Sanctity and Self-Inflicted Violence in Chinese Religions, 1500-1700 PDF
by Jimmy Yu
Description
In this illuminating study of a vital but long overlooked aspect of Chinese religious life, Jimmy Yu reveals that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, self-inflicted violence was an essential and sanctioned part of Chinese culture.
He examines a wide range of practices, including blood writing, filial body-slicing, chastity mutilations and suicides, ritual exposure, and self-immolation, arguing that each practice was public, scripted, and a signal of cultural expectations.
Individuals engaged in acts of self-inflicted violence to exercise power and to affect society, by articulating moral values, reinstituting order, forging new social relations, and protecting against the threat of moral ambiguity.
Self-inflicted violence was intelligible both to the person doing the act and to those who viewed and interpreted it, regardless of the various religions of the period: Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and other religions.
This book is a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on bodily practices in late imperial China, challenging preconceived ideas about analytic categories of religion, culture, and ritual in the study of Chinese religions.
Information
-
Download - Immediately Available
- Format:PDF
- Publisher:Oxford University Press
- Publication Date:27/04/2012
- Category:
- ISBN:9780199844890
Information
-
Download - Immediately Available
- Format:PDF
- Publisher:Oxford University Press
- Publication Date:27/04/2012
- Category:
- ISBN:9780199844890
