Sanctity and Self-Inflicted Violence in Chinese Religions, 1500-1700

Name: Sanctity and Self-Inflicted Violence in Chinese Religions, 1500-1700
Brand: ACADEMIC
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By Yu

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Description

In this illuminating study of a vital but long overlooked aspect of Chinese religious life, Jimmy Yu reveals that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, self-inflicted violence was an essential and sanctioned part of Chinese culture. He examines a wide range of practices, including blood writing, filial body-slicing, chastity mutilations and suicides, ritual exposure, and self-immolation, arguing that each practice was public, scripted, and a signal of certain cultural expectations.

Yu shows how individuals engaged in acts of self-inflicted violence to exercise power and to affect society, by articulating moral values, reinstituting order, forging new social relations, and protecting against the threat of moral ambiguity. Self-inflicted violence was intelligible both to the person doing the act and to those who viewed and interpreted it, regardless of the various religions of the period: Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and other religions.

Self-inflicted violence as a category reveals scholarly biases that tend to marginalize or exaggerate certain phenomena in Chinese culture. Yu offers a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on bodily practices in late imperial China, challenging preconceived ideas about analytic categories of religion, culture, and ritual in the study of Chinese religions.

Product details

Edition:

illustrated

Number of Pages:

290

Release Date:

2012-04-27

Publication Date:

2017-10-05

Publisher:

ACADEMIC

Languages:

Original: English

ISBN10:

0199844887

ISBN13:

9780199844883

GPSR Manufacturer Reference:

[email protected]

Weight:

602 g

Height:

161 cm

Width:

240 cm

Thickness:

20 cm

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