Tantra : Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion Paperback / softback
by Hugh B. Urban
Paperback / softback
Description
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.
Information
-
Out of stock
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:388 pages, 16 b-w illustrations, 2 tables
- Publisher:University of California Press
- Publication Date:14/10/2003
- Category:
- ISBN:9780520236561
Information
-
Out of stock
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:388 pages, 16 b-w illustrations, 2 tables
- Publisher:University of California Press
- Publication Date:14/10/2003
- Category:
- ISBN:9780520236561
