Body Meaning Healing or Cultures of Taste Theories of Appetite

Body/Meaning/Healing

Author: Thomas J Csordas

Exactly where is the common ground between religion and medicine in phenomena described as "religious healing?" In what sense is the human body a cultural phenomenon and not merely a biological entity? Drawing on over twenty years of research on topics ranging from Navajo and Catholic Charismatic ritual healing to the cultural and religious implications of virtual reality in biomedical technology, Body/Meaning/Healing sensitively examines these questions about human experience and the meaning of being human. In recognizing the way that the meaningfulness of our existence as bodily beings is sometimes created in the encounter between suffering and the sacred, these penetrating ethnographic studies elaborate an experiential understanding of the therapeutic process, and trace the outlines of a cultural phenomenology grounded in embodiment.

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As a Catholic fascinated by TV faith healers since childhood, Csordas (anthropology and religion, Case Western Reserve U.) studies both empirically and theoretically how religions attempt to provide meaning through healing, how individuals experience that healing, and in what ways religious and medical healing phenomena converge and diverge. All but one of the chapters have appeared elsewhere from 1988-2000. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

	Credits
	Introduction	1
Pt. I	Charismatic Transformations	9
1	The Rhetoric of Transformation in Ritual Healing	11
2	Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology	58
3	A Handmaid's Tale	88
4	The Affliction of Martin	100
Pt. II	Navajo Transformations	139
5	Ritual Healing and the Politics of Identity in Contemporary Navajo Society	141
6	Talk to Them So They Understand	165
7	The Sore that Does Not Heal	194
8	Words from the Holy People	219
Pt. III	Modulations of Embodiment	239
9	Somatic Modes of Attention	241
10	Shades of Representation and Being in Virtual Reality	260
	Notes	285
	Bibliography	297
	Indexes	317

Book about: Comunicação Crítica Contínua:Planejamento, Direção, e Resposta

Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism

Author: Timothy Morton

Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite brims with fresh material: from fish and chips to the first curry house in Britain, from mother's milk to Marx, from Kant on dinner parties to Mary Wollstonecraft on toilets. It examines a wide variety of Romantic writers: Hegel, Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats, and lesser-known writers such as William Henry Ireland and Charles Piggot. It includes a look at some legacies of Romanticism in the twentieth century, such as the work of Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre and Philip Larkin.

Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite is a volume of interdisciplinary essays that brings together a wide range of scholarship in diet studies, a growing field that investigates connections between food, drink and culture, including literature, philosophy and history. The collection considers the full range of social, cultural, political and philosophical phenomena associated with food in the Romantic period, reconsidering issues of race, class and gender, as well as those of colonialism, imperialism, and science. Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite brings two major critical impulses within the field of Romanticism to bear upon an important and growing field of research: appetite and its related discourses of taste and consumption. As consumption--in all its metaphorical variety--comes to displace the body as a theoretical site for challenging the distinction between inside and outside, food itself has attracted as a device to interrogate the rhetoric and politics of Romanticism. In brief, the volume initiates a dialogue between the cultural politics of food and eating, and the philosophicalimplications of ingestion, digestion, and excretion.