CompleteMartialArts.com - Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion

	List Price: $25.95 Our Price: $23.35 Your Save: $ 2.60 ( 10% ) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Manufacturer: University of California Press
Average Customer Rating: [ not yet rated ]
Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 294.5514 EAN: 9780520236561 ISBN: 0520236564 Label: University of California Press Manufacturer: University of California Press Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 388 Publication Date: 2003-10-14 Publisher: University of California Press Studio: University of California Press
Related Items Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism Tantra: Path of Ecstasy Tantra in Practice The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India The Roots of Tantra (Suny Series in Tantric Studies)
Editorial Reviews: 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.