An Intimate Rebuke PDF Download

Author: Laura S. Grillo
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478002638
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Throughout West African societies, at times of social crises, postmenopausal women—the Mothers—make a ritual appeal to their innate moral authority. The seat of this power is the female genitalia. Wielding branches or pestles, they strip naked and slap their genitals and bare breasts to curse and expel the forces of evil. In An Intimate Rebuke Laura S. Grillo draws on fieldwork in Côte d’Ivoire that spans three decades to illustrate how these rituals of Female Genital Power (FGP) constitute religious and political responses to abuses of power. When deployed in secret, FGP operates as spiritual warfare against witchcraft; in public, it serves as a political activism. During Côte d’Ivoire’s civil wars FGP challenged the immoral forces of both rebels and the state. Grillo shows how the ritual potency of the Mothers’ nudity and the conjuration of their sex embodies a moral power that has been foundational to West African civilization. Highlighting the remarkable continuity of the practice across centuries while foregrounding the timeliness of FGP in contemporary political resistance, Grillo shifts perspectives on West African history, ethnography, comparative religious studies, and postcolonial studies.

Author: Naminata Diabate
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478007575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Across Africa, mature women have for decades mobilized the power of their nakedness in political protest to shame and punish male adversaries. This insurrectionary nakedness, often called genital cursing, owes its cultural potency to the religious belief that spirits residing in women's bodies can be unleashed to cause misfortune in their targets, including impotence, disease, and death. In Naked Agency, Naminata Diabate analyzes these collective female naked protests in Africa and beyond to broaden understandings of agency and vulnerability. Drawing on myriad cultural texts from social media and film to journalism and fiction, Diabate uncovers how women create spaces of resistance during socio-political duress, including such events as the 2011 protests by Ivoirian women in Côte d’Ivoire and Paris as well as women's disrobing in Soweto to prevent the destruction of their homes. Through the concept of naked agency, Diabate explores fluctuating narratives of power and victimhood to challenge simplistic accounts of African women's helplessness and to show how they exercise political power in the biopolitical era.

Author: Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
Publisher: Open Court Publishing
ISBN: 9780812692587
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
Sheets-Johnstone critically examines the work of contemporary theorists, including Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacques Derrida, in an effort to recover the lived body and its impact on gendered existence and power relations. Deeply critical of feminist writers who minimize biological experience, she argues that theorists must thoroughly consider the evolutionary body in order to understand its cultural reworkings.. -- Choice review.

Author: William Walker Atkinson
Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.
ISBN: 1616404078
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Presented here in its original 12-volume series, the Personal Power Books are a set of self-help books designed to be carefully studied to develop personal power. In the Foreword to Volume I, personal power is defined as "The ability of strength possessed by the human individual, by which he does, or may, accomplish desired results in an efficient manner, along the lines of physical, mental, and spiritual effort and endeavor." In other words, these books describe the methods to attaining control and power in your own life, whether it be financial, physical, mental, or emotional--certainly a worthy goal for any individual.Volume XII includes information on the regenerative and restorative powers of sex. It talks about how to transmutate sexual energy, the power and attributes of sex, as well as instructions on the practice and secrets of regeneration.American writer WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON (1862-1932) was editor of the popular magazine New Thought from 1901 to 1905 and editor of the journal Advanced Thought from 1916 to 1919. He authored dozens of New Thought books under numerous pseudonyms, including the name "Yogi," some of which are likely still unknown today.

Author: Ylva Hernlund
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813541387
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Female "circumcision" or, more precisely, female genital cutting (FGC), remains an important cultural practice in many African countries, often serving as a coming-of-age ritual. It is also a practice that has generated international dispute and continues to be at the center of debates over women's rights, the limits of cultural pluralism, the balance of power between local cultures, international human rights, and feminist activism. In our increasingly globalized world, these practices have also begun immigrating to other nations, where transnational complexities vex debates about how to resolve the issue. Bringing together thirteen essays, Transcultural Bodies provides an ethnographically rich exploration of FGC among African diasporas in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. Contributors analyze changes in ideologies of gender and sexuality in immigrant communities, the frequent marginalization of African women's voices in debates over FGC, and controversies over legislation restricting the practice in immigrant populations.

Author: William F. Kraft
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1579102034
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
Two exaggerations threaten a wholesome understanding of human sexuality today. The first is represented by the ceaseless, value-free quest for pleasure; the second focuses on rules and spiritual cliches that offer little practical counsel or support. ÒWhole and Holy SexualityÓ is an insightful and enlightening handbook with concrete suggestions and support. It will help married, single and vowed celibate people to cope with, grow from, and enjoy sexuality.

Author: Laura S. Grillo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351260707
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Religions in Contemporary Africa is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the three main religious traditions on the African continent, African indigenous religions, Christianity and Islam. The book provides a historical overview of these important traditions and focuses on the roles they play in African societies today. It includes social, cultural and political case studies from across the continent on the following topical issues: Witchcraft and modernity Power and politics Conflict and peace Media and popular culture Development Human rights Illness and health Gender and sexuality With suggestions for further reading, discussion questions, illustrations and a list of glossary terms this is the ideal textbook for students in religion, African studies and adjacent fields approaching this subject area for the first time.

Author: Jung Eun Sophia Park
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498226019
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 81

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Book Description
Border crossing is a significant experience in the global era when many people cross borders, whether in cultural, geopolitical, relational, or existential terms. Border crossing can provide a great opportunity for spiritual growth, yet it is often a violent and dangerous process. Thus there is a need to explore border-crossing spirituality: to examine how various aspects of border crossing impact human life, analyze why border crossing happens, and explain how the act of border crossing provides transformation. Border crossing is an action undertaken to expand one's own boundaries, and from it emerges the borderland--a third space where one's transformation can occur. This book primarily focuses on various teachings of border crossing and the notion of "being in between." Almost every religious tradition has within it a spiritual teaching of border crossing and the importance of the borderland. This book is, by nature, cross cultural, interreligious, and interspiritual. Through the action of border crossing, transformation occurs in the borderland, and border-crossing spirituality can be crystallized as living a radical hospitality, valuing friendship, remaining in the present, and reclaiming subjectivity.

Author: Theodore Bennett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317155416
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
This book investigates how and why the criminal law differentiates between different types of body alterations, with particular reference to how they are conceptualised within legal discourse. By drawing connections between types of body alteration that have traditionally been considered separately and discretely, the book allows analytical conclusions to be made about the law’s treatment of the general category of ’body alteration’ rather than merely about specific types of body alteration. Taking legal discourse as its analytical focus, the author critically examines a number of case studies to determine the techniques and processes by which some body alterations are discursively constructed as legitimate and legally approved, and by which other body alterations are discursively constructed as illegitimate and legally sanctioned. Specifically, the body alterations that are addressed include sadomasochistic injuries; female genital modification and male circumcision; cosmetic surgery, body modification and healthy limb amputation; and sex reassignment surgery and genital ’normalisation’ surgery. International in scope, the discursive analysis in the book will be of interest to academics and researchers working in the areas of socio-legal and cultural studies.

Author: Fani Bhusan Das
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1449057764
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
The book is about a dream of mankind- the dream to live in "peacetime". After many conflicts and wars, in 1901 the humans initiated actions to materialize the dream. But unfortunately, the dream is still a dream after more than one hundred years. Time is nothing but realizing things in succession and is a condition and cause of conditions. Peace time is a mental phenomena and its measuring system is derived from functioning of solar system and cosmological units. The dream is to promulgate 28 days 13 months moon civil calendar which is a perfect, rational, uniform, regular and harmonious time calendar. This provides appropriate impulses to human minds for peaceful responses and to create a peace time culture. The book designs the Peace Calendar with names of 13 months of the year; each month promoting different moral values (as components of Peace) to mould the human minds towards "peacetime". The book also highlights the present problem of violence, terror and meltdowns in economic, social and environmental sectors in each of the 13 months. The UN is urged upon to take quick decision for fulfillment of the dream to save the humanity from large scale destruction and to switch over from the present "miserable time" to "peace time" by 2012-13, the cut off year for the beginning of holocaust in human civilization.