolitan community in Siberia: Buryats, who live in a semiautonomous republic within Russia with a large Buddhist population. Looking at religious transformation among Buryats across changing political economies, Anya Bernstein argues that under conditions of rapid social change—such as those that accompanied the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and the fall of the Soviet Union—Buryats have used Buddhist “body politics” to articulate their relationship not only with the Russian state, but also with the larger Buddhist world. During these periods, Bernstein shows, certain people and their bodies became key sites through which Buryats conformed to and challenged Russian political rule. She presents particular cases of these emblematic bodies—dead bodies of famous monks, temporary bodies of reincarnated lamas, ascetic and celibate bodies of Buddhist monastics, and dismembered bodies of lay disciples given as imaginary gifts to spirits—to investigate the specific ways in which religion and politics have intersected. Contributing to the growing literature on postsocialism and studies of sovereignty that focus on the body, Religious Bodies Politic is a fascinating illustration of how this community employed Buddhism to adapt to key moments of political change.

Author : Geoffrey Samuel,Jay Johnston
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 476 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2013-04-12
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781136766473

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Religion and the Subtle Body in Asia and the West by Geoffrey Samuel,Jay Johnston Pdf

Subtle-body practices are found particularly in Indian, Indo-Tibetan and East Asian societies, but have become increasingly familiar in Western societies, especially through the various healing and yogic techniques and exercises associated with them. This book explores subtle-body practices from a variety of perspectives, and includes both studies of these practices in Asian and Western contexts. The book discusses how subtle-body practices assume a quasi-material level of human existence that is intermediate between conventional concepts of body and mind. Often, this level is conceived of in terms of an invisible structure of channels, associated with the human body, through which flows of quasi-material substance take place. Contributors look at how subtle-body concepts form the basic explanatory structure for a wide range of practices. These include forms of healing, modes of exercise and martial arts as well as religious practices aimed at the refinement and transformation of the human mindbody complex. By highlighting how subtle-body practices of many kinds have been introduced into Western societies in recent years, the book explores the possibilities for new models of understanding which these concepts open up. It is a useful contribution to studies on Asian Religion and Philosophy.