Self-Alteration: How People Change Themselves across Cultures
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. 
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Self-Alteration: How People Change Themselves across Cultures
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. 
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Overview

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. 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781978837225
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Publication date: 11/10/2023
Pages: 208
Product dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

JEAN-PAUL BALDACCHINO is a professor of anthropology at the University of Malta in Msida, Malta. He is the coeditor, with Jon Mitchell, of Morality, Crisis and Capitalism: Anthropology for Troubled Times.

CHRISTOPHER HOUSTON is a professor of anthropology at Macquarie University in New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Theocracy, Secularism, and Islam in Turkey: Anthropocratic Republic and Istanbul, City of the Fearless: Urban Activism, Coup d'État, and Memory in Turkey.
 

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction: A Time for Change: Modes of Self-Alteration
Jean-Paul Baldacchino and Christopher Houston

Part I: Religious Cultures, Spiritual Practices, and Self-Alteration
Chapter 2 Exemplary Masters, Exemplary Reeds: Pedagogies of Self-Alteration in Sufi Music
Banu Şenay
Chapter 3 Re-imagining Self and Self-Alteration in Contemporary New Age, Pagan and Neo-Shamanic Spiritualities
Kathryn Rountree
Chapter 4 Wounded by Grace: Becoming a Prophet in an Evangelical Revival in Solomon Islands
Jaap Timmer

Part II: Self-Alteration and Political Activism
Chapter 5 Fabricating the New Man and Woman: Self-Alteration Through Revolutionary Socialism
Christopher Houston
Chapter 6 Transcendental Terror: Zen Self-Transformation through White Supremacist Atrocity, from Nazi Germany to Utøya and Christchurch
Max Harwood

Part III: Gendered Bodies and Therapeutic Interventions
Chapter 7 Beautiful, Moral, Functional: Bodily Self-Alteration in an Italian Centre for Eating Disorders
Gisella Orsini
Chapter 8 Porous Individuality as Self-Alteration: Commercial Self-Improvement in Urban China
Gil Hizi
Chapter 9 How Is Psychoanalysis a Mode of Self-Alteration? Anthropological Interrogations
Jean-Paul Baldacchino

Part IV: Self-Alteration, The Human, and the More-Than-Human
Chapter 10 Mutualistic Self-Alteration: Human-Pigeon Assemblages in Rural Pakistan
Muhammad A. Kavesh
Chapter 11 Self-Alteration as Human Capacity and as Cosmopolitan Right
Nigel Rapport

Part V: Afterword
Chapter 12 Making Oneself Otherwise: Reflections on Natality
Michael Jackson

Acknowledgments     
Notes on Contributors
Index
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