Ruth Harris (1) (1958–)
Autore di Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age
Per altri autori con il nome Ruth Harris, vedi la pagina di disambiguazione.
Sull'Autore
Ruth Harris is a Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at New College, Oxford.
Opere di Ruth Harris
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome canonico
- Harris, Ruth
- Data di nascita
- 1958-12-25
- Sesso
- female
- Nazionalità
- USA
- Luogo di nascita
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
- Luogo di residenza
- Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK
- Istruzione
- Oxford University (D.Phil ∙ 1984)
University of Pennsylvania (BA ∙ MA) - Attività lavorative
- professor
historian - Relazioni
- Pears, Iain (husband)
- Organizzazioni
- Oxford University
Smith College - Premi e riconoscimenti
- Wolfson History Prize (2010)
Fellow, British Academy (2011)
Utenti
Recensioni
Liste
Premi e riconoscimenti
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 5
- Utenti
- 336
- Popolarità
- #70,811
- Voto
- 4.2
- Recensioni
- 6
- ISBN
- 69
- Lingue
- 7
He was also a man of his time, and Harris does a superb job of returning him to the 19th century. A historian of the Dreyfus affair, she’s on firm ground in the world of fin de-siècle ferment. This was still a time when science and séances, religion and rationality could peacefully coexist.
Born Narendranath Datta in 1863, Vivekananda grew up in a family of unreconstructed Brahmos who moved in Calcutta’s reformist circles, scorning idolatry and untouchability. Still, they gave him a Calvinist education, all damnation and hellfire, that he found inauthentic. Aged 18, a chance encounter with an ascetic, Ramakrishna, changed his life. Ramakrishna’s homespun philosophy, welding the easy enchantment of esotericism with an anti-intellectual habit of mind, spoke to Vivekananda, helping him see through the desultory attractions of capitalist life.
Ramakrishna liked to shock the Hindus with degrading acts unbefitting a Brahmin such as touching excrement with his tongue and urinating from a banyan tree. If this sounds puerile, it was intentionally so. He fetishised the innocence of childhood, living naked and resisting adult sexuality. The point was to lose oneself in worship, to find empowerment in submission.
Vivekananda was struck by Ramakrishna’s devotion to Kali, the exuberant goddess despised by Brahmos, commonly depicted with a lolling tongue and a garland of skulls. On the rebound from the formless, abstract God of Brahmoism, Kali must have made a refreshing change. For the first time, he felt he could take pride in the Indian philosophical tradition. Ramakrishna preached the gospel of Vedanta, stressing the underlying unity of all being. Man and God are one. Dualisms – mind and body; good and evil; man and woman – are illusory. There were days when he woke up as a pious Muslim, or a mad child. There were times when he apparently bled like a woman on her period.
Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.
Pratinav Anil’s Another India: The Making of the World’s Largest Muslim Minority, 1947–77 is forthcoming from Hurst.… (altro)