Imagining the Fetus: The Unborn in Myth, Religion, and Culture
Imagining the Fetus: The Unborn in Myth, Religion, and Culture
Professor of Religious Studies
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Abstract
In contemporary Western culture, the word “fetus” introduces either a political subject or a literal, medicalized entity. Neither of these frameworks gives sufficient credit to the vast array of literary and oral traditions emerging from religious cultures around the world that see within the fetus a symbol, a metaphor, an imagination. The editors maintain that the fetus has been hijacked by two dominant and powerful modes’the political and the medical’and the potential of the fetus as symbol to serve as a gateway to imagination has been reduced as a result. This volume grows out of the acknowledgment of the fact that, throughout much of human history and across most of the world’s cultures, when the fetus was imagined, it enjoyed a much wider range of symbolic and cultural subjectivities, often contributing possibilities of inclusivity, emergence, liminality, and transformation. The purpose of this book is to restore the nuance of fetal symbolism and liberate it from the stultifying parameters of the abortion/embryonic stem cell debate, giving it room once again to function as a symbol of greater and more complex human emotions, dilemmas, and aspirations.
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Front Matter
- Introduction: Restoring Nuance to Imagining the Fetus
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The Story of Saṃkarṣaṇa’s and Kṛṣṇa’s Births: A Drama Involving Embryos
André Couture
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The Great Men of Jainism In Utero: A Survey
Eva De Clercq
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A Womb with a View: The Buddha’s Final Fetal Experience
Vanessa R. Sasson
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Life in the Womb: Conception and Gestation in Buddhist Scripture and Classical Indian Medical Literature
Robert Kritzer
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Philosophical Embryology: Buddhist Texts and the Ritual Construction of a Fetus
Justin Thomas McDaniel
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Tibetan Buddhist Narratives of the Forces of Creation
Frances Garrett
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Female Feticide in the Punjab and Fetus Imagery in Sikhism
Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh
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Embryology in Babylonia and the Bible
Marten Stol
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The Leaping Child: Imagining the Unborn in Early Christian Literature
Catherine Playoust andEllen Bradshaw Aitken
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“Famous” Fetuses in Rabbinic Narratives
Gwynn Kessler
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A Prophet Emerging: Fetal Narratives in Islamic Literature
Daniel C. Peterson
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The Colossal Fetuses of La Venta and Mesoamerica’s Earliest Creation Story
Carolyn E. Tate
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Out of Place: Fetal References in Japanese Mythology and Cultural Memory
Jane Marie Law
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Seeing Like a Family: Fetal Ultrasound Images and Imaginings of Kin
Sallie Han
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End Matter
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