書訊：Parasites, Worms, and the Human Body in Religion and Culture @ 歷史學X醫療史新時代

版主：感謝黃文儀小姐提供的新書訊，可以稱之為寄生蟲與蟲子：宗教與文化的身體史。

Parasites, Worms , and the Human Body
in Religion and Culture

Brenda Gardenour (Author, Editor), Misha Tadd
(Author, Editor)

Hardcover: 228 pages

Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing; First printing
edition (December 15, 2011)

Language: English

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15,
2011

The fear of parasites—with their power to invade, infest, and
transform the self—writhes and wriggles through cultures and religions across
the globe, reflecting a very human revulsion of being invaded and consumed by
both internal and external forces. However, in ancient China , the
parasitic wasp and the worm illuminate the relationship between the sage and
his pupil. On the Indian sub-continent, Hindu cultures worship Nagas, entities
who protect sources of drinking water from parasitic contamination, and the
reciprocal relationship between parasite and host is a recurring theme in Vedic
literature and ayurvedic texts. In medieval Europe ,
worms are symbols of both corruption through sin and redemption through Christ.
In traditional African American culture, disease is attributed to infestation
by supernatural spiders, bugs, and worms, while in the rainforests of southern
Argentina, parasitologists fight against very real parasitic invaders. The worm
represents our Jungian shadow, and we fear their bodies for they are our
own—soft and vulnerable, powerfully destructive, mindlessly living off the
corpses of others, and feeding on the corpse of the world.

This
book gathers together scholarly research from diverse disciplines, including
anthropology, the health sciences, history, literature, the medical humanities,
parasitology, sociology, and religious studies.

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Brenda Gardenour holds a Ph.D. in medieval history from Boston University
and is currently Assistant Professor of History at the Saint Louis College of
Pharmacy. She has been a Fulbright scholar in Madrid ,
an Evelyn Nation research fellow at the Huntington Library in California ,
and an NEH fellow at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London . Her current
research examines the use and abuse of Aristotelian discourse in the medieval
world and its continued influence on the deeper structures of modern
mentalités, particularly those linked with the horror genre.

Misha Tadd is a Ph.D.
candidate at Boston
University specializing
in Early Daoism. He received a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Doctoral Fellowship
for his work on Heshang gong zhu, a little-studied, but seminal, Daodejing
commentary. Through this text, his dissertation explores the intersection of
body, religion, and politics, and the ideal of harmony between the individual
and society. Currently, he is an adjunct faculty member at Loyola Marymount
University .