Self-alteration: how people change themselves across cultures

Abstract

"Contemporary life across the globe is awash with activities, enterprises, and programs that purport to enable self-transformation. But how easy is it for people to alter themselves? Self-Alteration: How People Change Themselves across Cultures explores cross-cultural processes of self-change, as well as their related existential dilemmas. Focusing on projects, practices, and contexts of self-alteration, the authors in this volume create models for cross-cultural analysis of self-change that leads to fresh ways of addressing the "self" itself. Its essays begin with social processes that reveal how the self acquires a non-trivial new meaning in and through its very process of alteration. This volume shows that, once self-alteration becomes an explicit focus of study, exciting new themes appear for investigation. The essays identify a number of modalities, methods, and mechanisms through which people seek to alter themselves. These include self-alteration via engagement with religious and spiritual traditions and innovations; self-alteration through embodied participation in therapeutic programs, including gendered care services; self-alteration by involvement in political activism; and self-change through relationships with the "more-than-human.""--