Religion and the Body

Catalog description

The seminar explores the contributions of scholarship on the body in religion to re-visioning theories of the body from the methodological perspective of the history of religions. We will examine three areas of scholarship that have had a significant influence on contemporary theories: the body in philosophy, the body in social theory, and the body in feminist and gender studies. We will critically interrogate the limitations of these Western theoretical models through an analysis of categories and models of the body that are grounded in the distinctive idioms of non-Western religious traditions, with a focus on six modalities: ritual bodies, ascetic bodies, gendered bodies, sexual bodies, tantric bodies, and devotional bodies.