For over a century, the Ihanzu of north-central Tanzania have conducted rainmaking rites. As with similar rites found across sub-Saharan Africa, these rites are replete with gender, sexual, and fertility motifs. Social scientists have typically explained such things as symbolizing human bodies and the act of procreation. But what happens when our interlocutors deny such symbolic explanations, when they insist that rain rites and the gender and sexual motifs in them do not symbolize anything but rather aim simply to bring rain? Beyond Bodies examines Ihanzu sensibilities about gender through a fine-grained ethnography of rainmaking rites. It considers the meaning of ritual practices in a society in which gender is not as bound to the body as it is in the Euro-American imagination. Engaging with recent anthropological and gender theory, this book crucially calls into question how social scientists have explained gender symbolism in myriad ethnographic and historical studies across Africa.

“Articulations and expressions of gender can be destabilising, transgressive, revolutionary and radical, encompassing both a painful legacy of oppression and a joyous exploration of new experience.” Analysing key texts from the 19th to 21st centuries, this book explores a range of British and Anglophone authors to contextualise women’s writing and feminist theory with ongoing debates in consciousness studies. Discussing writers who strive to redefine the gendered world of “sexualized” space, whether internal or external, mental or physical, this book argues how the “delusion” of gender difference can be addressed and challenged. In literary theory and in representations of the female body in literature, identity has increasingly become a shifting, multiple, renegotiable—and controversial—concept. While acknowledging historical and cultural constructions of sexuality, “writing the body” must ultimately incorporate knowledge of human consciousness. Here, an understanding of consciousness from contemporary science (especially quantum theory)—as the fundamental building block of existence, beyond the body—allows unique insights into literary texts to elucidate the problem of subjectivity and what it means to be human. Including discussion of topics such as feminism and androgyny, agency and entrapment, masculinities and masquerade, insanity and emotion, and individual and social empowerment, this study also creates a lively engagement with the literary process as a means of fathoming the “enigma” of consciousness. Daphne Grace is Professor of English, specializing in postcolonial and transnational literature, gender and women’s studies, in addition to British literature of the 19th to 21st centuries. She currently teaches at the University of the Bahamas, and has also previously taught at Sussex University, England, and Eastern Mediterranean University in Cyprus.

The authors challenge theories that put the body at the centre of identity, going 'beyond the body' to highlight the persistence of self-identity even when the body itself has been disposed of or is missing.

A theoretically sophisticated and cross-disciplinary reader in the anthropology of the body.

Johnny Seitz is currently teaching the art of reading bodies at Ryokan College of Psychology in Los Angeles and maintains a private practice. "I have personally and professionally experienced many forms of physiotherapies and psychotherapies over the past 20 years, and all have given myself and my patients varying results. I have found that Johnny Seitz's work is a more "lasered" approach which goes directly to the core." -Dr. M. Adam Sheck, Licensed Clinical Psychologist "I recommend him strongly." -Marcel Marceau, the 20th century's most famous mime "I know of no other method better for putting you in touch with your body, thus pointing the way toward health and fitness." -Richard Pena, Director, New York Film Festival "The interest in Johnny Seitz has been steadily increasing. Johnny presents a meaningful class, with a variety of approaches and techniques presented intensively in a very short time. He has an innate ability to present a class to students on an introductory level as well as those who are already well versed in a field. Mr. Seitz's influence has been deeply felt." -Myra A. Mayman, Office for the Arts, Harvard and Radcliffe Universities

Investigates the politics of women's health and work in early Victorian England, where government officials and reformers surveying the laboring population became convinced that the female body would be ruined by employment.