A01=Hugh B. Urban
anthropology
Author_Hugh B. Urban
buddhism
buddhist tradition
Category=GTM
Category=JHM
Category=QRF
comparative religion
contemporary religion
critical theory
cultural phenomena
east and west
eastern philosophy
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
european scholars
faith and spirituality
hinduism
india
indian religions
jainism
nonfiction
physical experiences
political power
religious lives
religious practices
religious secrecy
religious studies
sensuality
sex
sexual politics
sexuality
tantra
western thought
western world
world religions
Product details
- ISBN 9780520236561
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 14 Oct 2003
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Hugh B. Urban is Assistant Professor of Religion and Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal (2001) and Songs of Ecstasy: Tantric and Devotional Songs from Colonial Bengal (2001).
