Tantra (eBook)

Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion

Hugh B. Urban (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2003
388 Seiten
University of California Press (Verlag)
978-0-520-93689-8 (ISBN)

Infos

A complex body of religious practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions; a form of spirituality that seemingly combines sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range of physical experience with the religious life-Tantra has held a central yet conflicted role within the Western imagination ever since the first "e;discovery"e; of Indian religions by European scholars. Always radical, always extremely Other, Tantra has proven a key factor in the imagining of India. This book offers a critical account of how the phenomenon has come to be. Tracing the complex genealogy of Tantra as a category within the history of religions, Hugh B. Urban reveals how it has been formed through the interplay of popular and scholarly imaginations. Tantra emerges as a product of mirroring and misrepresentation at work between East and West--a dialectical category born out of the ongoing play between Western and Indian minds. Combining historical detail, textual analysis, popular cultural phenomena, and critical theory, this book shows Tantra as a shifting amalgam of fantasies, fears, and wish-fulfillment, at once native and Other, that strikes at the very heart of our constructions of the exotic Orient and the contemporary West.

Inhalt

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction: Diagnosing the "Disease" of Tantra
1. The Golden Age of the Vedas and the Dark Age of Kali: Tantrism, Orientalism, and the Bengal Renaissance
2. Sacrificing White Goats to the Goddess: Tantra and Political Violence in Colonial India
3. India’s Darkest Heart: Tantra in the Literary Imagination
4. Deodorized Tantra: Sex, Scandal, Secrecy, and Censorship in the Works of John Woodroffe and Swami Vivekananda
5. Religion for the Age of Darkness: Tantra and the History of Religions in the Twentieth Century
6. The Cult of Ecstasy: Meldings of East and West in a New Age of Tantra
Conclusion: Reimagining Tantra in Contemporary Discourse

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.10.2003
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Buddhismus
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Spezielle Soziologien
• Schlagworte: Anthropology • Buddhism • Buddhist tradition • Comparative Religion • Contemporary religion • Critical theory • cultural phenomena • East and West • Eastern philosophy • european scholars • Faith and spirituality • Hinduism • India • Indian religions • Jainism • Nonfiction • physical experiences • Political power • religious lives • Religious Practices • religious secrecy • Religious Studies • sensuality • Sex • Sexuality • sexual politics • Tantra • Western thought • Western World • World religions
• ISBN-10: 0-520-93689-2 / 0520936892
• ISBN-13: 978-0-520-93689-8 / 9780520936898