Religion and the Body

For the published version, see Adam Bursi, "Mijn poep, mijn zelf. Identiteit en religie door de lens van ontlasting," in Wie is er bang voor religie? Waarom kennis van religie belangrijk is, ed. Joas Wagemakers and Lucien van Liere (Almere: Parthenon, 2019), 246-252. Please be aware that the published and the preprint version are not 100% the same. This preprint version is deposited under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC) licence. This means that anyone may distribute, adapt, and build upon the work for non-commercial purposes, subject to full attribution.

"Der Körper eines gefolterten Mannes ist seit dem 11ten Jh. visueller und affektiver Mittelpunkt des lateinischen Christentums. Die Darstellbarkeit des Christuskörpers ist gleichzeitig ein altes Streitthema und verweist auf das zentrale Thema der abendländischen Religionsgeschichte - die Fleischwerdung Gottes. Am Beispiel philippinischer Selbstkreuzigungsrituale und der Faszinationsgeschichte des Turiner Grabtuchs untersuche ich Obsessionen, die sich auf die Materialität des Christuskörpers richten und ihn nicht, wie theologisch üblich, metaphorisch und symbolisch entleiben.
Diese bis in die Gegenwart anhaltende Leidenschaft am tatsächlichen Fleisch und Blut Christi und an der Physiologie seiner Schmerzen ist weder archaischer Restbestand noch entstammt sie dem „Untergrund“ katholischer Frömmigkeit (Daxelmüller). Sie folgt vielmehr einer immanent angelegten Logik dieser Religion, die eben ohne die Gründungserzählung von Folter, erlittenem Schmerz, Hinrichtung und leibhaftiger Wiederauferstehung nicht denkbar ist. Die Heilsbotschaft dieser Religion ist untrennbar mit dem menschlichen Körper verbunden. Überdies erzeugt die Behauptung der Doppelnatur Christi eine stete Spannung zwischen Körper und Bild, zwischen unsichtbarem und sichtbarem Körper, und wirkt jenseits der Religionsgeschichte auf vielfältige Konfigurationen europäischer Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte. "

Revivalism is a hallmark of pentecostal history in North America. This study analyzes the infamous case of evangelist Marjoe Gortner as he carries out a revival tour under the guises of authenticity and sincerity. After providing a brief biographical overview of both the revivalist’s life history and Marjoe, the documentary film, I analyze Marjoe’s roleplaying through Judith Becker’s theoretical application of cognitive theories of being, perception, and embodiment to pentecostal praxis. I argue that the processes of trance, re-entry, and structural coupling implicate Marjoe as more than just an unbelieving instigator of ecstatic religious phenomena. He is caught up in the production of intense effervescent states of social or corporate energy, and himself becomes a vital part of the revival experience. Neurologically, Marjoe experiences cognitive dissonance in terms of self-identity. The learned nature of revival services, furthermore, demonstrates the complexly embodied nature of ecstatic religious rituals.

"The story known most often as either Le Tumbeor Nostre Dame (Our Lady's Tumbler) or Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame (The juggler or The jongleur of Notre Dame) has be~n a minor but enduring component of Western European and American culture since the' late nineteenth century. Whereas most medieval narratives that have exercised much influence have been familiar at least intermittently since Romanticism or even earlier, this one attracted note only from 1873. But fro in that year it has occupied a place continuously in literature, as well as eventually in art, music, radio, television, and cinema. Its reception for the first few decades owed to its innate qualities, to particularities of the historical circumstances that would have predisposed audiences to the meanings they detected in it, and to the serendipity that a host of major scholars, authors, composers, performers, and artists gravitated to it and reworked it. Over ·the past half century, it has benefited from sporadic reworkings in high culture, but it has also earned a niche in mass culture, where information about its medieval origins has often become blurred. Tracking the varied fate of Le Tumbeor Nostre Dame (as I will designate the medieval tale) allows major insights not only into the reception of medieval tales but also into the very nature of story."

In New York City in 1875, a group interested in Spiritualism and occult science founded what would become the Theosophical Society. Primarily the creation of Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the Theosophical Society went through a number of early incarnations. One original version promised to teach occult powers. After Blavatsky found that she could not honor earlier promises to teach occultism, she shifted the focus of the Society to one that promoted Universal Brotherhood instead, highlighting notions of the body and demanding the control of emotion as a means to rebuff demands for training. With this refocusing, Blavatsky reestablished control of the Society and asserted herself as the central channel of esoteric knowledge. Thus, by shifting the focus from the attainment of occult powers to the more ambiguous “spiritual enlightenment,” Blavatsky erected an elaborate, centralized system of delayed spiritual gratification, a system contingent upon the individual's adoption of specific morals and values, while simultaneously maintaining control of the human body on all its levels: spiritual, social, physical, mental, and especially emotional.

Though the ritual of fasting is common to most of the known religious traditions, its practice and symbolic value may vary considerably. This paper aims to compare the meaning and significance of this ritual with special reference to the three Semitic religions, namely, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Some exciting similarities and dissimilarities in this connection are noted. It is discerned that fasting is often observed in these religions to commemorate certain events of religious significance during specific days of the year. Moreover, feasts and festivals that occur before or after various fasting periods in the selected religious traditions remind us of this ritual's social significance. However, sometimes fasting also signifies the spontaneous individual expression of thankfulness to or repentance before God. It is observed that fasting in these religions is envisioned to facilitate self-control, invoke mercy and sympathy for others, create a sense of bondage, establish and assert religious identities, and release negative feelings like guilt consciousness. In the final analysis, it is maintained that fasting does not necessarily imply the negation of the body or society as a form of asceticism. Instead, by facilitating self-control and freedom from one's inner fears and other emotional weaknesses, it can also lead to a more resounding affirmation of the self and greater integration into society.

In this article, I examine the entry of values perceived to be secular into Ultra-Orthodox Jewish thought. These values are introduced in an unconscious manner, and thus may be traced only in light of the subsequent changes that occur in Ultra-Orthodox thinking itself. I examine this subject through the work of Rabbi Avigdor Miller on the concept of the body.
Rabbi Miller, one of the twentieth century’s most important spiritual
mentors in the United States, was chosen because of the perceptible change in his thinking in the latter half of his teaching career, when we find external (i.e., “secular”) values playing an increasingly central role. This led Rabbi Miller to alternative readings of classical Jewish concepts, and even to a call for significant changes in the manner of living a worthy Jewish life.

This work studies the concepts of the body in East and South Asian bodily religious practices and the role of human body in religion. This study focusses on the Chinese and Indian bodily practices, more specifically on Hatha Yoga and Taoist techniques and concepts, in order to find out which concepts of the body form the basis of those practices and what is their inner logic, i.e. how the body is perceived and what the bodily goals of the practitioners are.

The results of the study show that the transformation of the body can be a religious goal. So far, the bodily transformation as an independent religious goal has been widely ignored in the religious studies, and the physical changes that accompany the spiritual transformation have been treated merely as side effects. The current study shows, however, that changing one’s body can also be the main motif for religious practices.

In premodern or religious thinking, the body is not perceived merely as a biological entity, but it also comprises of a number of cultural and social characteristics. The body is seen as being constructed and the construction is an on-going process. This construction process is a prerequisite for ritual self-transformation. A human beings person and body is seen as dependant on social relations and the body is seen as unstable and ever-changing. Thus, the body also involves a social dimension and is also connected with ethics. In a way, ethics and morale can be described as bodily categories.

Ce numéro thématique se propose de revenir sur les phénomènes de conversions religieuses comme pratiques sociales polymorphes, et interroge les différentes pratiques, temporalités et mobilités religieuses qui en découlent. Jouissant d’une grande profondeur historique, la question de la conversion suscite, en effet, une diversité d’interprétations et d’approches aussi bien épistémologiques que méthodologiques (Buckser et Glazier 2003). Pourtant, malgré une abondante littérature, les dynamiques de conversions sont généralement appréhendées en sciences sociales soit dans leur dimension spirituelle (Redford 1843 ; Brandt 2009) soit dans leur dimension fonctionnaliste voire utilitariste, couvrant le champ de la « rationalité de la conversion religieuse » (Decobert 2000). En outre, la notion de conversion se voit plus souvent analysée à partir de sa narration, de ses « illustrations biographiques » (Le Pape 2010), et donc décrite sous forme d’un récit standardisé et standardisant (Mary et Piault 1998 ; Fabre 1999), de « rupture » (Meyer 1998) ou de « radical change » (Robbins 2007) dans la vie du converti. Dans les sociétés africaines, les caractéristiques sociales, économiques et politiques – « le paradigme fonctionnaliste » en somme (Willaime 1999 : 22) – sont généralement mobilisées comme variables explicatives privilégiées pour rendre compte des conversions d’individus, poussant le chercheur à s’éloigner des idéologies religieuses (chrétiennes ou islamiques notamment) mais également à faire passer la dimension personnelle, voire intime, pour une variable secondaire (Comaroff et Comaroff 1991). Dans le cas des conversions aux pentecôtismes par exemple, les crises de sens, les dictatures, la pauvreté ou l’insécurité – « l’anomie » en somme (Durkheim 1975 [1897]) – apparaissent comme des récits explicatifs de premier choix pour énoncer les conversions individuelles ou de masse – deux phénomènes pourtant phénoménologiquement différents (Mahieddin 2015).

This paper is a study of the significance of body and touch in the embodied thinking and lifeworld of the Hindu Tantric visionary Abhinavagupta (c. 975-1025 c.e.). I elucidate Abhinavagupta's embodied phenomenology of Śiva-Who-Is-Being, focusing on his multivocal metaphor of the pulsating heart and its divine sense-energies. I show that Abhinavagupta understood the central act of salvation, the recollection (vimarśa) of Being, or ultimate consciousness, as being a bodily felt process. Abhinavagupta drew on an earlier body of discourse and practice, the Kaula Trika substratum, whose pivotal ritual was that of sexual union. Thus, Abhinavagupta recovered the body and senses for consciousness in a sensuous and erotic phenomenology, so that vimarśa was understood precisely as the "body's recollection of Being," the bodily felt awareness of the Pulsating Heart.

The papers in this issue are an outgrowth of a panel
entitled “Ritual Creativity, Emotions and the Body” organized
by Anna Fedele and Sabina Magliocco at the 2011 congress of
the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore
(SIEF) in Lisbon, Portugal.i Through this panel, we sought
to explore the importance of emotions and embodied experience
in the context of innovative contemporary rituals.
We were particularly interested in analyzing the ways
in which ritual experiences manifested themselves through
the body: how do innovative rituals construe the body,
or respond subversively to cultural constructions of the
body? How does ritual creativity manipulate the schemes,
hierarchies and symbol systems inscribed upon the body
in order to bring about sociocultural shifts? What sorts
of contrasts does it create between ritual performance and
social reality outside of ritual? To what extent can ritual
creativity be seen as a force of subversion or resistance?

The human body has long occupied a central role in religious praxis across the globe. Recent decades have witnessed a change in academic studies aimed at theorizing the body and its relationship with society and the cosmos. This article adds to this discourse by demonstrating the pervasiveness of the body as a root metaphor in medieval Chinese religious culture. The notion of the body as a microcosmic replica of the social, political, and metaphysical realms, and the need to synchronize it with the natural cycles of the universe, played a key role in the emerging doctrinal and liturgical schemes of Buddhism and Daoism, China's two main organized religious traditions. Using the apocryphal medieval Buddhist scripture The Sūtra of Trapuṣa and Bhallika as a case study, and reading it against the backdrop of earlier religious, medical, and philosophical texts, this article argues that visions of the body as an object of surveillance by the celestial authorities, and its purification and harmonization through ethical practices and ritual means, were hailed as the most significant religious activities in Buddhist and Daoist communities alike in medieval China, a feature that continues to occupy a central place in contemporary Chinese religious life.

Medieval and early modern Jewish works of self-improvement share a set of conventions identifying them as a genre. They all imagine the ideal self as a microcosm for a divinized cosmos, and they instruct their readers to conform to the ideal by means of ritual cognition, affect, ritual practice, and social action based in Jewish law. They also assume existence within a community so that material care for others was crucial to ideal selfhood. Contemporary kabbalistic self-help retains the microcosmic model, but some of its authors substitute psychotherapeutic and economic discourse for religious discourse, minimizing requirements for social action, maximizing the power of affect and ritual cognition, and valuing the attainment of personal desire. Other authors, however, use psychological discourse to emphasize the importance of social justice. Thus contemporary writers of kabbalistic self-help adapt and reformulate this earlier genre to different ends, depending on their use of religious, psychotherapeutic, and economic discourse.

Le catholicisme français des XIXe-XXI siècle s'est articulé autour de trois corps : le corps eucharistique, le corps ecclésial, le corps des fidèles. Observer l'articulation de ces trois corps permet de constater que le catholicisme français s'est constitué comme pilier ou communauté au sein de la nation française, sans jamais l'assumer.

Tibetan tantrists (non-monastic Buddhist practitioners of tantric rituals) attach great importance to keeping their hair long. The importance of tantrists’ hair is particularly striking in Repkong county (northeastern Tibet), which is famous for its large number of tantrists, many of whom wear dreadlocks wound around their heads. This study of the Repkong tantrists’ capillary culture will argue that their hair, at the intersection between the bodily, the social and the political, constitutes an overdetermined religious identity marker. Bromberger’s analytical approach to hair, which focuses primarily on sociological factors such as group belonging or norm vs. marginality, is relevant here, but overlooks key cultural dimensions of the phenomenon. Tibetan notions of embodied divinity and ritual power attached to hair indicate that it is important to include questions about cultural perceptions of the nature of hair and of its relationship with the individuals themselves, or with the beings that can inhabit it.

Among Indian religions, desires for the mundane are typically viewed as sources of suffering and impediments to liberation. To modulate these and other sote-riological impediments, many traditions developed transformational paths of practice. One of the most prominent of these is the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava path of devotion, which celebrates Kṛṣṇa as the highest deity. The goal is not merely liberation, but to develop uninterrupted loving devotion for Kṛṣṇa. However, self-interested desires remain critical impediments. To overcome these desires and reach the goals of the path, early Gauḍīya theologians recommended various practices of devotion. Drawing on scientific research on desire-modulation, I argue that many of these practices would be effective for modulating desires because of the ways in which they manipulate situation and stimulus controls, attention allocation, and processes of valuation. This analysis has implications for our understanding of the development of the Gauḍīya path, the development and success of certain kinds of Hindu religious practices over time, and the power of religious practices more generally for modulating desires.

There is little research into the effect religion may have on the gender assignment of intersex persons. This research addresses that issue, exploring the possible roots of contemporary gender assignment practices in ancient notions of purity and pollution, or purity rules, and argues that such customs or norms influence contemporary perspectives and attitudes surrounding gender identity. This work examines the practice of gender assignment of intersex persons in the "Western" world, along with any and all associated medical procedures and the teaching of gender performance and the adoption of gender performance by the subjects, and suggests that the practice of gender assignment is, in fact, a ritual practice stemming from "Western" notions of purity and pollution surrounding the body, specifically, gender as it relates to the body. Finally, this work concludes that the "Western" notions of purity and pollution which frame the ritual practice of gender assignment, have failed to evolve despite advances in science, psychology and social ethics and thus, this ritual practice needs to be seriously reexamined.

What is body? This article argues that body is always boundary-body, liminal body. As liminal body, it is always on the verge of becoming but is not yet. Becoming, body is in constant transformation, acts upon and reacts to its techno-socio-cultural-religious environment, is constantly acted upon, re-worked, re-drawn, re-imagined; not-yet being because it constantly escapes the boundaries that confine and aim to tame messy bodies. Technology in particular plays a crucial role in the dynamics of these boundary processes because it can exert power over bodies but it also allows body to open up into the world and to incorporate the world into itself.

While globalization paradigms have proven generative for studies of contemporary Pentecostalism, theorists of the Black Atlantic question whether such phenomena as trans-localism and mobility are actually as novel as they are often thought to be. Building off such theorists and drawing on empirical evidence from Mozambique and Brazil, I argue in this essay that Pentecostalism should not be seen as a tradition made diasporic by current globalizing trends. Rather, it is diasporic from the start. Appreciation of this, however, requires a shift in focus from such macro-scale phenomena as missions, media, and migration to the micro-maneuvers of the lived body. Attention to the body, in turn, makes plain that while Pentecostalism is a tradition of mobility, it is not the only one. Particularly in such religiously pluralistic milieus as those of the Black Atlantic, movements within Pentecostal ritual spaces connect with movements beyond them. This point, about the transposable qualities of religious dispositions, is one on which scholars of Pentecostal embodiment widely agree. This essay, however, urges attention to not only the aftereffects but the precursors of Pentecostal mobility. In both the Brazilian and Mozambican cases, pre-Christian modes of embodiment resonate with and help connect people to Pentecostalism. Thus, Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus—central though it has been for studies of Pentecostal embodiment—is too reductive and unilinear to capture the cross-directional dynamics at play. In its place I propose for Pentecostal studies a phenomenology of embodied indeterminacy.

As a basic medium of human interaction, the body is fundamental to socio- cultural communication systems, in particular the communication system «religion». Over time, religious traditions – in all their various cultural and historical forms and incarnations – have developed elaborated symbolic systems with body at their centre. This volume proposes to study these sys- tems and the role that body plays in their organisation through the perspec- tive of the concept of body as a medium and by drawing on media and com- munication theory. The papers collected in this volume explore this perspective in relation to different religious traditions, historical periods and theoretical as well as theological themes. They work with specific theoretical frameworks in order to discuss the scope and limitations of thinking of the body as a medium in religious symbol systems. Topics covered range from ancient mythology to contemporary Parsi rituals to the boundaries between body and technology.

This article deals with the increasingly severe attitude in Jewish Ultra-Orthodox society in the State of Israel regarding the relationship between the sexes. I seek to trace the philosophical roots of this attitude, as a product of existential thinking within the male contingent of the Ultra-Orthodox (Lithuanian) world itself, and I propose that the growing separation between the sexes is a direct result of rabbinic efforts to re-structure this world from within. The image of the Ultra-Orthodox public sphere is considered to be an exact reflection of the male individual and the way of life that is required of him. Ultra-Orthodox thought requires men to stop the flow of life, causing a ‘disconnect’ between the reflective self and the world in which the self exists as an object without reflexivity. According to Ultra-Orthodox thought, inability and failure to live all of life as reflective are linked to the human person as an ‘embodied being’. I explain the Ultra-Orthodox solution to the ‘problem of the body’ and how it influences the structure of theyeshivaas a ‘safe haven’. This mode of dealing with the body entails the exclusion of femininity from male life in theyeshivacontext and is also increasingly reflected in the public domain. In recent years, Ultra-Orthodox rabbis have designed the public sphere using the model of theyeshivaas a space that is a-feminine. This is supported by readings from new Ultra-Orthodox Musar writings, directed to men, which deal with women’s sexuality and create a new definition of modesty.

The Presbyterian missions and medical missions in 19th-century Taiwan were successful enterprises that over time developed into the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, which stands today as the largest Christian minority church in this country. Through a Foucauldian biopolitical perspective, this paper analyzes the roles of female missionaries in the management of bodies and the subjective experiences of both foreign and Native women in the missions. Going beyond descriptive narratives and control-versus-agency reductionist frames, the paper points the polyvalent semantics of such roles and experiences. It also explores the complex relations between the women’s biopolitical functions, the PCT’s industrial type of biopolitical apparatus, and the biopolitical regimes of the late Qing dynasty and the Japanese colonial government in the early  20th century. The conclusions remark on the analytical relevance of biopolitical perspectives in the study of gender and body-related phenomena in Christian missions and Christian religions beyond Western societies.

In this article, I explore the prostration accumulation portion of the Preliminary Practices of a specific group of Tibetan Buddhist women in Bongwa Mayma, a rural area of Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province. I focus specifically on the nuns and lay women who utilize this set of teachings and practices. The Preliminary Practices not only initiate practitioners into a specific tradition (that of the Drikung Kagyu and more specifically the Amitabha practices of this lineage), but also more fundamentally into Vajrayāna Buddhism as it is practiced in contemporary Tibet. Although monks and male lay practitioners in this region also tend to perform the same Preliminary Practices, I focus specifically on women because of their unique relationship with bodily labor. I begin this article with a discussion of the domestic and economic labor practices of contemporary Tibetan women in rural Yushu, followed by an analysis of Preliminary Practices as understood through the Preliminary Practice text and oral commentaries utilized by all interviewees and interviews (collected from 2016-2020) with female practitioners about their motivations, experiences, and realizations during the Refuge and prostration accumulation portion of their Preliminary Practices. Women themselves view bodily labor as a productive and inevitable aspect of life. On the one hand, women state openly that their domestic duties impede upon their ability to achieve religious realization. On the other, they frequently extol the virtues of hard work, perseverance, patience, and fortitude that their lives of labor helped them to cultivate. Prostration is meant to embody the act of going for Refuge, of submitting oneself to the teachings of the Buddha, to the path of the dharma, and to the community of religious practitioners with whom they will study and grow. Prostrations are meant to embody the extreme difficulty of Refuge, to remove obscurations, to crush the ego, and to confirm a dedication to endure the hardships on the path to realization. Buddhist women, despite their ambiguous relationship with physical labor, see the physical pain of this process as a transformative experience that allows them a glimpse of the spaciousness of mind and freedom from attachment-filled desire promised in the teachings they receive.

This essay examines the underlying assumptions on sexuality and kinship as these are negotiated in religious and theological interventions in the debates around same-sex marriage and assisted reproduction. I am especially concerned about how a certain steadfast biologism and investment in “the natural” and “the normal” seem to haunt these debates. Not only do the Roman Catholic Church and the religious right object to same-sex marriage on grounds of the abnormal and untenable nature of gay and lesbian relationships, but the supporters of same-sex marriage often turn out to rely equally on the sexual and erotic privilege of the monogamous couple, in the efforts to unclench the heterosexual privilege of recognition. The commitment to the dyad of the couple is what serves on both sides as the basis for “normal” family life. This “normality” is assumed complete by the fulfillment of the desire to raise children, a creation of the model modern family that increasingly includes assisted reproductive technologies. In both discussions, how the family is defined focuses on the body and on its legal, medical, and scientific status. For all the perceived changes in attitudes that surround the idea of “family,” the discourse itself remains rooted in the traditional Western notion—or rather what has been constructed as “traditional.”

In New Spain in the sixteenth century, the colony was imagined as a sacred body, as the mystical body of Christ (corpus mysticum), in which millions of presumed Catholic Indigenous subjects figured as the body's wounded feet. Beyond the simple secularization of a theological concept and its appropriation toward political ends, the colonial corpus mysticum became living, enfleshed, and incarnate, both sustaining the colonial project and rebelling against it. The Mexican corpus mysticum was grounded in the vernacular theologies and affects of the mortandad, the violent death world of the colonial cataclysm. The 'mysterious materiality' of the New World corpus mysticum points to signs of Mexican Indigenous communities' theopolitical refusal to be subsumed into the Spanish colonial flesh-body.

Le religieux s'invite dans les corps de multiples façons : par les marques (comme le tikka des hindous), les inscriptions sur le corps (circoncision, tatouages…), les pratiques, l'alimentation, la sexualité, les vêtements (le voile des religieuses catholiques ou la robe orange des moines bouddhistes), les bijoux-la liste est longue. Quasiment chaque religion formule des interdictions, des recommandations et prescriptions quant au rapport du croyant à son corps. Et la diversité religieuse grandissante fait voir de multiples usages différents, auxquels l'évolution sociale fait connaître encore des variations. Pourquoi une telle présence du religieux dans nos sociétés occidentales sécularisées ? Il est temps d'explorer les liens riches et complexes qui existent entre corps, religion, et diversité.

Abstract: From the study of a Catholic ritual called inner healing, charismatic Catholics experienced between a city in the state of Minas Gerais, emphasizes the importance of the relationship between body, emotion and memory. The internal cure ritual produces the individual creation technology where transfer and semantical expansion of terms and procedures at Jungian psychology (and others), medicine and catholic tradition builts an “intersubjective flow”, transversal and symmetrical, to understand, simultaneously, therapeutic and religious. Internal cure provided by “cure specialists” becomes a field where conflicting inclinations dialogues among themselves. As a religious experience, internal cure spreads into three sections: life and union charismatic communities, groups and “undefined” (practitioners separated from groups and communities). Internal cure practice is performed by “cure specialists” putting into practice and applying it towards people who demands for cure. A dialogue which has the course, memories and practitioners emotions as a stage, aiming to a new articulation between a small biographical descriptions (specifics) and a great catholic religiosity descriptions (dispersed and mythical).
Resumo: A partir do estudo de um ritual católico denominado cura interior, vivenciado entre católicos carismáticos de uma cidade do estado de Minas Gerais, ressalta-se a importância da articulação entre corpo, emoção e memória. No ritual da cura interior, ocorre a produção de uma tecnologia de constituição do sujeito em que a transferência e expansão semântica de termos e procedimentos da psicologia junguiana (e outras), da medicina e da tradição católica instituem um “fluxo intersubjetivo”, transversal e simétrico, de um fazer-saber simultaneamente terapêutico e religioso. A cura interior praticada pelos “especialistas da cura” torna-se um campo no qual tendências contraditórias dialogam entre si. Um diálogo que tem como palco a trajetória, a memória e as emoções dos praticantes, apontando para novas formas de articulação entre as pequenas narrativas biográficas (pontuais) e as grandes narrativas da religiosidade católica (difusas e míticas). Observações etnográficas e conceituações antropológicas permitirão compreender como a tradição é arranjada em contextos individualizantes.

The so-called "Sun Salutation" (Skt. sūryanamaskāra, Hin. sūryanamaskār), is one of the most ubiquitous and iconic of all modern yoga practices. As Alter (2000), Singleton (2010), and Goldberg (2016) have discussed at length, the modern history of yoga, and of the sūryanamaskār in particular, is deeply rooted in the soil of Indian nationalism and the emergence of a cosmopolitan middle-class physical culture in late 19 th and early 20 th century Europe and India. The goal of this paper is to explore three interrelated issues connected to the sūryanamaskār. First, we will examine the genealogical and morphological relationships between the sūryanamaskār exercise and Hindu traditions of ritual worship, especially mantra recitation (as namas-kāra) and prostration (as vandana) associated with the worship of Sūrya in Hindu vaidika and paurāṇika modes of priestly (brāhmaṇa) liturgical practice. Of particular focus will be vaidika practices of transition [ritual] (saṃdhyā) and paurāṇika traditions of Saura (Sūrya-sect) Hinduism as represented in the Hindu Itihāsa-Purāṇa (epic and narrative) literature and its cognate precursors. Special attention will be paid to ritual prostration, mantra performance, and the purported worldly and otherworldly benefits of sun-worship (pūjā) and devotion (bhakti). Second, we will examine the thesis forwarded by Mujumdar (1950) that the sūryanamaskār was taught in a communal-exercise (akhāṛā-vyāyama) mode by Samarth Rāmdās to the Maharashtrian culture-hero Shivajī, with an eye to the relative dearth of documentary evidence for the rubric as a mode of physical discipline, let alone as an accessory to yoga, in premodern literature. Of particular interest in this regard will be Rāmdās's discussion of the practice of the eight-limbed prostration (Skt. sāṣṭāṅga-namaskāra, Hin. sāṣṭāṅg-namaskār) in his principal work, the Dāsbodh (17 th c. CE), which provides a window into the role of prostrations in medieval bhakti traditions that are associated with narratives of Indian nationalism. In conjunction with this, we will discuss the constructive configuration of religious and physical elements into the form of sūryanamaskār as represented in the work of Bhavanrao Pant, with particular attention to its relationships to Vedic and Purānic ritual and European physical culture. We will conclude with reflections on the ways in which the modern sūryanamaskār and modern postural yoga demonstrate an ongoing process of interpretation and expression between the poles of the demonstration of religious piety (prostration) and empowerment through physical culture (potentiation), and why their conjunction, particularly in the modern era, makes sense historically and philosophically.

Mixed marriages contradicted the Catholic Church’s doctrine that a man and a woman joined in matrimony constitute one body and one spirit. This article is based on debates that took place in the Roman congregations (the Holy Office, the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, the Congregation of the Council) and the Papal Penitentiary. These debates, integrated with contemporary normative and prescriptive sources, are used to analyse how the Catholic Church’s policy on mixed marriages reflected the concept of a set of bodies – the individual body, the family, the political body and the ecclesiastical body – that was understood as a harmonious unity
subject to a ruler who did not acknowledge the possibility of deformity and who feared exposure of the whole body to contagion from impurity. This policy was characterised by a crucial ambiguity inherent in execrating a union with the «heretic». Such a union was simultaneously considered both illicit and valid – a sin and even a crime against the flesh (delicta carnis) but also a sacrament because of the partners’ common baptism.

Contemporary Anthropology of Religion is proudly sponsored by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. We seek
proposals for ethnographic monographs and edited volumes that contribute broadly to the anthropological study of religious
experience, cultures and practice. To this end, we are especially keen for manuscripts that combine vivid ethnography with
strong and innovative theoretical orientations. Examples might include new approaches to ritual theory and practice;
explorations of religious (inter)subjectivities; ethnographies of vernacular religion and modes of secularity; and
ethnographies that challenge the boundaries between text, cosmology and social practice.
For more information on submitting a proposal for this series, please contact me: mireille.yanow@palgrave-usa.com