Download or read book Imagining the Fetus written by Vanessa R Sasson and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In contemporary Western culture, the word "fetus" introduces either a political subject or a literal, medicalized entity. Neither of these frameworks does justice to the vast array of religious literature and oral traditions from cultures around the world in which the fetus emerges as a powerful symbol or metaphor. This volume presents essays that explore the depiction of the fetus in the world's major religious traditions, finding some striking commonalities as well as intriguing differences. Among the themes that emerge is the tendency to conceive of the fetus as somehow independent of the mother's body — as in the case of the Buddha, who is described as inhabiting a palace while gestating in the womb. On the other hand, the fetus can also symbolically represent profound human needs and emotions, such as the universal experience of vulnerability. The authors note how the advent of the fetal sonogram has transformed how people everywhere imagine the unborn today, giving rise to a narrow range of decidedly literal questions about personhood, gender, and disability.
Download or read book The Anthropology of the Fetus written by Sallie Han and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-10-01 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a biological, cultural, and social entity, the human fetus is a multifaceted subject which calls for equally diverse perspectives to fully understand. Anthropology of the Fetus seeks to achieve this by bringing together specialists in biological anthropology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology. Contributors draw on research in prehistoric, historic, and contemporary sites in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and North America to explore the biological and cultural phenomenon of the fetus, raising methodological and theoretical concerns with the ultimate goal of developing a holistic anthropology of the fetus.
Download or read book About Abortion written by Carol Sanger and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most private decisions a woman can make, abortion is also one of the most contentious topics in American civic life. Protested at rallies and politicized in party platforms, terminating pregnancy is often characterized as a selfish decision by women who put their own interests above those of the fetus. This background of stigma and hostility has stifled women’s willingness to talk about abortion, which in turn distorts public and political discussion. To pry open the silence surrounding this public issue, Sanger distinguishes between abortion privacy, a form of nondisclosure based on a woman’s desire to control personal information, and abortion secrecy, a woman’s defense against the many harms of disclosure. Laws regulating abortion patients and providers treat abortion not as an acceptable medical decision—let alone a right—but as something disreputable, immoral, and chosen by mistake. Exploiting the emotional power of fetal imagery, laws require women to undergo ultrasound, a practice welcomed in wanted pregnancies but commandeered for use against women with unwanted pregnancies. Sanger takes these prejudicial views of women’s abortion decisions into the twenty-first century by uncovering new connections between abortion law and American culture and politics. New medical technologies, women’s increasing willingness to talk online and off, and the prospect of tighter judicial reins on state legislatures are shaking up the practice of abortion. As talk becomes more transparent and acceptable, women’s decisions about whether or not to become mothers will be treated more like those of other adults making significant personal choices.
Download or read book Abortion in the Early Middle Ages C 500 900 written by Zubin Mistry and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First full-length study of attitudes to abortion in the early medieval west. When a Spanish monk struggled to find the right words to convey his unjust expulsion from a monastery in a desperate petition to a sixth-century king, he likened himself to an aborted fetus. Centuries later, a ninth-century queenfound herself accused of abortion in an altogether more fleshly sense. Abortion haunts the written record across the early middle ages. Yet, the centuries after the fall of Rome remain very much the "dark ages" in the broader history of abortion. This book, the first to treat the subject in this period, tells the story of how individuals and communities, ecclesiastical and secular authorities, construed abortion as a social and moral problem across anumber of post-Roman societies, including Visigothic Spain, Merovingian Gaul, early Ireland, Anglo-Saxon England and the Carolingian empire. It argues early medieval authors and readers actively deliberated on abortion and a cluster of related questions, and that church tradition on abortion was an evolving practice. It sheds light on the neglected variety of responses to abortion generated by different social and intellectual practices, including church discipline, dispute settlement and strategies of political legitimation, and brings the history of abortion into conversation with key questions about gender, sexuality, Christianization, penance and law. Ranging across abortion miracles in hagiography, polemical letters in which churchmen likened rivals to fetuses flung from the womb of the church and uncomfortable imaginings of resurrected fetuses in theological speculation, this volume also illuminates the complex cultural significance of abortion in early medieval societies. Zubin Mistry is Lecturer in Early Medieval European History, University of Edinburgh.
Download or read book Primary Sources and Asian Pasts written by Peter C. Bisschop and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-11-09 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This conference volume unites a wide range of scholars working in the fields of history, archaeology, religion, art, and philology in an effort to explore new perspectives and methods in the study of primary sources from premodern South and Southeast Asia. The contributions engage with primary sources (including texts, images, material artefacts, monuments, as well as archaeological sites and landscapes) and draw needed attention to highly adaptable, innovative, and dynamic modes of cultural production within traditional idioms. The volume works to develop categories of historical analysis that cross disciplinary boundaries and represent a wide variety of methodological concerns. By revisiting premodern sources, Asia Beyond Boundaries also addresses critical issues of temporality and periodization that attend established categories in Asian Studies, such as the “Classical Age” or the “Gupta Period”. This volume represents the culmination of the European Research Council (ERC) Synergy project Asia Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State, a research consortium of the British Museum, the British Library and the School of Oriental and African Studies, in partnership with Leiden University.
Download or read book The Social Worlds of the Unborn written by D. Lupton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-06-19 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human embryos and foetuses are highly public and contested figures. Their visual images appear across a wide range of forums. They have become commercial commodities as part of the IVF industry and are the focus of intense debates regarding concepts of personhood. This book discusses these issues, drawing on social and cultural theory and research.
Download or read book Ties That Bind written by Reiko Ohnuma and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012-07-12 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reiko Ohnuma offers a wide-ranging exploration of maternal imagery and discourse in pre-modern South Asian Buddhism, drawing on textual sources preserved in Pali and Sanskrit. She demonstrates that Buddhism in India had a complex and ambivalent relationship with mothers and motherhood-symbolically, affectively, and institutionally. Symbolically, motherhood was a double-edged sword, sometimes extolled as the most appropriate symbol for buddhahood itself, and sometimes denigrated as the most paradigmatic manifestation possible of attachment and suffering. On an affective level, too, motherhood was viewed with the same ambivalence: in Buddhist literature, warm feelings of love and gratitude for the mother's nurturance and care frequently mingle with submerged feelings of hostility and resentment for the unbreakable obligations thus created, and positive images of self-sacrificing mothers are counterbalanced by horrific depictions of mothers who kill and devour. Institutionally, the formal definition of the Buddhist renunciant as one who has severed all familial ties seems to co-exist uneasily with an abundance of historical evidence demonstrating monks' and nuns' continuing concern for their mothers, as well as other familial entanglements. Ohnuma's study provides critical insight into Buddhist depictions of maternal love and maternal grief, the role played by the Buddha's own mothers, Maya and Mahaprajapati, the use of pregnancy and gestation as metaphors for the attainment of enlightenment, the use of breastfeeding as a metaphor for the compassionate deeds of buddhas and bodhisattvas, and the relationship between Buddhism and motherhood as it actually existed in day-to-day life.
Download or read book Birth in Buddhism written by Amy Paris Langenberg and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent decades have seen a groundswell in the Buddhist world, a transnational agitation for better opportunities for Buddhist women. Many of the main players in the transnational nuns movement self-identify as feminists but other participants in this movement may not know or use the language of feminism. In fact, many ordained Buddhist women say they seek higher ordination so that they might be better Buddhist practitioners, not for the sake of gender equality. Eschewing the backward projection of secular liberal feminist categories, this book describes the basic features of the Buddhist discourse of the female body, held more or less in common across sectarian lines, and still pertinent to ordained Buddhist women today. The textual focus of the study is an early-first-millennium Sanskrit Buddhist work, "Descent into the Womb scripture" or Garbhāvakrānti-sūtra. Drawing out the implications of this text, the author offers innovative arguments about the significance of childbirth and fertility in Buddhism, namely that birth is a master metaphor in Indian Buddhism; that Buddhist gender constructions are centrally shaped by Buddhist birth discourse; and that, by undermining the religious importance of female fertility, the Buddhist construction of an inauspicious, chronically impure, and disgusting femininity constituted a portal to a new, liberated, feminine life for Buddhist monastic women. Thus, this study of the Buddhist discourse of birth is also a genealogy of gender in middle period Indian Buddhism. Offering a new critical perspective on the issues of gender, bodies and suffering, this book will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience, including researchers in the field of Buddhism, South Asian history and religion, gender and religion, theory and method in the study of religion, and Buddhist medicine.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Tantric Studies written by Payne and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-15 with total page 1273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Since the earliest encounters between tantric traditions and Western scholars, tantra has posed a challenge. Representation of tantra has tended to emphasize the antinomian, decadent aspects, which, as attention-grabbing as they were for Western audiences, hampered the study of the field. The Oxford Handbook of Tantric Studies is intended to overcome these obstacles, facilitating collaboration between scholars working on different forms of tantra, and in different disciplines. With more than forty chapters and a global pool of contributors, the Handbook aims to be the definitive reference work in the field, exploring core topics such as action, transformation, embodiment, art, language, and social movements. The first chapter provides an overview of major issues confronting the field today, including debates regarding the definition and category of "tantra," historical origins and dating, and recent developments in gender studies and tantra, ethnography and "lived tantra," and cognitive approaches to the study of tantra. Using a topical framework, the opening section explores the concept of action, one of the most prominent features of tantra, which includes performing rituals, practicing meditation, chanting, embarking on a pilgrimage, or reenacting moments from a sacred text. From there, the sections cover broad topics such as transformation (e.g., soteriology and healing), gender and embodiment, "extraordinary" beings (such as deities and saints), art and visual expressions, language and literature, social organizations, and the history and historiography of tantra. Keywords tantric studies, tantra, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, ritual, soteriology, meditation, embodiment, yoga"--
Download or read book Transforming the Void written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-05-02 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transforming the Void: Embryological Discourse and Reproductive Imagery in East Asian Religions considers paths to self-cultivation and salvation that are patterned on human embryological development or procreative imagery in the religions of China and Japan. Focusing on Taoism, Esoteric Buddhism, Shinto, Shugendō, and local religious traditions, the contributors to the volume provide new insight into how the body’s generative processes are harnessed as powerful metaphors for spiritual attainment. This volume offers an in-depth examination of the religious dimensions of embryology and reproductive imagery, topics that have been hitherto solely approached through the lens of the history of medicine. Contributors include: Brigitte Baptandier, Catherine Despeux, Grégoire Espesset, Christine Mollier, Fabrizio Pregadio, Dominic Steavu, Lucia Dolce, Bernard Faure, Iyanaga Nobumi, Anna Andreeva, Kigensan Licha, Gaynor Sekimori.
Download or read book Shared Characters in Jain Buddhist and Hindu Narrative written by Naomi Appleton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking a comparative approach which considers characters that are shared across the narrative traditions of early Indian religions (Brahmanical Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism) Shared Characters in Jain, Buddhist and Hindu Narrative explores key religious and social ideals, as well as points of contact, dialogue and contention between different worldviews. The book focuses on three types of character - gods, heroes and kings - that are of particular importance to early South Asian narrative traditions because of their relevance to the concerns of the day, such as the role of deities, the qualities of a true hero or good ruler and the tension between worldly responsibilities and the pursuit of liberation. Characters (incuding character roles and lineages of characters) that are shared between traditions reveal both a common narrative heritage and important differences in worldview and ideology that are developed in interaction with other worldviews and ideologies of the day. As such, this study sheds light on an important period of Indian religious history, and will be essential reading for scholars and postgraduate students working on early South Asian religious or narrative traditions (Jain, Buddhist and Hindu) as well as being of interest more widely in the fields of Religious Studies, Classical Indology, Asian Studies and Literary Studies.
Download or read book Conceiving Israel written by Gwynn Kessler and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2009-09-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kessler shows how the rabbis of the third through sixth centuries turned to non-Jewish writings on embryology and procreation to explicate the biblical insistence on the primacy of God's role in procreation at the expense of the biological parents.
Download or read book Globalization written by Prof. Manfred B. Steger and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-12-04 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Since the end of the Cold War, globalization—the process and the idea—has been reshaping the world. Global studies scholarship has emerged to make sense of the transnational manifestations of globalization: economic, social, cultural, ideological, technological, environmental, and postcolonial. But a series of crises in the first two decades of the twenty-first century has put the neoliberal globalization system of the 1990s under severe strain. Are we witnessing a turn toward “deglobalization,” intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine or a moment of “reglobalization,” spearheaded by digital technology? The contributors to this book employ transdisciplinary research to assess past developments, the current state, and future trajectories of globalization in light of today’s dynamics of insecurity, volatility, and geopolitical tensions.
Download or read book Tribals Empire and God written by Zhodi Angami and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-04-06 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tribal biblical interpretation is a developing area of study that is concerned with reading the Bible through the eyes of tribal people. While many studies of reading the Bible from the reader's social, cultural and historical location have been made in various parts of the world, no thorough study that offers a coherent and substantive methodology for tribal biblical interpretation has been made. This book is the first comprehensive work that offers a description of tribal biblical interpretation and shows its application by making a lucid reading of Matthew's infancy narrative from a tribal reader's perspective. Using reader-response criticism as his primary method, Zhodi Angami brings his tribal context of North East India into conversation with Matthew's account of the birth of Jesus. Since tribal people of North East India see themselves as living under colonial rule, a tribal reader sees Matthew's text as a narrative that actively resists and subverts imperial rule. Likewise, the tribal experience of living at the margins inspires a tribal reader to look at the narrative from the underside, from the perspective of those who are sidelined, ignored, belittled or forgotten. Tribal biblical interpretation presented here follows a process of conversation between tribal worldview and Matthew's narrative. Such a method animates the text for the tribal reader and makes the biblical narrative not only more intelligible to the tribal reader but allows the text to speak directly to the tribal context.
Download or read book A Companion to Comparative Theology written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-08-22 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion to Comparative Theology offers a survey of historical developments, contemporary approaches and future directions in a field of theology that has experienced rapid growth and expansion in the past decades.
Download or read book Tolerance Intolerance and Recognition in Early Christianity and Early Judaism written by Michael Labahn and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-16 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays investigates signs of toleration, recognition, respect and other positive forms of interaction between and within religious groups of late antiquity. At the same time, it acknowledges that examples of tolerance are significantly fewer in ancient sources than examples of intolerance and are often limited to insiders, while outsiders often met with contempt, or even outright violence. The essays take both perspectives seriously by analysing the complexity pertaining to these encounters. Religious concerns, ethnicity, gender and other social factors central to identity formation were often intertwined and they yielded different ways of drawing the limits of tolerance and intolerance. This book enhances our understanding of the formative centuries of Jewish and Christian religious traditions. It also brings the results of historical inquiry into dialogue with present-day questions of religious tolerance.
Download or read book Listening to the Bible written by Christopher Bryan and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher Bryan reflects on the often-difficult relationship between academic study of the Bible and the Church, and suggests a way forward in which scientific questions are not to be ignored, but in asking them we are not to ignore the texts' setting-in-life, which is and has always been the believing community.
