Self-Alteration

How People Change Themselves across Cultures

Edited by Jean-Paul Baldacchino and Christopher Houston

Rutgers University Press

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.

Anthropology has only recently focused on one of the basic human experiences: that people set out to change themselves, and they do so using the tools that their culture offers to them. This volume presents a rich array of observations around this theme to carry the conversation forward. Tanya Luhrmann, author of How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others

This remarkable volume casts new light on our understanding of selfhood, by looking at the ways different people in different contexts alter themselves. Jon P. Mitchell, author of Ambivalent Europeans: Ritual, Memory and the Public Sphere in Malta

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.

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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