Description: Discussions on non-human animals, other-than-human persons and religion originally emerged within the context of Christian theology, eco-theology and Western-based environmentalism. In response to that, and by adhering to post-modern discourses on, for instance, indigeneity, mimicry and hybridity, the volume explores South Asian cult
Brief description: Fabrizio M. Ferrari is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Chester. Thomas Dahnhardt is Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies on Mediterranean and Africa at the Universita Ca' Foscari Venezia.
Review Quotes:
This book offers a rich discourse of the animal, and brings forth the fundamental reconsiderations of nonhuman and human difference, otherness, and subjectivity.
New Asia Books
Each article in this volume gives us a quick but intriguing glimpse of an often unfamiliar (sub-) culture from a unique angle.
Indo-Iranian Journal
Charming Beauties and Frightful Beasts considers representations of animals in South Asian narratives as subjects, objects, symbols and signifiers. In doing so this edited book poses important questions about the nature of culture itself and the role of power and ethics within it.
The text's concentration on folk narratives, through literature, arts, myth and ritual, is important in making this a particularly valuable contribution to the developing cultural discourse of 'animal studies', paying heed to the south Asian multiplicity of religions and communities. The book's objective to explore the ways in which animals have shaped human paradigms and alternative worldviews is met with rich and varied.contributions.
South Asia Research
On the whole this volume offers food for thought to the current conversation on animals. Even if animal voices still simply reflect human desires and human traits, fortunately for us, some of the contributions encourage us to rethink assumptions that the animal is mute, and its representations merely constructions of the human, as its other.
Journal of Hindu Studies