Tantra : sex, secrecy politics, and power in the study of religions / / Hugh B. Urban

• Autore: Urban Hugh B
• Pubblicazione: Berkeley, : University of California Press, c2003
• Edizione: 1st ed.
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (390 p.)
• Disciplina: 294.5/514
• Soggetto topico: Tantrism; Tantric Buddhism
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 337-366) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Front matter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: Diagnosing the "Disease" of Tantra -- 1. The Golden Age of the Vedas and the Dark Age of Kàlí: Tantrism, Orientalism, and the Bengal Renaissance -- 2. Sacrificing White Goats to the Goddess: Tantra and Political Violence in Colonial India -- 3. India's Darkest Heart: Tantra in the Literary Imagination -- 4. Deodorized Tantra: Sex, Scandal, Secrecy, and Censorship in the Works of John Woodroffe and Swami Vivekananda -- 5. Religion for the Age of Darkness: Tantra and the History of Religions in the Twentieth Century -- 6. The Cult of Ecstasy: Meldings of East and West in a New Age of Tantra -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: 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.
• Titolo autorizzato: Tantra
• ISBN: 1-282-35961-4; 1-59734-932-1; 9786612359613; 9781417525533; 0-520-93689-2
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910807209903321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II