Alternate Currents | Free Book
In the second half of the twentieth century, Reiki went from an
obscure therapy practiced by a few thousand Japanese and Japanese
Americans to a global phenomenon. By the early twenty-first century,
people in nearly every corner of the world have undergone the
initiations that authorize them to channel a cosmic energy—known as
Reiki—to heal body, mind, and spirit. They lay hands on themselves
and others, use secret symbols and incantations to send Reiki to
distant recipients, and strive to follow five precepts to cultivate
their spiritual growth. Reiki’s international rise and development
is due to the work of Hawayo Takata (1900–1980), a Hawai‘i-born
Japanese American woman who brought Reiki out of Japan and adapted
it for thousands of students in Hawai‘i and North America, shaping
interconnections across the North Pacific region as well as cultural
transformations over the transwar period spanning World War II.
Alternate Currents: Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century
North Pacific
analyzes how, from her training in Japan in the mid-1930s to her
death in Iowa in 1980, Takata built a vast trans-Pacific network
that connected Japanese American laborers on plantations in Hawai‘i
to social elites in Tokyo, Hollywood, and New York; middle-class
housewives in American suburbs; and off-the-grid tree planters in
the mountains of British Columbia. Using recently uncovered archival
materials and original oral histories, Justin B. Stein examines how
these relationships between healer and patient, master and disciple,
became deeply infused with values of their time and place and how
they interplayed with Reiki’s circulation, performance, and meanings
along with broader cultural shifts in the twentieth-century North
Pacific. Highly readable and informative, each chapter is structured
around a period in the life of Takata, the charismatic,
rags-to-riches architect of the network in which Reiki spread for
decades. Alternate Currents explores Reiki as an exemplary
transnational spiritual therapy, demonstrating how lived practices
transcend artificial distinctions between religion and medicine, and
circulate in global systems while maintaining strong connections
with the practices’ homeland.
In The Press
This clear-eyed and exceptionally well-organized study of transnational spiritual therapies will be a revelatory work for specialists and general audiences alike interested in the rise of "new age" phenomena, beliefs, and practices in the mid- to late twentieth century. One of its key insights, that transnational spiritual therapies engage in "particular universalism," (i.e., privileging the cultures and values of the "original" locale while claiming universal applicability), which can result in an erasure or occlusion of influences from outside the original locale, is potentially very useful for studies of a wide range of cultural phenomena.
- Title: Alternate Currents | Free Book
- Author: Steven
- Created at : 2024-10-23 04:22:13
- Updated at : 2024-10-26 16:39:07
- Link: https://novels-ebooks.techidaily.com/210732780-9780824896409-alternate-currents/
- License: This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.