Self and Self-Transformations in the History of Religions

ISBN-13: 9780195144505 / Angielski / Twarda / 2002 / 288 str.

Guy S. Stroumsa; David Dean Shulman; David Shulman

Opis

This book brings together scholars of a variety of the world's major civilizations to focus on the universal theme of inner transformation. The idea of the "self" is a cultural formation like any other, and models and conceptions of the inner world of the person vary widely from one civilization to another. Nonetheless, all the world's great religions insist on the need to transform this inner world, however it is understood, in highly expressive and specific ways. Such transformations, often ritually enacted, reveal the primary intuitions, drives, and conflicts active within the culture. The individual essays--by such distinguished scholars as Wai-yee Li, Janet Gyatso, Wendy Doniger, Christiano Grottanelli, Charles Malamoud, Margalit Finkelberg, and Moshe Idel--study dramatic examples of these processes in a wide range of cultures, including China, India, Tibet, Greece and Rome, Late Antiquity, Islam, Judaism, and medieval and early-modern Christian Europe.

Recenzje

The contributors to this volume are to be congratulated for bringing to the reader's attention the existence of different types and a wide range of self-transformations associated with conversion, possession, sacrificial and initiation rituals, transsexuality, meditation, shamanism, mysticism, and so on. As such, this volume is a very useful historical compendium of insightful papers on some ancient religious traditions that articulated the quest for self-transformations.