Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The body is a central theme in recent cultural theory. The body is also a core concern in world religious traditions, and the body as locus of experience, object of desire, source of metaphor, and icon of self-representation is a pervasive preoccupation of Western, especially postmodern, culture. These factors, taken together, make for a high degree of complexity when the “body” is addressed in the study of religion. A review of the literature exposes an unresolved matrix of difficult issues that run like fault lines across the landscape of this endeavor. The key questions that run through this complexity are how and why religion paradoxically reinforces, diminishes, and transmutes the relationship of humankind to its identity as embodied consciousness.The chapter proceeds as follows. First, the crisis of representation of the body within the social sciences as it touches upon the study of religion is addressed. Second, key features of the depiction of the body in the West are sketched out from their origins in the ancient Near East. Third, a brief exploration of the somatic aspects of non-Western traditions is presented. Fourth, these three perspectives are drawn together as prerequisites for understanding the place of the body in advanced modernity or “postmodernity.” Fifth and last, some of the ways in which the contemporary problematics of the body appear in the study of religion ... log in or subscribe to read full text