Author: Anna M. Hennessey File Type: pdf 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 books 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. Contemporary artists 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.**ReviewImagery, Ritual, and Birth is a hugely significant and timely book, calling attention to one of the most profound set of issues in philosophy and the contemporary study of religion and secularitythe ongoing mishandling of birth and natalityas well as offering its own rich and satisfying response. This book will be essential reading for anyone who takes seriously the theoretical and empirical study of religion, secularity, nonreligion and the sacred, and for those involved in the reshaping of these fields around new understandings of spirituality, worldview and existential meaning and culture. It is also a wonderful read, and will engage and reward scholars and students at all levels. (Lois Lee, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Religious Studies, University of Kent) This diverse and multicultural examination of the contemporary movement by women, men gender-non-conforming individuals and communities to re-sacralize the birthing body provides a profound and detailed examination of the loss of birthing imagery in the modern West - and the efforts of contemporary artists, birth activists, women, men and other birthgivers to reclaim it. Her argument for the significance of birthing images which offer empowerment, and support to women and other birthgivers is augmented by the many powerful images of birth and pregnancy drawn from Asian, African, European, Meso-American and Indigenous sources. (Arisika Razak, professor emerita, Womens Spirituality Program, California Institute of Integral Studies) About the Author Anna Hennessey, PhD, is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley.

Author: Mary Louise Lobsinger File Type: pdf

Author: Luc Pauwels File Type: pdf The burgeoning field of visual social science is rooted in the idea that valid scientific insight into culture and society can be acquired by observing, analyzing and theorizing its visual manifestations visible behavior of people and material products of culture. Reframing Visual Social Science provides a well-balanced, critical-constructive and systematic overview of existing and emerging modes of visual social and cultural research. The book includes integrated models and conceptual frameworks, analytical approaches to scrutinizing existing imagery and multimodal phenomena, a systematic presentation of more active ways and formats of visual scholarly production and communication, and a number of case studies which exemplify the broad fields of application. Finally, visual social research is situated within a wider perspective by addressing the issue of ethics by presenting a generic approach to producing, selecting and using visual representations and through discussing the specific challenges and opportunities of a more visual social science. **

Author: David Nutt File Type: pdf Part of the Oxford Psychiatry Library series, this pocketbook is a clear and comprehensive overview of the brain science underpinning addiction and how this helps explain the current and future therapeutics for the range of addictions, using full colour images to enhance understanding. Substance Abuse focuses on the nature of addiction as a brain disorder that includes a range of different behavioural traits such as impulsivity and reward dependence, and discusses the critical role of kinetic and pharmacological factors. The text explains how the primary pharmacological targets of drugs of abuse are now understood, the relation to the variable nature of addiction to different substances, and how this may lead to new approaches to treatment.**