{"product_id":"9780520236561","title":"Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion","description":"\u003cbr\u003eA complex body of religious practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions; a form of spirituality that seemingly combines sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range of physical experience with the religious life—Tantra has held a central yet conflicted role within the Western imagination ever since the first \"discovery\" of Indian religions by European scholars. Always radical, always extremely Other, Tantra has proven a key factor in the imagining of India. This book offers a critical account of how the phenomenon has come to be.\u003cp\u003eTracing the complex genealogy of Tantra as a category within the history of religions, Hugh B. Urban reveals how it has been formed through the interplay of popular and scholarly imaginations. Tantra emerges as a product of mirroring and misrepresentation at work between East and West--a dialectical category born out of the ongoing play between Western and Indian minds. Combining historical detail, textual analysis, popular cultural phenomena, and critical theory, this book shows Tantra as a shifting amalgam of fantasies, fears, and wish-fulfillment, at once native and Other, that strikes at the very heart of our constructions of the exotic Orient and the contemporary West.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of California Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47025960419568,"sku":"9780520236561","price":34.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780520236561_p0.jpg?v=1763709892","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780520236561","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}