The Self Possessed PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Self Possessed PDF full book. Access full book title The Self Possessed by Frederick M. Smith. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Frederick M. Smith
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231137486
Category : Sanskrit literature
Languages : en
Pages : 733
Get Book
Book Description
The Self Possessed is a multifaceted, diachronic study reconsidering the very nature of religion in South Asia, the culmination of years of intensive research. Frederick M. Smith proposes that positive oracular or ecstatic possession is the most common form of spiritual expression in India, and that it has been linguistically distinguished from negative, disease-producing possession for thousands of years. In South Asia possession has always been broader and more diverse than in the West, where it has been almost entirely characterized as "demonic." At best, spirit possession has been regarded as a medically treatable psychological ailment and at worst, as a condition that requires exorcism or punishment. In South (and East) Asia, ecstatic or oracular possession has been widely practiced throughout history, occupying a position of respect in early and recent Hinduism and in certain forms of Buddhism. Smith analyzes Indic literature from all ages-the earliest Vedic texts; the Mahabharata; Buddhist, Jain, Yogic, Ayurvedic, and Tantric texts; Hindu devotional literature; Sanskrit drama and narrative literature; and more than a hundred ethnographies. He identifies several forms of possession, including festival, initiatory, oracular, and devotional, and demonstrates their multivocality within a wide range of sects and religious identities. Possession is common among both men and women and is practiced by members of all social and caste strata. Smith theorizes on notions of embodiment, disembodiment, selfhood, personal identity, and other key issues through the prism of possession, redefining the relationship between Sanskritic and vernacular culture and between elite and popular religion. Smith's study is also comparative, introducing considerable material from Tibet, classical China, modern America, and elsewhere. Brilliant and persuasive, The Self Possessed provides careful new translations of rare material and is the most comprehensive study in any language on this subject.
Author: Frederick M. Smith
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231137486
Category : Sanskrit literature
Languages : en
Pages : 733
Get Book
Book Description
The Self Possessed is a multifaceted, diachronic study reconsidering the very nature of religion in South Asia, the culmination of years of intensive research. Frederick M. Smith proposes that positive oracular or ecstatic possession is the most common form of spiritual expression in India, and that it has been linguistically distinguished from negative, disease-producing possession for thousands of years. In South Asia possession has always been broader and more diverse than in the West, where it has been almost entirely characterized as "demonic." At best, spirit possession has been regarded as a medically treatable psychological ailment and at worst, as a condition that requires exorcism or punishment. In South (and East) Asia, ecstatic or oracular possession has been widely practiced throughout history, occupying a position of respect in early and recent Hinduism and in certain forms of Buddhism. Smith analyzes Indic literature from all ages-the earliest Vedic texts; the Mahabharata; Buddhist, Jain, Yogic, Ayurvedic, and Tantric texts; Hindu devotional literature; Sanskrit drama and narrative literature; and more than a hundred ethnographies. He identifies several forms of possession, including festival, initiatory, oracular, and devotional, and demonstrates their multivocality within a wide range of sects and religious identities. Possession is common among both men and women and is practiced by members of all social and caste strata. Smith theorizes on notions of embodiment, disembodiment, selfhood, personal identity, and other key issues through the prism of possession, redefining the relationship between Sanskritic and vernacular culture and between elite and popular religion. Smith's study is also comparative, introducing considerable material from Tibet, classical China, modern America, and elsewhere. Brilliant and persuasive, The Self Possessed provides careful new translations of rare material and is the most comprehensive study in any language on this subject.
Author: Rebecca R. Falkoff
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501752820
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202
Get Book
Book Description
In Possessed, Rebecca R. Falkoff asks how hoarding—once a paradigm of economic rationality—came to be defined as a mental illness. Hoarding is unique among the disorders included in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5, because its diagnosis requires the existence of a material entity: the hoard. Possessed therefore considers the hoard as an aesthetic object produced by clashing perspectives about the meaning or value of objects. The 2000s have seen a surge of cultural interest in hoarding and those whose possessions overwhelm their living spaces. Unlike traditional economic elaborations of hoarding, which focus on stockpiles of bullion or grain, contemporary hoarding results in accumulations of objects that have little or no value or utility. Analyzing themes and structures of hoarding across a range of literary and visual texts—including works by Nikolai Gogol, Arthur Conan Doyle, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Luigi Malerba, Song Dong and E. L. Doctorow—Falkoff traces the fraught materialities of the present to cluttered spaces of modernity: bibliomaniacs' libraries, flea markets, crime scenes, dust-heaps, and digital archives. Possessed shows how the figure of the hoarder has come to personify the economic, epistemological, and ecological conditions of modernity. Thanks to generous funding from New York University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.
Author: Zeftel
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9781638040262
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book
Book Description
Author: Éva Pócs
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633864143
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 556
Get Book
Book Description
Possession, a seemingly irrational phenomenon, has posed challenges to generations of scholars rooted in Western notions of body-soul dualism, self and personhood, and a whole set of presuppositions inherited from Christian models of possession that was “good” or “bad.” The authors of the essays in this book present a new and more promising approach. They conceive spirit possession as a form of communication, of expressivity, of culturally defined behavior that should be understood in the context of local, vernacular theories and empiric reflections. With the aim of reformulating the comparative anthropology of spirit possession, the editors have opened corridors between previously separate areas of research. Together, anthropologists and historians working on several historical periods and in different European, African, South American, and Asian cultural areas attempt to redefine the very concept of possession, freeing it from the Western notion of the self and more clearly delineating it from related matters such as witchcraft, devotion, or mysticism. The book also provides an overview of new research directions, including novel methods of participant observation and approaches to spirit possession as indigenous historiography
Author: Mark Morelli
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578507873
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 358
Get Book
Book Description
Author: Paul Christopher Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022612293X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Get Book
Book Description
The word “possession” is anything but transparent, especially as it developed in the context of the African Americas. There it referred variously to spirits, material goods, and people. It served as a watershed term marking both transactions in which people were made into things—via slavery—and ritual events by which the thingification of people was revised. In Spirited Things, Paul Christopher Johnson gathers together essays by leading anthropologists in the Americas that reopen the concept of possession on these two fronts in order to examine the relationship between African religions in the Atlantic and the economies that have historically shaped—and continue to shape—the cultures that practice them. Exploring the way spirit possessions were framed both by material things—including plantations, the Catholic church, the sea, and the phonograph—as well as by the legacy of slavery, they offer a powerful new way of understanding the Atlantic world.
Author: Samuel Sagan
Publisher: Destiny Books
ISBN: 9780892816125
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Get Book
Book Description
For centuries Eastern traditions have taken the subject of entity possession quite seriously. Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India, recognizes bhutas or entities and their influence on mental and physical well-being, as well as the ways they can be evicted from the individual. Now, in a work that is unique in Western literature, Dr. Samuel Sagan examines the problem of these incorporeal beings that attach themselves to human beings as parasites, causing various emotional, mental and physical problems. A landmark study that presents sound analysis and treatment of this phenomenon, Entity Possession demystifies a topic that has long been overdramatized by the folklore surrounding possession and exorcism. Using actual case studies of the "hungry ghost" phenomenon, Dr. Sagan analyzes their mechanisms and motivations, presenting the facts of entity possession, and including many tips on how to dislodge these parasites from the individuals whose lives are thrown out of balance by their presence.
Author: Reussie Miliardario
Publisher: Reussie Miliardario
ISBN: 1461184894
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 235
Get Book
Book Description
Aside from the hump on her back, aside from the fact that she hides away in an island cave near Hollywood, aside from the fact that music plays in her mind, Cordellia Dressemme seems like an ordinary teenager. At least Cordellia thought she was ordinary, that is before the U.S. economy crash and before alluring music began playing in her mind, music that only she and the most devilishly handsome bad boy can hear.Why is she so undeniably drawn to this mysterious boy with wicked silver eyes and a crooked grin that makes her body tingle all over? And why did he take her away to enchanting woods with mesmerizing waterfalls and a spellbinding lake only to avoid her like the plague?But, worse than that, the music possesses her thoughts. It draws her to the boy and to aprohibited place. So many seductive tunes and the dreams and the visions... It lures her to the point of near madness to a place that could kill her andeveryone she loves. But, she can't help it--when she sees the boy running toward the forbidden, she can't help but chase after him, she can't help but sacrifice everything for him. He is her other half even if he is entirely bad.
Author: Bruce Hood
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190699914
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Get Book
Book Description
Ownership is on most people's lips these days, or at least the lack of ownership. Everywhere people seem to be fighting over what is theirs. They want to take back their property, their lands, their liberty, their bodies, their identity, and their right to do what they want. These demands arequite remarkable when you consider that ownership is not an observable property but rather an abstract concept. And yet this abstract concept controls just about everything we do, and rarely do we stop to consider how it rules our lives. Ownership even explains the anger and political turmoil thatis currently sweeping over Western democracies: people feel they have had something taken away, something they used to own in the past and want back.Possessed is the first accessible book to consider the psychological origins and future of ownership in a rapidly changing world. It reveals how we are compelled to accumulate possessions in a relentless drive to seek status and approval by signalling our values to others by what we own. It tracesthe history of ownership but looks to the future as our drive to own will need to adapt to environmental and technological change.
Author: Eugene Maurey
Publisher: Red Feather
ISBN: 9780914918882
Category : Exorcism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book
Book Description
Discusses why a living person becomes possessed and explains how an exorcism of a spirit is performed at a distance, not in the presence of the client.
