You might also like

More about Tantra

• Book details
• Synopsis
• Trending among others

You get 116 loyalty points

Book 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.

Book details

Book category Books in English Reference, information & interdisciplinary subjects Interdisciplinary studies Regional studies

• Full title: Tantra
• Subtitle: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion
• Author: Hugh B. Urban
• Language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 388
• EAN: 9780520236561
• ISBN: 0520236564
• ID: 04617004
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Weight: 608 g
• Dimensions: 302 × 371 × 46 mm
• Date of publishing: 14. October 2003

Trending among others

---

---

---