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Author: Wendy Sinclair-Brull
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136789456
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
This book examines in rich detail the neglected topic of female ascetics. Based on field research, it documents the social forces which facilitated the establishment of an Order of Ascetics for women, defying tradition in many respects. It describes the subtle methods by which the individual is transformed into a full member of the Order, and how hierarchy and purity are indeed integral to the process.
Author: Wendy Sinclair-Brull
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136789456
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book examines in rich detail the neglected topic of female ascetics. Based on field research, it documents the social forces which facilitated the establishment of an Order of Ascetics for women, defying tradition in many respects. It describes the subtle methods by which the individual is transformed into a full member of the Order, and how hierarchy and purity are indeed integral to the process.
Author: Lynn Teskey Denton
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791484629
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
Female Ascetics in Hinduism provides a vivid account of the lives of women renouncers—women who renounce the world to live ascetic spiritual lives—in India. The author approaches the study of female asceticism by focusing on features of two dharmas, two religiously defined ways of life: that of woman-as-householder and that of the ascetic, who, for various reasons, falls outside the realm of householdership. The result of fieldwork conducted in Varanasi (Benares), the book explores renouncers' social and personal backgrounds, their institutions, and their ways of life. Offering a first-hand look at and an insightful analysis of this little-known world, this highly readable book will be indispensable to those interested in female asceticism in the Hindu tradition and women's spiritual lives around the world.
Author: Monica Lindberg Falk
Publisher: NIAS Press
ISBN: 8776940195
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
"This anthropological study addresses religion and gender relations through the lens of the lives, actions and role in Thai society of an order of Buddhist nuns (mae chii). It presents a unique ethnography of these Thai Buddhist nuns, examines what it implies to be a female ascetic in contemporary Thailand and analyses how the ordained state for women fits into the wider gender patterns found in Thai society. The study also deals with the nuns' agency in creating religious space and authority for women. In addition, it raises questions about how the position of Thai Buddhist nuns outside the Buddhist sanhga affects their religious legitimacy and describes recent moves to restore a Theravada order of female monks." -- BACK COVER.
Author: Wendy Sinclair-Brull
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136789529
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
This book examines in rich detail the neglected topic of female ascetics. Based on field research, it documents the social forces which facilitated the establishment of an Order of Ascetics for women, defying tradition in many respects. It describes the subtle methods by which the individual is transformed into a full member of the Order, and how hierarchy and purity are indeed integral to the process.
Author: Susanna Elm
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191591637
Category : Asceticism
Languages : en
Pages : 466
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Book Description
Many of the institutions fundamental to the role of men and women in society today were formed in late antiquity. This path-breaking study offers a comprehensive look at how Christian women of this time initiated alternative, ascetic ways of living, both with and without men. The author studies how these practices were institutionalized, and why later they were either eliminated or transformed by a new Christian Roman elite of men we now think of as the founding fathers of monasticism. - ;Situated in a period that witnessed the genesis of institutions fundamental to this day, this path-breaking study offers a comprehensive look at how ancient Christian women initiated ascetic ways of living, and how these practices were then institutionalized. Using the organization of female asceticism in Asia Minor and Egypt as a lever, the author demonstrates that - in direct contrast to later conceptions - asceticism began primarly as an urban movement. Crucially, it also originated with men and women living together, varying the model of the family. The book then traces how, in the course of the fourth century, these early organizational forms underwent a transformation. Concurrent with the doctrinal struggles to redefine the Trinity, and with the formation of a new Christian --eacute--;lite, men such as Basil of Caesarea changed the institutional configuration of ascetic life in common: they emphasized the segregation of the sexes, and the supremacy of the rural over urban models. At the same time, ascetics became clerics, who increasingly used female saints as symbols for the role of the new ecclesiastical elite. Earlier, more varied models of ascetic life were either silenced or condemned as heretical; and those who had been in fact their reformers became known as the founding fathers of monasticism. -
Author: Serinity Young
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019065970X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
From the beautiful apsaras of Hindu myth to the swan maidens of European fairy tales, stories of flying women-some carried by wings, others by clouds, rainbows, floating scarves, and flying horses-reveal the perennial fascination with and ambivalence about female power and sexuality. In Women Who Fly, Serinity Young examines the motif of the flying woman as it appears in a wide variety of cultures and historical periods, in legends, myths, rituals, sacred narratives, and artistic productions. She considers supernatural women like the Valkyries of Norse legend, who transport men to immortality; winged deities like the Greek goddesses Iris and Nike; figures of terror like the Furies, witches, and succubi; airborne Christian mystics; and wayward, dangerous women like Lilith and Morgan le Fay. Looking beyond the supernatural, Young examines the modern mythology surrounding twentieth-century female aviators like Amelia Earhart and Hanna Reitsch. Throughout, Young demonstrates that female power has always been inextricably linked with female sexuality and that the desire to control it is a pervasive theme in these stories. This is vividly depicted, for example, in the twelfth-century Niebelungenlied, in which the proud warrior-queen Brünnhilde loses her great physical strength when she is tricked into surrendering her virginity. Even in the twentieth-century the same idea is reflected in the exploits of the comic book and film character Wonder Woman who, Young suggests, retains her physical strength only because her love for fellow aviator Steve Trevor goes unrequited. The first book to systematically chronicle the figure of the flying woman in myth, literature, art, and pop culture, Women Who Fly offers a fresh look at the ways in which women have both influenced and been understood by society and religious traditions throughout the ages and around the world.
Author: Kristi Upson-Saia
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136655417
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 187
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Book Description
Early Christian Dress is the first full-length monograph on the subject of dress in early Christianity. It pays attention to the ways in which dress expressed and shaped Christian identity, the role dress played in Christians’ rivalries with pagan neighbours, and especially to the ways in which notions of gender were culled and revised in the process. Although many scholars have argued that gender in late antiquity was a performed and embodied category, few have paid attention to the ways in which dress and physical appearances were implicated in the understanding of femininity and masculinity. This study addresses that gap, revealing the amount of sartorial work necessary to secure stable gender categories in the worlds of early Imperial pagans and late ancient Christians. This study analyzes several vigorous discussions and debates that arose over Christian women’s dress. It examines how Christians interpreted their dress—especially the dress of female ascetics—as evidence of Christianity’s advanced morality and piety, a morality and piety that was coded "masculine." Yet even Christian leaders who championed ascetic women’s ability to achieve a degree of virility in terms of their virtue and spiritual status were troubled when ascetics’ dress threatened to materially dissolve gender categories, difference, and hierarchies. In the end, the study enables us to gain a broader view of how gender was constructed, perceived, and contested in early Christianity.
Author: Manisha Sethi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000365786
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
The book attends to a historical question — how to account for the high numbers of renouncers (sadhvis) mentioned in medieval and ancient texts — which has been acknowledged and raised, but left unaddressed within Jain studies. It does so through ethnographic data gathered through extensive fieldwork among the sadhvis in Delhi and Jaipur. The volume foregrounds the primacy of ‘choice’ and ‘agency’— upheld by the nuns themselves, who associate asceticism with autonomy, freedom, joy, spiritual well-being, self-worth and peace, and grihastha (household) with loss of independence, fettered existence, degradation, burdensome familial obligations and social responsibilities. It also examines whether it may be apt to term Jain nuns as practitioners of an ‘indigenous mode of feminism’. The book challenges the existing sociological theories of renunciation and tests the feminist concepts of agency and autonomy by investigating the culturally coded roles ascribed to women in Jainism, which are variegated, and examines how a fractured discourse and reality is resolved in the subjectivities and identities of female ascetics. The very legitimacy of the institution of female asceticism, and the way in which the society (samaj) upholds and sustains it, renders female asceticism into a socially approved alternative institution — albeit one that allows Jain nuns to create spaces of relative and autonomy and even prestige for themselves.
Author: Natubhai Shah
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publishe
ISBN: 9788120819382
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Author: Gananath Obeyesekere
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022618921X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
The great pilgrimage center of southeastern Sri Lanka, Kataragama, has become in recent years the spiritual home of a new class of Hindu-Buddhist religious devotees. These ecstatic priests and priestesses invariably display long locks of matted hair, and they express their devotion to the gods through fire walking, tongue-piercing, hanging on hooks, and trance-induced prophesying. The increasing popularity of these ecstatics poses a challenge not only to orthodox Sinhala Buddhism (the official religion of Sri Lanka) but also, as Gananath Obeyesekere shows, to the traditional anthropological and psychoanalytic theories of symbolism. Focusing initially on one symbol, matted hair, Obeyesekere demonstrates that the conventional distinction between personal and cultural symbols is inadequate and naive. His detailed case studies of ecstatics show that there is always a reciprocity between the personal-psychological dimension of the symbol and its public, culturally sanctioned role. Medusa's Hair thus makes an important theoretical contribution both to the anthropology of individual experience and to the psychoanalytic understanding of culture. In its analyses of the symbolism of guilt, the adaptational and integrative significance of belief in spirits, and a host of related issues concerning possession states and religiosity, this book marks a provocative advance in psychological anthropology.
