Download or read book Gender Rituals written by Nancy Lutkehaus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume draws together ethnographies of female initiation rites in Melanesia which require anthropologists to rethink their analysis of initiations and their perceptions of gender. The contributors argue that female initiation rites express more than cultural notions of femininity, narrow definitions of reproduction, or coming of age rituals - instead they play an important role in other life cycle rituals and in the political and economic organization of society.
Download or read book Gender Rituals written by Nancy Lutkehaus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume draws together ethnographies of female initiation rites in Melanesia which require anthropologists to rethink their analysis of initiations and their perceptions of gender. The contributors argue that female initiation rites express more than cultural notions of femininity, narrow definitions of reproduction, or coming of age rituals - instead they play an important role in other life cycle rituals and in the political and economic organization of society.
Download or read book Iron Gender and Power written by Eugenia W. Herbert and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1994-01-22 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[Herbert] has constructed a model of power relationships structured upon gender and age, and derived from male transformative processes, and in so doing has written a notable, and most enjoyable, book." -- African History "Herbert examines with great care and thoroughness the relationships between gender and power and the rationales that give them social form.... [Her] analytical ability is outstanding." -- Patrick McNaughton "This book is a well-written and essential study of the place of belief in African material culture." -- International Journal of African Historical Studies Herbert relates the beliefs and practices associated with iron working in African cultures to other transformative activities -- chiefly investiture, hunting, and pottery making -- to propose a gender/age-based theory of power.
Download or read book Landscapes Gender and Ritual Space written by Susan Guettel Cole and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-03-31 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The division of land and consolidation of territory that created the Greek polis also divided sacred from productive space, sharpened distinctions between purity and pollution, and created a ritual system premised on gender difference. Regional sanctuaries ameliorated competition between city-states, publicized the results of competitive rituals for males, and encouraged judicial alternatives to violence. Female ritual efforts, focused on reproduction and the health of the family, are less visible, but, as this provocative study shows, no less significant. Taking a fresh look at the epigraphical evidence for Greek ritual practice in the context of recent studies of landscape and political organization, Susan Guettel Cole illuminates the profoundly gendered nature of Greek cult practice and explains the connections between female rituals and the integrity of the community. In a rich integration of ancient sources and current theory, Cole brings together the complex evidence for Greek ritual practice. She discusses relevant medical and philosophical theories about the female body; considers Greek ideas about purity, pollution, and ritual purification; and examines the cult of Artemis in detail. Her nuanced study demonstrates the social contribution of women's rituals to the sustenance of the polis and the identity of its people.
Download or read book Performing Islam written by Azam Torab and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Performing Islam" focuses on a wide spectrum of ritual activities in Iran today as a key for elucidating social, cultural and political processes, but in particular the values and beliefs underpinning gender constructions in a rapidly changing complex society.
Download or read book Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women written by Isaac Jack Lévy and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Ellii Kongas-Maranda Prize from the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society, 2003. Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women preserves the precious remnants of a rich culture on the verge of extinction while affirming women's pivotal role in the health of their communities. Centered around extensive interviews with elders of the Sephardic communities of the former Ottoman Empire, this volume illuminates a fascinating complex of preventive and curative rituals conducted by women at home--rituals that ensured the physical and spiritual well-being of the community and functioned as a vital counterpart to the public rites conducted by men in the synagogues. Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt take us into the homes and families of Sephardim in Turkey, Israel, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States to unravel the ancient practices of domestic healing: the network of blessings and curses tailored to every occasion of daily life; the beliefs and customs surrounding mal ojo (evil eye), espanto (fright), and echizo (witchcraft); and cures involving everything from herbs, oil, and sugar to the powerful mumia (mummy) made from dried bones of corpses. For the Sephardim, curing an illness required discovering its spiritual cause, which might be unintentional thought or speech, accident, or magical incantation. The healing rituals of domesticated medicine provided a way of making sense of illness and a way of shaping behavior to fit the narrow constraints of a tightly structured community. Tapping a rich and irreplaceable vein of oral testimony, Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women offers fascinating insight into a culture where profound spirituality permeated every aspect of daily life.
Download or read book Gender Culture and Consumer Behavior written by Cele C. Otnes and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2012-04-27 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book covers the gamut of topics related to gender and consumer culture. Changing gender roles have forced scholars and practitioners to re-examine some of the fundamental assumptions and theories in this area. Gender is a core component of identity and thus holds significant implications for how consumers behave in the marketplace. This book offers innovative research in gender and consumer behavior with topics relevant to psychology, marketing, advertising, sociology, women’s studies and cultural studies. It offers 16 chapters of cutting-edge research on gender, international culture and consumption. Unique to this volume is its emphasis on consumption and masculinity and inclusion of topics on a rapidly changing world of issues related to culture and gender in advertising, communications, psychology and consumer behavior.
Download or read book The Visual Arts of Africa written by Judith Perani and published by Pearson. This book was released on 1998 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Special features of this book: follows a geographical organization across the continent; each chapter is reader friendly with clear, accessible sub-headings; represents important religious and utilitarian art traditions from the Sahara desert, West Africa, Central Africa, Northeast Africa, Eastern Africa, and Southern Africa; gives special attention to the themes of gender, power, and life cycle rituals, which frequently intersect with one another to form an understanding of the arts of Africa; includes figurative sculpture, masquerades, architecture, textiles, dress, ceramics, wall painting, and leatherwork traditions; includes selected examples of the earliest known documented art works as well as contemporary art of each geographical region; includes an up-to-date bibliography, incorporating recent published field research for each chapter; and features 369 black and white illustrations, 16 colored plates, maps, and a time line.
Download or read book Promising Rituals written by Beatrix Hauser and published by Routledge India. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With reference to Brahmapur, Orissa, India.
Download or read book The Holy Book of Women s Mysteries written by Zsuzsanna Budapest and published by Weiser Books. This book was released on 2007-10-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A women's spirituality classic now back in print! The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries is essential for Pagans, feminists, and women seeking to learn more about the spiritual path as it relates to the feminine and the Goddess aspects of witchcraft and Wicca. This book is not about reinstating a matriarchy or tearing down patriarchy; it is about women's spirituality and its relationship with politics and lifestyle. Z. Budapest is one of the founding mothers of modern women's witchcraft, beginning with the establishment of Susan B. Anthony Coven in Los Angeles in 1971. She catapulted herself into the media spotlight when she was tried as a witch and found guilty in 1975 after being arrested on Venice Beach for reading tarot cards. She fought the charges and, after a nine year battle, won the right for every tarot reader to do so legally. The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries is a seminal text that contains invaluable information on Dianic witchcraft and spells, including everyday magick, sabbat rituals, and divination methods; a section on how vegetarian theories and politics relate to witchcraft and the feminine aspect; and a good deal of information on goddesses and how the patriarchal religions distorted old myths to serve their own needs. There are several unique and beautiful Rites of Passage for women and men that you don't often find, and Budapest's personal life stories are an equally valuable read, from her escape across the mountains from Communist Hungary to her fight for women's religious freedom upon moving to America. * This reprint features a new introduction by Z. Budapest, in addition to essays by luminaries such as Starhawk and Merlin Stone.
Download or read book Brides Mourners Bacchae written by Vassiliki Panoussi and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does the treatment of women's rituals in Latin poetry and prose reveal Roman ideas of female agency? Powerful female characters pervade both Greek and Latin literature, even if their presence is largely dictated by the narratives of men. Feminist approaches to the study of women in Greek literature have helped illustrate the importance of their religious and ritual roles in public life—Latin literature, however, has not been subject to similar scrutiny. In Brides, Mourners, Bacchae, Vassiliki Panoussi takes up the challenge, exploring women's place in weddings, funerals, Bacchic rites, and women-only rituals. Panoussi probes the multifaceted ways women were able to exercise influence, even power, in ancient Rome from the days of the late Republic to Flavian times. Systematically investigating both poetry and prose, Panoussi covers a wide variety of genres, from lyric poetry (Catullus), epic (Ovid, Lucan, Valerius, Statius), elegy (Propertius, Ovid), and tragedy (Seneca) to historiography (Livy) and the novel (Petronius). The first large-scale analysis of this body of evidence from a feminist perspective, the book makes a compelling case that female ritual was an important lens through which Roman authors explored the problems of women's agency, subjectivity, civic identity, and self-expression. By focusing on the fruitful intersection of gender and religion, the book elucidates not only the importance of female religious experience in Rome but also the complexity of ideological processes affecting Roman ideas about gender, sexuality, family, and society. Brides, Mourners, Bacchae will be of value to scholars of classics and ancient religions, as well as anyone interested in the study of gender in antiquity or the connection between religion and ideology.
Download or read book Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women s Writing written by Brinda Mehta and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-26 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume carefully assesses fixed notions of Arab womanhood by exploring the complexities of Arab women’s lives as portrayed in literature. Encompassing women writers and critics from Arab, French, and English traditions, it forges a transnational Arab feminist consciousness. Brinda Mehta examines the significance of memory rituals in women’s writings, such as the importance of water and purification rites in Islam and how these play out in the women’s space of the hammam (Turkish bath). Mehta shows how sensory experiences connect Arab women to their past. Specific chapters raise awareness of the experiences of Palestinian women in exile and under occupation, Bedouin and desert rituals, and women’s views on conflict in Iraq and Lebanon, and the compatibility between Islam and feminism. At once provocative and enlightening, this work is a groundbreaking addition to the timely field of modern Arab women’s writing and criticism and Arab literary studies.
Download or read book Women s Agency and Rituals in Mixed and Female Masonic Orders written by Alexandra Heidle and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume concentrates on two aspects of the participation of women in Freemasonry: Womena (TM)s agency (i.e. the power women gained and exercised in this context) and rituals (i.e. the role of man and women in changing and shaping the rituals women work with).
Download or read book Daily Rituals Women at Work written by Mason Currey and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More of Mason Currey's irresistible Daily Rituals, this time exploring the daily obstacles and rituals of women who are artists--painters, composers, sculptors, scientists, filmmakers, and performers. We see how these brilliant minds get to work, the choices they have to make: rebuffing convention, stealing (or secreting away) time from the pull of husbands, wives, children, obligations, in order to create their creations. From those who are the masters of their craft (Eudora Welty, Lynn Fontanne, Penelope Fitzgerald, Marie Curie) to those who were recognized in a burst of acclaim (Lorraine Hansberry, Zadie Smith) . . . from Clara Schumann and Shirley Jackson, carving out small amounts of time from family life, to Isadora Duncan and Agnes Martin, rejecting the demands of domesticity, Currey shows us the large and small (and abiding) choices these women made--and continue to make--for their art: Isak Dinesen, "I promised the Devil my soul, and in return he promised me that everything I was going to experience would be turned into tales," Dinesen subsisting on oysters and Champagne but also amphetamines, which gave her the overdrive she required . . . And the rituals (daily and otherwise) that guide these artists: Isabel Allende starting a new book only on January 8th . . . Hilary Mantel taking a shower to combat writers' block ("I am the cleanest person I know") . . . Tallulah Bankhead coping with her three phobias (hating to go to bed, hating to get up, and hating to be alone), which, could she "mute them," would make her life "as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water" . . . Lillian Hellman chain-smoking three packs of cigarettes and drinking twenty cups of coffee a day--and, after milking the cow and cleaning the barn, writing out of "elation, depression, hope" ("That is the exact order. Hope sets in toward nightfall. That's when you tell yourself that you're going to be better the next time, so help you God.") . . . Diane Arbus, doing what "gnaws at" her . . . Colette, locked in her writing room by her first husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars (nom de plume: Willy) and not being "let out" until completing her daily quota (she wrote five pages a day and threw away the fifth). Colette later said, "A prison is one of the best workshops" . . . Jessye Norman disdaining routines or rituals of any kind, seeing them as "a crutch" . . . and Octavia Butler writing every day no matter what ("screw inspiration"). Germaine de Staël . . . Elizabeth Barrett Browning . . . George Eliot . . . Edith Wharton . . . Virginia Woolf . . . Edna Ferber . . . Doris Lessing . . . Pina Bausch . . . Frida Kahlo . . . Marguerite Duras . . . Helen Frankenthaler . . . Patti Smith, and 131 more--on their daily routines, superstitions, fears, eating (and drinking) habits, and other finely (and not so finely) calibrated rituals that help summon up willpower and self-discipline, keeping themselves afloat with optimism and fight, as they create (and avoid creating) their creations.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies written by Chris Bobel and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 1041 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access handbook, the first of its kind, provides a comprehensive and carefully curated multidisciplinary and genre-spanning view of the state of the field of Critical Menstruation Studies, opening up new directions in research and advocacy. It is animated by the central question: ‘“what new lines of inquiry are possible when we center our attention on menstrual health and politics across the life course?” The chapters—diverse in content, form and perspective—establish Critical Menstruation Studies as a potent lens that reveals, complicates and unpacks inequalities across biological, social, cultural and historical dimensions. This handbook is an unmatched resource for researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and activists new to and already familiar with the field as it rapidly develops and expands.
Download or read book Gender Sainthood Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi ism written by Karen G. Ruffle and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study of devotional hagiographical texts and contemporary ritual performances of the Shi'a of Hyderabad, India, Karen Ruffle demonstrates how traditions of sainthood and localized cultural values shape gender roles. Ruffle focuses on the annual mo
Download or read book An Intimate Rebuke written by Laura S. Grillo and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout West African societies, at times of social crises, postmenopausal women—the Mothers—make a ritual appeal to their innate moral authority. The seat of this power is the female genitalia. Wielding branches or pestles, they strip naked and slap their genitals and bare breasts to curse and expel the forces of evil. In An Intimate Rebuke Laura S. Grillo draws on fieldwork in Côte d’Ivoire that spans three decades to illustrate how these rituals of Female Genital Power (FGP) constitute religious and political responses to abuses of power. When deployed in secret, FGP operates as spiritual warfare against witchcraft; in public, it serves as a political activism. During Côte d’Ivoire’s civil wars FGP challenged the immoral forces of both rebels and the state. Grillo shows how the ritual potency of the Mothers’ nudity and the conjuration of their sex embodies a moral power that has been foundational to West African civilization. Highlighting the remarkable continuity of the practice across centuries while foregrounding the timeliness of FGP in contemporary political resistance, Grillo shifts perspectives on West African history, ethnography, comparative religious studies, and postcolonial studies.
