Imagery, Ritual, and Birth (eBook)

Ontology between the Sacred and the Secular

Anna M. Hennessey (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018
226 Seiten
Lexington Books (Verlag)
978-1-4985-4874-8 (ISBN)

Infos

Every human being is born and has gone through a process of birth. This book explores how imagery is used in religious, secular, and nonreligious ways during the contemporary rituals of birth, through analysis of a wide variety of art, iconography, poetry, and material culture.

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Every human being is born and has gone through a process of birth. Yet the topic of birth remains deeply underrepresented in the humanities, overshadowed by a scholarly focus on death. This book explores how imagery is used ritualistically in religious, secular, and nonreligious ways during birth, through analysis of a wide variety of art, iconography, poetry, and material culture. Objects central to the book's study include religious figurines, paintings about birth, and other items representative of pregnancy, crowning, or giving birth that have an historical or original meaning connected to religion. Contemporaryartists are also creating new art in which they represent birth and mothering as nonreligious events that are sacred or divine. Framed through the concept of social ontology, which examines the nature of the social world and studies how people create meaning out of the various objects, images, and processes that make up human social life, the book theorizes a social ontology of birth, focusing on how the meaning of imagery undergoes metamorphosis between the spheres of religion, secularity, nonreligion, and the sacred when used during birth as a rite of passage. Included in the study are more than thirty images of birth, some of which have never been written about before.

Autor

Anna Hennessey, PhD, is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley.

Inhalt

List of Figures List of Tables Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction: Birth Imagery and Ontological TransformationChapter One: Birth and Death in the Arts and Humanities Chapter Two: Religious Objects and the Sheela-na-gig Chapter Three: The Social Ontology of Birth Chapter Four: The Secularization of Religious Objects During Birth Chapter Five: Art as Sacred Symbol in Birth as a Rite of Passage Chapter Six: Nonreligion and the Sacred in New Images of Birth Chapter Seven: New Feminisms and Decolonizing Birth Conclusion: Transforming the Culture of Birth Through Imagery Bibliography Index About the Author

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 11.12.2018
• Vorwort: Robbie E. Davis-Floyd
• Zusatzinfo: 37 Illustrations including: - 36 Black & White Illustrations; - 1 Tables.
• Verlagsort: Lanham
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Makrosoziologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Spezielle Soziologien
• Schlagworte: Birth • birth art • Childbirth • childbirth rituals • Eschatology • Maternity • Motherhood • mothering • phenomenology of birth • philosophy of birth • religion and birth • rite of passage • sacred birth • Social Ontology
• ISBN-10: 1-4985-4874-1 / 1498548741
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4985-4874-8 / 9781498548748