Tantra Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion By: Hugh B. Urban Publisher: University of California Press Print ISBN: 9780520230620, 0520230620 eText ISBN: 9780520936898, 0520936892 Edition: 1st Pages: 388 Copyright year: 2003 Format: EPUB Available from $ 34.95 USD SKU: 9780520936898 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. Additional ISBNs 9780520236561, 0520236564 SKU: 9780520230620 Ebooks here: https://ebookscoffee.sellpass.io/products/Tantra
