{"title":"embodied palimpsest","authors":"K. Zubko","doi":"10.1558/bar.21543","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.21543","url":null,"abstract":"In the South Asian dance style of bharatanatyam, the devotional bodies of dancers and the gods they portray model a performative porosity about ‘religious bodies.’ But what embodied resonances of religiosity transfer when the intention of the dancer or topic is not marked as devotional? Apsaras Arts’ Agathi: The Plight of the Refugee (2017–18) offers an ethnographic case study through which I aim to deepen the theory around the porosity of bodies by developing the theoretical construct of an embodied palimpsest: a framework that allows previous ‘erased’ layers to become present and interactive with later layers. I demonstrate how the choreographed gestures and rasas, or aesthetic moods, utilized to embody certain Hindu myths inform this danced portrayal of migrant experiences, but also note how the interactive layers of the palimpsest reshape classical theories about rasa, in particular karuna rasa, the mood of compassion, and can be used to particularize theories about kinesthetic empathy.","PeriodicalId":247531,"journal":{"name":"Body and Religion","volume":"144 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122716393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy by E.-J. Graham (2021)","authors":"Andrew Durdin","doi":"10.1558/bar.22538","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.22538","url":null,"abstract":"Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy by E.-J. Graham (2021)London and New York: Routledge, xvi + 252pp.","PeriodicalId":247531,"journal":{"name":"Body and Religion","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130913271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Plea for Embodied Spirituality: The Role of the Body in Religion by F. Watts (2021)","authors":"Rebekah Wallace","doi":"10.1558/bar.22544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.22544","url":null,"abstract":"A Plea for Embodied Spirituality: The Role of the Body in Religion by F. Watts (2021)London: SCM Press, ix + 230pp.","PeriodicalId":247531,"journal":{"name":"Body and Religion","volume":"92 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115072044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Harvey Milk’s (sexual and sacred) body","authors":"William K. Gilders","doi":"10.1558/bar.15678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.15678","url":null,"abstract":"Harvey Milk has been constituted as a queer saint. This article, in the selfidentifying voice of a gay man, explores the significance of Harvey Milk’s queer cultural sanctity in relation to his sexual embodiment, emphasizing that ‘Saint Harvey’ was a leading figure in a movement of sexual liberation and was himself a strongly sexual being, facts sometimes downplayed in his representation as a sacred figure in contrast with his vitally sexual pre-assassination body. Examining the phenomenon of the ‘canonization’ of a sexually embodied gay Jewish agnostic, the article asks what happens when Milk’s sacralization is explicitly tied to his sexuality, focusing on a central question: can a saint be a sexual being, not peripherally or incidentally, but centrally and essentially?","PeriodicalId":247531,"journal":{"name":"Body and Religion","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131000649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Surveilled, harmonized, purified","authors":"Ori Tavor","doi":"10.1558/bar.17840","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.17840","url":null,"abstract":"The human body has long occupied a central role in religious praxis across the globe. Recent decades have witnessed a change in academic studies aimed at theorizing the body and its relationship with society and the cosmos. This article adds to this discourse by demonstrating the pervasiveness of the body as a root metaphor in medieval Chinese religious culture. The notion of the body as a microcosmic replica of the social, political, and metaphysical realms, and the need to synchronize it with the natural cycles of the universe, played a key role in the emerging doctrinal and liturgical schemes of Buddhism and Daoism, China’s two main organized religious traditions. Using the apocryphal medieval Buddhist scripture The S?tra of Trapu?a and Bhallika as a case study, and reading it against the backdrop of earlier religious, medical, and philosophical texts, this article argues that visions of the body as an object of surveillance by the celestial authorities, and its purification and harmonization through ethical practices and ritual means, were hailed as the most significant religious activities in Buddhist and Daoist communities alike in medieval China, a feature that continues to occupy a central place in contemporary Chinese religious life.","PeriodicalId":247531,"journal":{"name":"Body and Religion","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124454593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Religion and the imperial body politic of Japan","authors":"Pamela D. Winfield","doi":"10.1558/bar.16248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.16248","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a religious history of the Japanese emperor's body as it was discursively constructed, visually imagined, and ritually reinforced as the larger body politic. It demonstrates that the Shinto-inflected notion of the imperial body politic (J. kokutai) technically only emerged during the early modern period in Japan. It therefore draws attention instead to the important premodern Buddhist precursors that first equated the emperor's own body with the greater state polity of Japan. Buddhist teachings about the world-body of Buddhahood (dharmakaya), the monumental bronze Buddha body of Birushana in Nara, and Buddhist ritual activity throughout Japan's provincial temple system all helped to construct Emperor Shomu (r. 710-56) as the all-protecting head of the family-state (kokka). Later esoteric Buddhist teachings about 'becoming a Buddha in this very body' (sokushin jobutsu) and elaborate state-protecting rites performed before Kukai's (744-835) multi-headed and multi-armed figures all helped to protect the body of the emperor (or his clothes), and by extension, the health and wellbeing of the country at large. Finally, modern reformulations such as Kiyozawa Manshi's (1863-1903) 'hand metaphor' and Minobe Tatsukichi's (1873-1948) 'organ theory of government' continued to resonate with these pre-existing Buddhist corporeal tropes, as well as with newly imported Western philosophical constructs. As a result, this premodern Buddhist analysis of the emperor's rhetorical, artistic, and ceremonial body-state demonstrates the centrality of the human body in imagining religious authority and political power in Japan.","PeriodicalId":247531,"journal":{"name":"Body and Religion","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121678995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jamie L. Brummitt, Kira Moolman, J. Reed, E. R. Seeman, Jeffrey Smith
{"title":"Erik R. Seeman’s Speaking with the Dead in Early America (2019)","authors":"Jamie L. Brummitt, Kira Moolman, J. Reed, E. R. Seeman, Jeffrey Smith","doi":"10.1558/bar.22752","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.22752","url":null,"abstract":"Erik R. Seeman’s Speaking with the Dead in Early America (2019)","PeriodicalId":247531,"journal":{"name":"Body and Religion","volume":"173 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122565748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dying bodies","authors":"Kira Moolman","doi":"10.1558/bar.18252","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.18252","url":null,"abstract":"Two enormous shifts in history shape Western culture as we know it today: the Protestant Reformation and what historical theologian Ephraim Radner names the ‘Great Transition,’ the health transition that brought modernity its unprecedented low mortality rates and lengthened lifespans. This article explores one geographical location and one specific time – Victorian London – to argue that the lingering effects of the Protestant Reformation and the growing impact of the Great Transition as this relates to the practices and rituals around the dead, particularly the dead child, were partly responsible for the reforms around the dead child in the home. Lydia Murdoch’s account of the rise of the mortuary movement, and her description of the discrimination against Irish Catholics by Protestant elites, forms the foundation for my argument. Rather than limiting the narrative to one of religious and class prejudice, I claim that religious motivation, and not only religious prejudice, worked with growing health reforms in order to bring about these historical shifts.","PeriodicalId":247531,"journal":{"name":"Body and Religion","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122920649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘A sacred relic kept’","authors":"Jamie L. Brummitt","doi":"10.1558/bar.18285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.18285","url":null,"abstract":"By at least the 1830s, evangelical Protestants in the United States considered relic collection and distribution to be an essential part of an individual’s ‘good death’ experience. Protestant relics took form as bodily and contact relics. Bodily relics included locks of hair, pictures of bodies that once lived, post-mortem images, and, in rare cases, blood and bones. Contact relics included Bibles, clothes, burial shrouds, letters, and other objects associated with the dead. Evangelical publishers employed the memoir genre to teach children and adults how to distribute these relics on their deathbeds to family and friends. Some evangelical children even modeled handwritten memoirs of their friends after these published accounts. By the mid-nineteenth century, most Anglo-American Protestants regarded relic collection and distribution around the deathbed as a defining feature of evangelicalism. This held true for evangelical women, children, and men. In fact, evangelical men took these deathbed practices with them to war. Civil War soldiers who died away from home insisted on writing deathbed letters to families as part of their good death experiences. These letters usually carried soldiers’ most treasured possessions back home as Protestant relics, including locks of hair, Bibles, and rings.","PeriodicalId":247531,"journal":{"name":"Body and Religion","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123549537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa By L. S. Grillo (2018)","authors":"Michelle C. Johnson","doi":"10.1558/bar.22163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.22163","url":null,"abstract":"An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa by L. S. Grillo (2018)Durham: Duke University Press, ix + 284pp.","PeriodicalId":247531,"journal":{"name":"Body and Religion","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114977684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}