Self-Alteration : : How People Change Themselves across Cultures / / ed. by Jean-Paul Baldacchino, Christopher Houston.

• HerausgeberIn: Baldacchino, Jean-Paul,; Houston, Christopher,
• MitwirkendeR: Harwood, Max,; Hizi, Gil,; Jackson, Michael,; Kavesh, Muhammad,; Orsini, Gisella,; Rapport, Nigel,; Rountree, Kathryn,; Senay, Banu,; Timmer, Jaap,
• Place / Publishing House: New Brunswick, NJ : : Rutgers University Press, , [2023]; 2024
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (232 p.) :; 4 color images

Many of us feel a pressing desire to be different-to be other than who we are. Self-conscious, we anxiously perceive our shortcomings or insufficiencies, wondering why we are how we are and whether we might be different. Often, we wish to alter ourselves, to change our relationships, and to transform the person we are in those relationships. Not only a philosophical question about how other people change, self-alteration is also a practical care-can I change, and how? Self-Alteration: How People Change Themselves across Cultures explores and analyzes these apparently universal hopes and their related existential dilemmas. The essays here come at the subject of the self and its becoming through case studies of modes of transformation of the self. They do this with social processes and projects that reveal how the self acquires a non-trivial new meaning in and through its very process of alteration. By focusing on ways we are allowed to change ourselves, including through religious and spiritual traditions and innovations, embodied participation in therapeutic programs like psychoanalysis and gendered care services, and political activism or relationships with animals, the authors in this volume create a model for cross-cultural or global analysis of social-self change that leads to fresh ways of addressing the 'self' itself.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- INTRODUCTION A TIME FOR CHANGE Modes of Self-Alteration Jean-Paul Baldacchino and Christopher Houston -- Part I RELIGIOUS CULTURES, SPIRITUAL PRACTICES, AND SELF-ALTERATION -- 1 EXEMPLARY MASTERS, EXEMPLARY REEDS Pedagogies of Self-Alteration in Sufi Music -- 2 REIMAGINING SELF AND SELF-ALTERATION IN CONTEMPORARY NEW AGE, PAGAN, AND NEOSHAMANIC SPIRITUALITIES -- 3 WOUNDED BY GRACE Becoming a Prophet in an Evangelical Revival in Solomon Islands -- Part II SELF-ALTERATION AND POLITICAL ACTIVISM -- 4 FABRICATING THE NEW MAN AND WOMAN Self-Alteration through Revolutionary Socialism -- 5 TRANSCENDENTAL TERROR Zen Self-Transformation through White Supremacist Atrocity, from Nazi Germany to Utøya and Christchurch -- Part III GENDERED BODIES AND THERAPEUTIC INTERVENTIONS -- 6 BEAUTIFUL, MORAL, FUNCTIONAL Bodily Self-Alteration in an Italian Center for Eating Disorders -- 7 POROUS INDIVIDUALITY AS SELF-ALTERATION Commercial Self-Improvement in Urban China -- 8 HOW IS PSYCHOANALYSIS A MODE OF SELF-ALTERATION? Anthropological Interrogations -- Part IV SELF-ALTERATION, THE HUMAN, AND THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN -- 9 MUTUALISTIC SELF-ALTERATION Human-Pigeon Assemblages in Rural Pakistan -- 10 SELF-ALTERATION AS HUMAN CAPACITY AND AS COSMOPOLITAN RIGHT -- AFTERWORD MAKING ONESELF OTHERWISE Reflections on Natality -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS -- INDEX