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Full Description
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 book's 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.
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Birth Imagery and Ontological Transformation
Chapter One: Birth and Death in the Arts and Humanities
Chapter Two: Religious Objects and the Sheela-na-gig
Chapter Three: The Social Ontology of Birth
Chapter Four: The Secularization of Religious Objects During Birth
Chapter Five: Art as Sacred Symbol in Birth as a Rite of Passage
Chapter Six: Nonreligion and the Sacred in New Images of Birth
Chapter Seven: New Feminisms and Decolonizing Birth
Conclusion: Transforming the Culture of Birth Through Imagery
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
