
- 219 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
About this book
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.
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Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access Imagery, Ritual, and Birth by Anna M. Hennessey in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Theology & Religion & Gender Studies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Imagery, Ritual, and Birth
- Imagery, Ritual, and Birth: Ontology between the Sacred and the Secular
- Copyright page
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Birth Imagery and OntologicalTransformation
- Chapter 1
- Birth and Death in the Arts and Humanities
- Chapter 2
- Religious Objects and the Sheela-na-gig
- Chapter 3
- The Social Ontology of Birth
- Chapter 4
- The Secularization of Religious Objects During Birth
- Chapter 5
- Art as Sacred Symbol in Birth as a Rite of Passage
- Chapter 6
- Nonreligion and the Sacred in New Images of Birth
- Chapter 7
- New Feminisms and Decolonizing Birth
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- About the Author