{"product_id":"tantra-9780520236561","title":"Tantra","description":"\u003cdiv\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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\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\/div\u003e","brand":"Hugh B. Urban","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42959970730102,"sku":"9780520236561","price":34.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/ingramacademic.com\/products\/tantra-9780520236561","provider":"Ingram Academic \u0026 Professional","version":"1.0","type":"link"}