Celebrates body decorations through color photographs and commentaries that describe the evolution of different practices throughout history and its role in specific special occasions.

Man is distinguished from animals by a self-retouching impulse, an urge to remake his own body. This book surveys and illustrates the different kinds of body decoration, such as painting, make-up, tattooing, and scarring, which have been practiced all over the world from prehistoric times to the Body Art and cosmetics of today. The social implications are spelled out in detail.

This exciting collection of work from leading feminist scholars including Elspeth Probyn, Penelope Deutscher and Chantal Nadeau engages with and extends the growing feminist literature on lived and imagined embodiment and argues for consideration of the skin as a site where bodies take form - already written upon but open to endless re-inscription. Individual chapters consider such issues as the significance of piercing, tattooing and tanning, the assault of self harm upon the skin, the relation between body painting and the land among the indigenous people of Australia and the cultural economy of fur in Canada. Pierced, mutilated and marked, mortified and glorified, scarred by disease and stretched and enveloping the skin of another in pregnancy, skin is seen here as both a boundary and a point of connection - the place where one touches and is touched by others; both the most private of experiences and the most public marker of a raced, sexed and national history.

Graham McAleer’s Erich Przywara and Postmodern Natural Law is the first work to present in an accessible way the thinking of Erich Przywara (1889-1972) for an English-speaking audience. Przywara’s work remains little known to a broad Catholic audience, but it had a major impact on many of the most celebrated theologians of the twentieth century, including Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, Edith Stein, and Karl Barth. Przywara’s ground-breaking text Analogia Entis (The analogy of being) brought theological metaphysics into the modern era. While the concept of "analogy of being" is typically understood in static terms, McAleer explores how Przywara transformed it into something dynamic. McAleer shows the extension of Przywara’s thought into a range of disciplines: from a new theory of natural law to an explanation of how misunderstanding the analogy of being lies at the foundation of the puzzles of modernity and postmodernity. He demonstrates, through Przywara’s conceptual framework, how contemporary moral problems, such as those surrounding robots, Islam and sumptuary laws, Nazism (including fascism and race), embryos, migration, and body modification, among others, are shaped by the failure of Western thought to address metaphysical quandaries. McAleer updates Przywara for a new audience searching for solutions to the failing humanism of the current age. This book will be of interest to intellectuals and scholars in a wide range of disciplines within philosophy or theology, and will appeal especially to those interested in systematic and moral theology.

This is the first general monograph on ancient Greek dress in English to be published in more than a century. By applying modern dress theory to the ancient evidence, this book reconstructs the social meanings attached to the dressed body in ancient Greece. Whereas many scholars have focused on individual aspects of ancient Greek dress, from the perspectives of literary, visual, and archaeological sources, this volume synthesizes the diverse evidence and offers fresh insights into this essential aspect of ancient society.

The human body is both the site of lived experiences and a means of communicating those experiences to a diverse audience. Hominins have been culturing their bodies, that is adding social and cultural meaning through the use pigments and objects, for over 100,000 years. There is archaeological evidence for practices of adornment of the body by late Pleistocene and early Holocene hominins, including personal ornaments, clothing, hairstyles, body painting, and tattoos. These practices have been variously interpreted to reflect differences such as gender, status, and ethnicity, to attract or intimidate others, and as indices of a symbolically mediated self and personal identity. These studies contribute to a novel and growing body of evidence for diversity of cultural expression in the past, something that is a hallmark of human cultures today.

Though stressing that Flannery O'Connor was first and foremost a writer of fiction, John Desmond maintains in Risen Sons that her orthodox Catholic theology stands at the center of her vision, providing the metaphysical base from which the fiction evolved. Given this religious context, Desmond contends that O'Connor's stated view of fiction-writing as an "incarnational act" suggests a direct connection between the practice of fiction-writing and the Incarnation of Christ--the pivotal historic event which her fiction seeks to imitate and through which her vision is revealed. O'Connor's attempts to create images that would connect the Incarnation with fictional incarnation, Mystery with mystery, were not immediately realized in her early works. It was only with Wise Blood that she came to recognize Christian historical vision as her particular fictional subject and the analogical method as the appropriate fictional strategy. This discovery made possible the convergence of her metaphysics, historical vision, and artistic technique, providing the thematic and structural basis for the quality of "unique wholeness" that distinguishes all her works. Desmond suggests that O'Connor achieved the fullest development of her analogical vision and most complete identification of thought and technique in her novel The Violent Bear It Away. Her dramatic rendering of the route Tarwater takes before he can comprehend the transcendent, mysterious source of personality and the meaning of personhood in history parallels the actions of Christ, embodying O'Connor's complex and dramatic vision of the mind's engagement with history in all its ultimate extensions of meaning.