Imagery, Ritual, and Birth: Ontology between the Sacred and the Secular

About the Book

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. Contemporaryartists 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.

Table of 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

About the Author :
Anna Hennessey, PhD, is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley.

Review :
Anna M. Hennessey's book functions as an excellent account of the social ontology of birth, as well as of birth practices, rituals, and objects---that is, their social meanings and how these meanings come into being and sometimes change. Hennessey's work not only comprises a novel and fascinating social ontology of birth and birth processes, but also serves to challenge what Searle and others, in the context of philosophy of mind, treat as a legitimate object of consciousness. Ripe with striking images of artifacts used as sacred objects in birth and often demonstrating explicit female and reproductive imagery, Imagery, Ritual, and Birth explores both art about birth and art used in birth to reinforce the power and significance of this rite of passage for understanding lived religious experience. . . The particular focus of Hennessey’s study and the multi-leveled argument she makes mean that her audience has the potential to be much wider than one might first assume. Scholars interested in religious art and artifact will find the discussion of shifting ontologies engaging and scholars of motherhood, birth, and women in religion will appreciate the careful attention to women’s subjective experience and the significance of the childbirth rite of passage. All scholars of religion would do well to heed Hennessey’s call to take seriously not only the experience of women generally but also the power and transformative potential of childbirth as a site of religious and spiritual meaning. Imagery, Ritual, and Birth is a hugely significant and timely book, calling attention to one of the most profound set of issues in philosophy and the contemporary study of religion and secularity—the ongoing mishandling of birth and natality—as well as offering its own rich and satisfying response. This book will be essential reading for anyone who takes seriously the theoretical and empirical study of religion, secularity, nonreligion and the sacred, and for those involved in the reshaping of these fields around new understandings of spirituality, worldview and existential meaning and culture. It is also a wonderful read, and will engage and reward scholars and students at all levels. This diverse and multicultural examination of the contemporary movement by women, men gender-non-conforming individuals and communities to re-sacralize the birthing body provides a profound and detailed examination of the loss of birthing imagery in the modern West - and the efforts of contemporary artists, birth activists, women, men and other birthgivers to reclaim it. Her argument for the significance of birthing images which offer empowerment, and support to women and other birthgivers is augmented by the many powerful images of birth and pregnancy drawn from Asian, African, European, Meso-American and Indigenous sources.