Imagery, Ritual, and Birth: Ontology between the Sacred and the Secular

(Hardback)

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Every human being is born and has gone through a process of birth. Yet the topic of birth remains deeply underrepresented in the humanities, overshadowed by a scholarly focus on death. This book explores how imagery is used ritualistically in religious, secular, and nonreligious ways during birth, through analysis of a wide variety of art, iconography, poetry, and material culture. Objects central to the books study include religious figurines, paintings about birth, and other items representative of pregnancy, crowning, or giving birth that have an historical or original meaning connected to religion. Contemporary artists are also creating new art in which they represent birth and mothering as nonreligious events that are sacred or divine. Framed through the concept of social ontology, which examines the nature of the social world and studies how people create meaning out of the various objects, images, and processes that make up human social life, the book theorizes a social ontology of birth, focusing on how the meaning of imagery undergoes metamorphosis between the spheres of religion, secularity, nonreligion, and the sacred when used during birth as a rite of passage. Included in the study are more than thirty images of birth, some of which have never been written about before.

Reviews

Imagery, Ritual, and Birth is a hugely significant and timely book, calling attention to one of the most profound set ofissues in philosophy andthe contemporary study of religion and secularitythe ongoing mishandling of birth and natalityas well asoffering its own rich and satisfying response. This book will be essential reading for anyone who takes seriously the theoreticaland empirical study of religion, secularity, nonreligion and the sacred, and for thoseinvolved in the reshaping of these fields around new understandings of spirituality, worldview and existential meaning and culture. It is also a wonderful read, and will engage and reward scholars and students at all levels. -- Lois Lee, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Religious Studies, University of Kent
This diverse and multicultural examination of the contemporary movement by women, men gender-non-conforming individuals and communitiesto re-sacralize the birthing body provides a profound and detailed examination of the loss of birthing imagery inthe modern West - and the efforts of contemporaryartists, birth activists, women, men and other birthgiversto reclaim it. Her argument for the significance of birthing images which offer empowerment, andsupport to women and otherbirthgivers is augmented by the many powerful images of birth and pregnancydrawn from Asian, African, European, Meso-American and Indigenous sources. -- Arisika Razak, professor emerita, Women's Spirituality Program, California Institute of Integral Studies

Author Bio

Anna Hennessey, PhD, is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley.