Imagery, ritual, and birth : ontology between the sacred and the secular / Anna M. Hennessey.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hennessey, Anna, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Birth customs--Religious aspects.

Birth customs.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xxi, 195 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, [2019]

Summary:

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 book's 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.

Contents:

Birth imagery and the creation of sacred meaning

Birth and death in the arts and humanities

Religious objects and the Sheela-na-gig

The social ontology of birth

The secularization of religious objects during birth

Art as sacred symbol in birth as a rite of passage

Nonreligion and the sacred in new images of birth

New feminisms and the subject of birth

Transforming the culture of birth through imagery.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-4985-4874-1