Self-Alteration

How People Change Themselves Across Cultures

By: Christopher Houston (Editor), Jean-Paul Baldacchino (Editor)

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Paperback | 8 January 2024

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208 Pages

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15.6 x 23.5 x 2.3

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Many of us feel a pressing desire to be different--to be other than who we are. Self-conscious, we anxiously perceive our shortcomings or insufficiencies, wondering why we are how we are, and whether we might be different. Often, we wish to alter ourselves, to change our relationships, and to transform the person we are IN those relationships. Not only a philosophical question about how other people change, self-alteration is also a practical care--can *I* change, and how? Self-Alteration: How People Change Themselves across Cultures explores and analyses these apparently universal hopes and their related existential dilemmas. The essays here come at the subject of the self and its becoming through case studies of modes of transformation of the self. They do this with social processes and projects that reveal how the self acquires a non-trivial new meaning in and through its very process of alteration. By focusing on ways we are allowed to change ourselves, including through religious and spiritual traditions and innovations; embodied participation in therapeutic programs like psychoanalysis and gendered care services; and through political activism or relationships with animals, the authors in this volume create a model for cross-cultural or global analysis of social-self change that leads to fresh ways of addressing the 'self' itself.

Industry Reviews

"Anthropology has only recently focused on one of the basic human experiences: that people set out to change themselves, and they do so using the tools that their culture offers to them. This volume presents a rich array of observations around this theme to carry the conversation forward." -- Tanya Luhrmann * author of How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others *
"This remarkable volume casts new light on our understanding of selfhood, by looking at the ways different people in different contexts alter themselves." -- Jon P. Mitchell * author of Ambivalent Europeans: Ritual, Memory and the Public Sphere in Malta *

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