Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, And Power In The Study Of Religion - Softcover

Urban, Hugh B. B.

 
9780520236561: Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, And Power In The Study Of Religion
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0520236564 ISBN 13: 9780520236561
Verlag: University of California Press, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

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 'discovery' 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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hugh B. Urban is Assistant Professor of Religion and Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal (2001) and Songs of Ecstasy: Tantric and Devotional Songs from Colonial Bengal (2001).

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"A powerful book demonstrating how the Western study of Hinduism, Indian religious texts, and American popular culture have become related to one another in exceptionally intimate and creative ways. Urban refuses to narrate yet another postcolonial narrative about the evil West, producing instead a subtle and much more accurate reading of the cultural encounter that produced, intentionally or not, a new form of erotic mysticism-Western Tantra."—Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna

Aus dem Klappentext

"A powerful book demonstrating how the Western study of Hinduism, Indian religious texts, and American popular culture have become related to one another in exceptionally intimate and creative ways. Urban refuses to narrate yet another postcolonial narrative about the evil West, producing instead a subtle and much more accurate reading of the cultural encounter that produced, intentionally or not, a new form of erotic mysticism-Western Tantra." Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna

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Verlag
University of California Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0520236564
ISBN 13 
9780520236561
Einband
Tapa blanda
Anzahl der Seiten
390
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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9780520230620: Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0520230620 ISBN 13:  9780520230620
Verlag: University of California Press, 2003
Hardcover