RELI 189 Seminar in Religion (Spring 2015)

SID# 840752; Dayna Kalleres, Instructor (dkalleres@ucsd.edu)
Email instructor for permission to enroll.

Religious Body

The seminar explores how the human body serves as a medium for religious and ritual experience cross-culturally as well as across history. The body serves as a site and vessel for the split between body and mind (as well as the fusion), a location of sin, virtue, temptation, atonement, redemption, sexual and gendered identity, holy and demonic demarcations in society, etc. In this class we survey the body in several different circumstances: disabled, altered, partial, nude and clothed, sexualized and polluted, perfected and holy to name a few. How does religion and ritual interact with culture and society to situate the human body in all of these ways? We shall consider a variety of materials in our exploration: literature and religious texts, art, film, radio podcasts, internet.