Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780520236561)

A complex body of religious practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions; a form of spirituality that seemingly combines sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range of physical experience with the religious life-Tantra has held a central yet conflicted role within the Western imagination ever since the first "discovery" of Indian religions by European scholars. Always radical, always extremely Other, Tantra has proven a key factor in the imagining of India. This book offers a critical account of how the phenomenon has come to be.

Tracing the complex genealogy of Tantra as a category within the history of religions, Hugh B. Urban reveals how it has been formed through the interplay of popular and scholarly imaginations. Tantra emerges as a product of mirroring and misrepresentation at work between East and West--a dialectical category born out of the ongoing play between Western and Indian minds. Combining historical detail, textual analysis, popular cultural phenomena, and critical theory, this book shows Tantra as a shifting amalgam of fantasies, fears, and wish-fulfillment, at once native and Other, that strikes at the very heart of our constructions of the exotic Orient and the contemporary West.

Author: Hugh B. Urban
ISBN-10: 0520236564
ISBN-13: 9780520236561
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 10/14/2003
Pages: 388
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.16lbs
Size: 9.02h x 5.88w x 0.97d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2004 pg. 1901