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Renunciation and the Making of Social Worlds

Author:Elizabeth Wilson
Series:Sanctum Studies in Indian Intellectual, Cultural, and Historical Traditions
Binding:Paperback
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About the Book
Renunciation and Social Worlds reconsiders one of the enduring assumptions about religious renunciation: that leaving worldly life means leaving social life behind. Instead, Liz Wilson asks how acts of renunciation create, transform, and sometimes intensify relationships of kinship, obligation, authority, care, and belonging.

Drawing principally on Buddhist and Jain traditions, the book explores the social worlds that emerge around those who relinquish ordinary domestic attachments. Families may participate in renunciation together; ties between parents and children may be reconfigured rather than simply severed; acts of ordination may generate merit for the living or the dead; and celibacy and ascetic discipline may produce new forms of religious relationship and authority.

Moving between historical materials and contemporary practices, Wilson examines renunciation not as the opposite of social existence but as a distinctive way of reorganizing it. Renunciation and Social Worlds thus opens a larger question: what kinds of human relationships become possible when detachment itself becomes a religious ideal?
About the Author
Elizabeth Wilson

Elizabeth Wilson is Professor at Miami University, Ohio, and a scholar of Buddhism and South Asian religions whose research focuses on gender, embodiment, sexuality, asceticism, death, family, and religious practice.

She is the author of Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature, editor of The Living and the Dead: Social Dimensions of Death in South Asian Religions and Family in Buddhism: Buddhist Vows and Family Ties, and co-author of Religion, the Body, and Sexuality: An Introduction. Her scholarship has consistently explored the relationships among religious discipline, embodied life, family, gender, and the social dimensions of renunciatory traditions.
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