Self-Alteration

How People Change Themselves across Cultures

Jean-Paul Baldacchino, Christopher Houston (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover

208 Seiten

2023
Rutgers University Press (Verlag)
978-1-9788-3723-2 (ISBN)

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Many of us feel a pressing desire to be different—to be other than who we are. Self-conscious, we anxiously perceive our shortcomings or insufficiencies, wondering why we are how we are and whether we might be different. Often, we wish to alter ourselves, to change our relationships, and to transform the person we are in those relationships. Not only a philosophical question about how other people change, self-alteration is also a practical care—can I change, and how? Self-Alteration: How People Change Themselves across Cultures explores and analyzes these apparently universal hopes and their related existential dilemmas. The essays here come at the subject of the self and its becoming through case studies of modes of transformation of the self. They do this with social processes and projects that reveal how the self acquires a non-trivial new meaning in and through its very process of alteration. By focusing on ways we are allowed to change ourselves, including through religious and spiritual traditions and innovations, embodied participation in therapeutic programs like psychoanalysis and gendered care services, and political activism or relationships with animals, the authors in this volume create a model for cross-cultural or global analysis of social-self change that leads to fresh ways of addressing the 'self' itself.

JEAN-PAUL BALDACCHINO is a professor of anthropology at the University of Malta in Msida, Malta. He is the coeditor, with Jon Mitchell, of Morality, Crisis and Capitalism: Anthropology for Troubled Times. CHRISTOPHER HOUSTON is a professor of anthropology at Macquarie University in New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Theocracy, Secularism, and Islam in Turkey: Anthropocratic Republic and Istanbul, City of the Fearless: Urban Activism, Coup d'État, and Memory in Turkey.

Chapter 1 Introduction: A Time for Change: Modes of Self-Alteration

Jean-Paul Baldacchino and Christopher Houston

Part I: Religious Cultures, Spiritual Practices, and Self-Alteration

Chapter 2 Exemplary Masters, Exemplary Reeds: Pedagogies of Self-Alteration in Sufi Music

Banu Şenay

Chapter 3 Re-imagining Self and Self-Alteration in Contemporary New Age, Pagan and Neo-Shamanic Spiritualities

Kathryn Rountree

Chapter 4 Wounded by Grace: Becoming a Prophet in an Evangelical Revival in Solomon Islands

Jaap Timmer

Part II: Self-Alteration and Political Activism

Chapter 5 Fabricating the New Man and Woman: Self-Alteration Through Revolutionary Socialism

Christopher Houston

Chapter 6 Transcendental Terror: Zen Self-Transformation through White Supremacist Atrocity, from Nazi Germany to Utøya and Christchurch

Max Harwood

Part III: Gendered Bodies and Therapeutic Interventions

Chapter 7 Beautiful, Moral, Functional: Bodily Self-Alteration in an Italian Centre for Eating Disorders

Gisella Orsini

Chapter 8 Porous Individuality as Self-Alteration: Commercial Self-Improvement in Urban China

Gil Hizi

Chapter 9 How Is Psychoanalysis a Mode of Self-Alteration? Anthropological Interrogations

Jean-Paul Baldacchino

Part IV: Self-Alteration, The Human, and the More-Than-Human

Chapter 10 Mutualistic Self-Alteration: Human-Pigeon Assemblages in Rural Pakistan

Muhammad A. Kavesh

Chapter 11 Self-Alteration as Human Capacity and as Cosmopolitan Right

Nigel Rapport

Part V: Afterword

Chapter 12 Making Oneself Otherwise: Reflections on Natality

Michael Jackson

Acknowledgments

Notes on Contributors

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	14.11.2023
Co-Autor	Max Harwood, Gil Hizi, Michael Jackson
Zusatzinfo	4 color images
Verlagsort	New Brunswick NJ
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 235 mm
Gewicht	454 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	1-9788-3723-2 / 1978837232
ISBN-13	978-1-9788-3723-2 / 9781978837232
Zustand	Neuware