Self-Alteration: How People Change Themselves across Cultures approaches the subject of the self and its becoming through the exploration of modes of its transformation, including through religious and spiritual traditions and innovations; embodied participation in therepeutic prorams like psychoanalysis and gendered care services; and through political activism or relationships with animals. The essays in this collection show that both minor and major modes of self-alteration exist in many places and times, and across very different modern societies.
 

JEAN-PAUL BALDACCHINO is a professor of anthropology at the University of Malta in Msida, Malta. He is the coeditor, with Jon Mitchell, of Morality, Crisis and Capitalism: Anthropology for Troubled Times.

CHRISTOPHER HOUSTON is a professor of anthropology at Macquarie University in New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Theocracy, Secularism, and Islam in Turkey: Anthropocratic Republic and Istanbul, City of the Fearless: Urban Activism, Coup d'État, and Memory in Turkey.
 

Chapter 1 Introduction: A Time for Change: Modes of Self-Alteration
Jean-Paul Baldacchino and Christopher Houston
Part I: Religious Cultures, Spiritual Practices, and Self-Alteration
Chapter 2 Exemplary Masters, Exemplary Reeds: Pedagogies of Self-Alteration in Sufi Music
Banu ¿enay
Chapter 3 Re-imagining Self and Self-Alteration in Contemporary New Age, Pagan and Neo-Shamanic Spiritualities
Kathryn Rountree
Chapter 4 Wounded by Grace: Becoming a Prophet in an Evangelical Revival in Solomon Islands
Jaap Timmer
Part II: Self-Alteration and Political Activism
Chapter 5 Fabricating the New Man and Woman: Self-Alteration Through Revolutionary Socialism
Christopher Houston
Chapter 6 Transcendental Terror: Zen Self-Transformation through White Supremacist Atrocity, from Nazi Germany to Utøya and Christchurch
Max Harwood
Part III: Gendered Bodies and Therapeutic Interventions
Chapter 7 Beautiful, Moral, Functional: Bodily Self-Alteration in an Italian Centre for Eating Disorders
Gisella Orsini
Chapter 8 Porous Individuality as Self-Alteration: Commercial Self-Improvement in Urban China
Gil Hizi
Chapter 9 How Is Psychoanalysis a Mode of Self-Alteration? Anthropological Interrogations
Jean-Paul Baldacchino
Part IV: Self-Alteration, The Human, and the More-Than-Human
Chapter 10 Mutualistic Self-Alteration: Human-Pigeon Assemblages in Rural Pakistan
Muhammad A. Kavesh
Chapter 11 Self-Alteration as Human Capacity and as Cosmopolitan Right
Nigel Rapport
Part V: Afterword
Chapter 12 Making Oneself Otherwise: Reflections on Natality
Michael Jackson
Acknowledgments     
Notes on Contributors
Index