Course description:  This course begins with a challenge to the commonsense notion that the body is a “natural” thing.  It assumes that bodies take on meaning according to cultural particularities, and it calls in to question Western ideas about the proper relationships between body, mind, spirit, and self.  It also assumes that our understanding of the world is inescapably influenced by our bodies, by their physical, social and cultural locations, and by our brains, particularly our sensorimotor systems.  That is to say that knowledge is body dependent. 

Therefore, the course assumes that a discussion of the body necessarily involves a set of “philosophical” questions about body/mind relationships, i.e. about what it means to be human.  Do we have bodies, or are we bodies?   Do we know things through our minds alone, or is the body an integral part of the construction of knowledge?  What does the body know and how does it know it?  And what of the connection between body and spirit?   How do religions understand and use the body?  What is the relationship between religious ideologies of the body and the bodily practices and knowledge systems of their practitioners? 

To make these questions concrete, we will explore a variety of

·         themes and practices, such as pollution and taboos, sexuality (celibacy, intercourse), food (fasting and dietary taboos), orifice regulations, body image and representation, incarnation and divine eros etc.

·         Religious traditions, such as Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Taoism, etc.

·         theoretical treatments of the body (structuralism, poststructuralism, symbolism, etc.) and disciplinary perspectives (sociological, philosophical, anthropological, historical) as they effect the intersection of religion and the body.

 Underlying our exploration of scholarly materials will be the injunction to take the body seriously. And our implicit task is to think “otherwise” about body/mind/spirit relationships.

Theoretical Context: Historically Western scholarly and theological encounters with the body have been framed within a dualistic paradigm.  For Christian theologians, the mind/body dichotomy originated in the Biblical separation of spirit and matter, the material world being an impediment to the spiritual union with the divine. For secularists, dualism has meant an embrace of the Cartesian separation between mind and body, mind being the rational, interpretive thought center and body being a mechanistic biological organism.  It has also meant the association of self and subjectivity with the mind (cogito), and an assumption that the body is something that one has rather than something that one is.

 In recent decades, however, scholars from many disciplines including Religious Studies have begun to examine the overlooked and undertheorized body.  Discourses of the body as a social product, the effect of changes in culture, political power and economic relations emerged, especially in the social sciences .  While these new approaches to the body have problematized the  “natural” body and expanded analyses of the relationship between the body and its social, cultural and political institutions, rarely have they seriously troubled the waters of dualism.  By and large contemporary social theory understands the body as a passive recipient of social processes over which it has little or no control.  Culture, society and the individual (the self as mind) become the subject in a cause and effect relationship where the body is acted upon.  The body is rarely spoken of as agent, subject, or self.  Indeed, the possibility of the body possessing its own agency is foreclosed by the parameters of the discourse itself.  This bias toward the cognitive base of knowledge production and human subjectivity leads to theories are disembodied, leaving the relationship of humans to their bodies absent from most theoretical work.

Course objectives: One of the assumptions of this course is that a conversation about the body necessarily involves an analysis of the relationship between the body, mind, self, spirit, This course’s main objectives are:

1)       to develop an analysis of the history, significance, ubiquity and implications of the Cartesian paradigm for emerging discourses of the body.

2)      To critique contemporary theoretical (e.g., structural, poststructural, phenomenological) approaches to the body--and their relationship to the Cartesian paradigm--as they effect Religious Studies scholarly readings of the body.

3)       To explore disciplinary explanations of the religious body

·         the body as historical artifact

·         the body as symbolic system

·         the body as an effect of structural arrangements of power

·         the body as lived experience, the seat of subjectivity

4)      to experiment with phenomenological approaches to the body

Required readings:

Aho, The Orifice as Sacrificial Site:  Culture, Organization and the Body

Berquist, Controlling Corporeality:  The Body and the Household in Ancient Israel

Coakley,  Religion and the Body

Sklar, Dancing with the Virgin:  Body and Faith in the Fiesta of Tortugas, New Mexico

Course reader available at bookstore

Course business:

This class is designed to work as a seminar for a small group of interested students.  We will have no examinations but you will be expected to contribute regularly and consistently to the class discussion of readings.  In addition to course readings, we will have a guest speaker, attend two field trips, and you will prepare a final project.  My evaluation of your participation will be based on the following:

1        Active participation in class discussions based on comprehension of readings

2        Weekly journal entries on readings, visits, work on your project, etc.  Journal entries due in class on Thursdays.

3        Attendance at guest speakers and field trips and your ability to connect them to course materials.

4        Book review or experiment with a religious body technique (may be connected to your final project).

5        Final project: You will be expected to analyze an embodied religious practice or a technique of the body.  Your analysis will necessarily examine the practice through the lens of numerous theoretical and disciplinary frameworks.  As well, you may want to conduct field observations, interviews, and/or your own experiments with this practice.  Your final presentation should be a multi-media presentation, one the makes use of oral, written and visual (computer) media. 

Grading:

Project:                                                            40%

Journal                                                             30%

Class participation                                              15%

Book review or practice                                       15% 

Schedule for body