Religion and Sexuality in Cross-Cultural Perspective / Edition 1

by Stephen Ellingson, M. Christian Green

Overview

Issues of sexuality and gender are hotly contested in both religious communities and national cultures around the world. In the social sciences, religious traditions are often depicted as inherently conservative or even reactionary in their commitments to powerful patriarchal and pronatalist sexual norms and gender categories. In illuminating the practices of religious traditions in various cultures, these essays expose the diversity of religious rituals and mythologies pertaining to sexuality. In the process the contributors challenge conventional notions of what is normative in our sexual lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415941280
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/27/2002
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	270
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Stephen Ellingson is assistant professor of sociology of religion and Director of the Lilly Program on Congregational Ministry at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary. He is co-author of Organizational Ethics in Health Care. M. Christian Green, formerly of the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith, and Ethics, is a researcher at the Religion, Culture, and Family Project at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
STEPHEN ELLINGSON
Part I/Fecundism, Ideologies of Reproduction, and Sexual Identity
1 Cultural Production and Reproductive Issues
The Significance of the Charismatic Movement in Nigeria
TOLA OLU PEARCE
2 Sex, Rhetoric, and Ontology
Fecundism as an Ethical Problem
WILLIAM R. LAFLEUR
3 The Mythology of the Masquerading Post-Menopausal Women
WENDY DONIGER
PartII/ Binary Sexual Categories
4 Beyond Binary Categories
Mesoamerican Religious Sexuality
SYLVIA MARCOS
5 The Hijras
An Alternative Gender in Indian Culture
SERENA NANDA
6 Mimesis in the Face of Fear
Femme Queens, Butch Queens, and Gender Play in the Houses of Greater Newark
KAREN MCCARTHY BROWN
Part III/ Power and Domination
7 Tacit Containment
Social Value, Embodiment and Gender Practice in Northern Sudan
JANICE BODDY
8 Millennial Capitalism, Occult Economies and the Crisis of Reproduction in South Africa
JEAN AND JOHN COMAROFF
Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Ellingson's introduction to this volume asserts that "religion" is important "as a system of faith and ethics." Rooted in the Abrahamic traditions, such definitions are not necessarily pertinent to a "cross-cultural perspective" and are under renegotiation on the social sciences and humanities today. The eight distinguished senior scholars whose work Ellingson and Green have brought together write of religions and sexualities...Religion and Sexuality in Cross-cultural Perspective contains far more advanced and stimulating thinking-like the Comaroffs'-on both religions and embodiment... Journal of Anthropological Research 2003 ."

From the Publisher