Ruth Harris (1) (1958–)
Auteur de Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age
Pour les autres auteurs qui s'appellent Ruth Harris, voyez la page de désambigüisation.
A propos de l'auteur
Ruth Harris is a Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at New College, Oxford.
Œuvres de Ruth Harris
Murders and madness : legal psychiatry and criminal anthropology in Paris, 1880-1910 (1989) 7 exemplaires
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom canonique
- Harris, Ruth
- Date de naissance
- 1958-12-25
- Sexe
- female
- Nationalité
- USA
- Lieu de naissance
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
- Lieux de résidence
- Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK
- Études
- Oxford University (D.Phil ∙ 1984)
University of Pennsylvania (BA ∙ MA) - Professions
- professor
historian - Relations
- Pears, Iain (husband)
- Organisations
- Oxford University
Smith College - Prix et distinctions
- Wolfson History Prize (2010)
Fellow, British Academy (2011)
Membres
Critiques
Listes
Prix et récompenses
Vous aimerez peut-être aussi
Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 5
- Membres
- 335
- Popularité
- #71,019
- Évaluation
- 4.2
- Critiques
- 6
- ISBN
- 69
- Langues
- 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.… (plus d'informations)