Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols

by Paula Richman, Stevan Harrell, Caroline Walker Bynum

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807010081
• ISBN13: 9780807010082
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: Beacon Press (MA)
• Length: 326 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Multiple Examinations into Gender and Religion

From Front Jacket: "'It is no longer possible to study religious practice or religious symbols without taking gender -- that is, the cultural experience of being male and female -- into account.' This is the point of departure for the 11 scholars of comparative religion, intellectual history, and anthropology whose analyses of the function of religious symbols are represented in this volume. Two theoretical insights unify their work: first, that all religious experience is 'gendered' (there is no neuter 'homo religiousus"_ and second, that all religious symbols are 'polysemic,' or possess multiple meanings. The cross-cultural scholarship collected here illuminates the complexity of the relationship between gender, itself culturally constructed, religious symbol, and the larger social context. Gender-related symbols bear many relationships to society, at times affirming societal values, at times rejecting or transcending them. The issue at stake here is not what values in the culture have produced religious symbols, but how these symbols function for those who use them, and who these users are. "It is not possible ever to ask 'How does a symbol - any symbol - mean? without asking 'For whom does it mean?' The contributors to 'Gender and Religion' pose these questions in a wide variety of settings, offering analyses of religious texts, rituals, and lives of men and owmen in dramatically different cultures. Charles F. Keyes suggests the inherent sexual ambiguity of Thai Buddhist male initiation practices. Carolyn M. Wallace explores the asymmetry between the exclusively male priesthood and motherhood in contemporary Mormonism by investigating male and female perspectives on the two concepts. Paula Richman explicates a Tamil Buddhist text that depicts the courtesan as a renouncer of desire. Caroline Walker Bynum looks at images of the female in the late medieval spiritual writings of men and women. And in the final provocative essay, John E. Toews presents Freud's oedipal theory as an 'authentic modern myth,' asking to what extent the modification and criticisms that emerged during the 1920s in the psychoanalytic community were influences by gender perspective." Contents Include: * Intro the Complexity of Symbols - Carolyn W. Bynum I - Gender as Culturally Constructed Meaning * Iranian Sofreh: From Collective to Female Ritual - L. Jamzadeh & M. Mills * Ambiguous Gender; Male Initiation in a Northern Thai Buddhist Society - C. Keyes * Men, Women, and Ghosts in Taiwanese Folk Religion - S. Harrell * The Priesthood and Motherhood in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - C. Wallace II - Gender as Polysemic Symbol * Portrayal of a Female Renouncer in a Tamil Buddhist Text - P. Richman * Gender and Cosmology in Chinese Correlative Thinking - A. H. Black * Uses of Gender Imagery in Ancient Gnostic Texts - M. A. Williams III - Gender as Point-of-View * Images of Gender in the Poetry of Krishna - J. S. Hawley * ...and W