Transformational Embodiment in Asian Religions: Subtle Bodies, Spatial Bodies

This volume examines several theoretical concerns of embodiment in the context of Asian religious practice. Looking at both subtle and spatial bodies, it explores how both types of embodiment are engaged as sites for transformation, transaction and transgression.

Collectively bridging ancient and modern conceptualizations of embodiment in religious practice, the book offers a complex mapping of how body is defined. It revisits more traditional, mystical religious systems, including Hindu Tantra and Yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, Bon, Chinese Daoism and Persian Sufism and distinctively juxtaposes these inquiries alongside analyses of racial, gendered, and colonized bodies. Such a multifaceted subject requires a diverse approach, and so perspectives from phenomenology and neuroscience as well as critical race theory and feminist theology are utilised to create more precise analytical tools for the scholarly engagement of embodied religious epistemologies.

This a nuanced and interdisciplinary exploration of the myriad issues around bodies within religion. As such it will be a key resource for any scholar of Religious Studies, Asian Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, and Gender Studies.

George Pati is Associate Professor of Theology and International Studies and the Surjit S. Patheja Chair in World Religions and Ethics at Valparaiso University, USA. His research interests include religious literature in the Malayalam language, South Asian devotional traditions, the mediation of Hindu devotion through texts, rituals, and performances of Kerala, South India, and the body and religion. He is the author of Religious Devotion and the Poetics of Reform: Love and Liberation in Malayalam Poetry (2019).

Katherine C. Zubko is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and NEH Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at University of North Carolina, Asheville, USA. Her research interests include aesthetics, ritual, performance, dance anthropology, and embodied religion in South Asia. She is the author of Dancing Bodies of Devotion: Fluid Gestures in Bharata Natyam (2014).