A01=Anna M. Hennessey
A23=Robbie E. Davis-Floyd
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Anna M. Hennessey
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birth
birth art
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HRLK
Category=JBSF1
Category=JBSR
Category=JFSJ1
Category=JFSR
Category=JHB
Category=QRVK
childbirth
childbirth rituals
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
eschatology
Language_English
maternity
motherhood
mothering
PA=Available
phenomenology of birth
philosophy of birth
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
religion and birth
rite of passage
sacred birth
social ontology
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9781498548731
- Weight: 476g
- Dimensions: 159 x 230mm
- Publication Date: 11 Dec 2018
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Every human being is born and has gone through a process of birth. Yet the topic of birth remains deeply underrepresented in the humanities, overshadowed by a scholarly focus on death. This book explores how imagery is used ritualistically in religious, secular, and nonreligious ways during birth, through analysis of a wide variety of art, iconography, poetry, and material culture. Objects central to the book’s study include religious figurines, paintings about birth, and other items representative of pregnancy, crowning, or giving birth that have an historical or original meaning connected to religion. Contemporaryartists are also creating new art in which they represent birth and mothering as nonreligious events that are sacred or divine. Framed through the concept of social ontology, which examines the nature of the social world and studies how people create meaning out of the various objects, images, and processes that make up human social life, the book theorizes a social ontology of birth, focusing on how the meaning of imagery undergoes metamorphosis between the spheres of religion, secularity, nonreligion, and the sacred when used during birth as a rite of passage. Included in the study are more than thirty images of birth, some of which have never been written about before.
Anna Hennessey, PhD, is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley.
