Imagining The Fetus The Unborn In Myth Religion And Culture

Author : Vanessa R Sasson
Publisher : OUP USA
ISBN 13 : 0195380045
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Sallie Han
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1785336924
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Carol Sanger
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674977300
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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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 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New medical technologies, women’s willingness to talk online and off, and tighter judicial reins on state legislatures are shaking up the practice of abortion. As talk becomes more transparent, Carol Sanger writes, women’s decisions about whether to become mothers will be treated more like those of other adults making significant personal choices.

Author : Peter C. Bisschop
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110674262
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : D. Lupton
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137310723
Total Pages : 153 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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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 153 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.

Author : Reiko Ohnuma
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199915679
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ties That Bind written by Reiko Ohnuma and published by Oxford University Press. 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.

Author : Zubin Mistry
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1903153573
Total Pages : 358 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Amy Paris Langenberg
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1315512521
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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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 210 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.

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004306528
Total Pages : 596 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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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 provides new insight into how the body’s generative processes are harnessed as powerful metaphors for spiritual attainment in the religious traditions of China and Japan.

Author : Gwynn Kessler
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812241754
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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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.