Jay Johnston

Subtle transformations: Imagining the body in alternative health practices

This article is an examination of an ancient but widespread model of the body known as the subtle body. Subtle body is a term used to describe a model of embodied subjectivity in which matter and consciousness are not understood as ontologically distinct but as varieties of ‘energy’ resonating at different densities. The subtle body model figures the self as multiple, extensive and radically intersubjective. We argue that this model has much to offer cultural studies but that in order for it to be considered, cultural studies will have to overcome its traditional scepticism, if not outright hostility, to spiritual/religious thought. The article grounds its argument in a study of some alternative health practices, arguing that they represent a popular body practice hitherto neglected by cultural studies.

Shifting selves: the struggle for identity and spirituality in the work of three young women artists

This essay looks at contemporary art works produced by three young women who took part in a research project that was exploring the spiritual meanings of art in the lives of adolescents. Nineteen students were interviewed and we asked them to tell us about their art works which we then analysed in relation to a set of descriptors that we developed defining spiritual symbols and stories. We developed a central term—Connected Knowing—which seeks to appreciate a ‘spiritual rationality’ in works of art. This essay reports on three of these art works and explores the ways in which the artist understands the connections between self and other, self and world, self and community. We used theory on art perception and gender to understand the ways in which spiritual meaning was produced by the artists. A central theme that emerged from the three works was that identity is a struggle and not a given, and that multiple perspectives of self in the development of identity is experienced as a positive embodied value.

The Haunting: Cultural Studies, Religion, and Alternative Therapies

Dr Ruth Barcan is a Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (Berg Publishers, 2004) and of numerous articles on feminist cultural studies approaches to the body. She is currently writing a book on alternative therapies for Berg, provisionally entitled The Body and Alternative Therapies: Cultural Practice and the Boundaries of the Senses. Jay Johnston currently works in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies and the Department of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Angels of Desire: Subtle Subjects, Aesthetics and Ethics (forthcoming, Gnostica: Equinox). Previous publications include J. Johnston and R. Barcan, “Subtle Transformations: Imagining the Body in Alternative Health Practices.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.1 (2006): 25-44.

Stone-agency: sense, sight and magical efficacy in traditions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland

ABSTRACT This article examines the materiality and mediality of sacred and ‘magical’ stones in Northern European vernacular belief practices (especially Gaelic traditions). In particular, it considers their attribution to specific deities and metaphysical beings, their role in healing rituals and in enabling humans to perceive metaphysical realms. The paper’s focus – via methodologies and theories recently developed in both religious aesthetics and ‘new materialism’ – is on the materiality and ontology of the objects and the associated visions and the ‘relations’ such stones are understood to have produced. As ‘sites’ of divine agency and efficacy the stones (including orthostats, amulets and prehistoric flints) were imbued not only with spiritual agency, but also placed within an invisible network of relations that linked individuals, non-human animals, the landscape and the metaphysical realms. This panoply of relations is crucial to the aesthetic logic guiding selection and ‘attribution’ to specific deities/spiritual beings. The theoretical framework for this discussion explores the degree to which such material culture can be considered ‘aniconic’ and the attendant conceptualisation of ‘efficacy’ and ‘agency’ as applied to interpreting the religious function of the stones.

Slippery and Saucy Discourse: Grappling with the Intersection of ‘Alternate Epistemologies’ and Discourse Analysis

Academic work—the production and dissemination of knowledge and the attendant tools, methods, and processes requisite to create it—has implicitly relied on both the concept of mastery (exhibiting expertise) and the concomitant practice of reason. In the wake of poststructuralism, feminism and postcolonial studies, these foundations of academic personas and practice have been resoundingly destabilized. In short, it is now generally understood in the humanities disciplines that academic analysis can no longer simply be presented as a disembodied and entirely objective undertaking. Subsequently, much effort has been directed towards identifying the biases—personal, political, socio-cultural—that covertly and overtly direct the construction of both the theory and practice of academic investigation. For as Michel Foucault (1969) famously proposed, certain unspoken rules exist for any discourse; these rules direct what can and cannot be presented as knowledge as well as what forms of presentation are acceptable within a given context. These rules or conventions create limits to both forms of argument and conceptual proposition. This chapter is concerned with the boundary between what can and cannot be presented as knowledge within the discipline of religious studies,1 particularly

New Age artworks: portrait of a puzzle

The impetus for this project came from a passing comment in Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s landmark book New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (1998). In the pr...

Theosophical Bodies: Colour, Shape and Emotion from Modern Aesthetics to Healing Therapies

Although appearing initially as disparate phenomena, this chapter illustrates that the concept of the body and self developed by the Theosophical Society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided the foundation for the development of a specific type of Modernist non-objective aesthetics and the concept of the self that underpins many contemporary alternative health therapies. All these cultural beliefs, products, and practices are based on a energetic concept of the self that extends beyond the corporeal and presupposes capacities for very particular perceptual sensitivities. Theories of emotion, shape, and colour played a central role in the communication of this concept of self, spirit, and world. Keywords:cultural beliefs; health therapies; theories of colour; theories of emotion; theories of shape; Theosophical Society

The Liber Bartholomaei on the Ascension: Edition of Bibliothèque Nationale Copte 1321 f. 37

This article publishes the editio princeps (with English translation) of a parchment codex leaf belonging to Ms. A of the Liber Bartholomaei. The text is written in Sahidic Coptic, originates from the White Monastery (ca. Xth A.D.), and is now held in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. The leaf includes the ascension of Jesus sequence from the apocryphon as witnessed by the apostles; and the article provides a synopsis of this section in Ms. A with the published texts of Mss. B-D, together with the parallel from the Gospel of the Savior. The ensuing discussion casts light on the redaction history of the LB, the relative worth of the four known recensions (A-D), and the development of narratives about the ascension of Jesus in the Coptic apocryphal tradition.

Portals: Opening Doorways to Other Realities Through the Senses

quality (suzhi). Harbin’s capitalist heroes were thus described as ‘intellectual’ entrepreneurs with college degrees who had made their money through their knowledge in high technology industries (p. 139). Conversely, Hsu’s interviewees thought that ‘getihu could be admired or envied, but they could not be respected because they did not have suzhi’ (p. 138). These collective narratives point to the emergence of a more nuanced social categorisation, where human capital and human quality (suzhi) are increasingly important markers of class and social status. Hsu successfully applies the existing literature on suzhi to explain changing systems of social stratification in China, although her main contribution is perhaps her focus on the entrepreneurial classes, which have become increasingly important social actors and agents of change (Goodman 2008). Hsu’s mix of complex processes of change alongside little vignettes and respondents’ anecdotes give these transformations a human face while also making the book an enjoyable read.