| Title:
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TANTRA
SEX, SECRECY, POLITICS, AND POWER IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION |
| By: |
Hugh B. Urban |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| List price:
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£30.00 |
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£24.00 |
| Discount: |
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£6.00 |
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| ISBN 10: |
0520236564 |
| ISBN 13: |
9780520236561 |
| Availability: |
Usually dispatched within 1-3 weeks.
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| Publisher: |
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS |
| Pub. date: |
1 October, 2003 |
| Pages: |
388 |
| Description: |
Tracing the complex genealogy of Tantra as a category within the history of religions, this work shows how it has been formed through the interplay of popular and scholarly imaginations. |
| Synopsis: |
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. |
| Illustrations: |
16 b/w illustrations, 2 tables |
| Publication: |
US |
| Imprint: |
University of California Press |
| Returns: |
Returnable |
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