Religion and the Subtle Body in Asia and the West: Between Mind and Body (Review)

Journal of Religious and Cultural Theory, 2012

Global religious practices present a challenge and an opportunity to religious communities and practitioners. This term, global religious practices, I define as practices such as Buddhist meditation and Hindu yoga, that can be enacted and adapted in a variety of contexts and disembedded from their traditional religious discourses, settings, and communities. Paying attention to specific contexts in which religious practices are performed and the historical trajectories that created possibilities of global movement offers a nuanced understanding of how religious traditions connect, attach, and intersect with other modern religious and secular discourses. Global religious practices illustrate that religions do not travel as whole entities but partial elements that resonate with different cultures and are appropriated over time. In this article I focus specifically on Asian religions as these are especially disseminated in piecemeal, modernized versions that are often mistaken to be representative of the entire tradition. I discuss in particular three related areas yoga and meditation have entered, which have aided in the adaptation and globalization process: science, psychology, and health and well-being movements. I do not inquire into how ‘authentic’ or consistent these practices and innovations are but rather demonstrate the dynamic nature of religion within globalization, the limits and opportunities, and the complex and contingent features of this process. First I describe the contexts, which have led to the flourishing of Asian global religious practices including cultural flows, discourses of Orientalism, and the modern fascination with the self. In the second part of this paper I illustrate the processes and strategies through which Asian global religious practices are created and how these are recontextualized in new settings.

2011

Cambridge University Press, 2011 Frontmatter, pp i-vi Contents pp, vii-viii List of Boxes, Figures, and Maps, pp ix-x Preface pp, xi-xii 1 - In the beginning: Religion and history, pp 1-14 2 - Ming China: The fourteenth century's new world order, pp 15-52 3 - The Buddha and the shōgun in sixteenth-century Japan, pp 53-71 4 - Opportunities lost: The failure of Christianity, 1550–1750, pp 72-93 5 - Buddhism: Incarnations and reincarnations, pp 94-122 6 - Apocalypse now, pp 123-141 7 - Out of the twilight: Religion and the late nineteenth century, pp 142-160 8 - Into the abyss: Religion and the road to disaster during the early twentieth century, pp 161-193 9 - Brave new world: Religion in the reinvention of postwar Asia, pp 194-223 10 - The globalization of Asian religion, pp 224-230 Glossary pp, 231-236 Timeline of dynasties and major events, pp 237-238 Suggestions for further reading, pp 239-244 Index, pp 245-259

Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies analyzes the role of religion in past and present understandings of Asia. Religion, and the history of its study in the modern academy, has exercised massive influence over Asian Studies fields in the past century. Asian Studies has in turn affected, and is increasingly shaping, the study of religion. Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies looks into this symbiotic relationship - both in current practice, and in the modern histories of both Orientalism and Area Studies

Situating Medicine and Religion in Asia, 2023

In press, forthcoming 2023... Although Asian practices for health, healing and spiritual cultivation have survived today, they circulate in new forms, whether within a burgeoning global marketplace, in the imaginaries of national health bureaus, as the focus of major scholarly grant initiatives, or as subjects of neurological study. These modern understandings are contoured by the European history of science and do not represent how they were mobilised in their originary times and places. Categories like ‘alternative’, ‘complementary’, and ‘wellness’ privilege medical authority and a distance from religion writ large, implying a distance between ‘medicine’ and ‘religion’ not reflected in the originary contexts of these practices. Situating Medicine and Religion in Asia makes a critical intervention in the scholarship on East, South and Southeast Asia and the Himalayas. Case studies show how practices from divination and demonography, to anatomy, massage, plant medicine and homeopathy were situated within the contours of medicine and religion of their time, in contrast to modern formations of ‘medicine’ and' ‘religion’. The chapters follow a common structure that allows for easy comparison across a broad geographic, temporal and conceptual range, presenting a set of methodological tools for the study of medicine and religion. Taken together, they assemble empirical data about the construction of medicine and religion as social categories of practice, from which more general claims can be made. The volume thus makes a critical intervention in the histories of medicine, religion and science in the region, while providing readers with a set of methodological approaches for future study.

Social compass, 2004

HORIZONTE, 2015

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Numen 62:1, 2015

How and under what conditions is knowledge about religion produced? This special issue on religious studies in Asia presents work by scholars who examine the discipline of “Religious Studies” — resisting the temptation to preconceive exactly what that means — in four modern Asian settings: India, China, Thailand, and Singapore. The authors provide genealogical reflection on and historical analysis of the conditions under which the academic study of religion arose in each nation.

Asian Ethnology, 2019

Pacific Asia Inquiry 4 (1): 197-204, 2013