In contemporary Western culture, the word “fetus” introduces either a political subject or a literal, medicalized entity. Neither of these frameworks gives sufficient credit to the vast array of literary and oral traditions emerging from religious cultures around the world that see within the fetus a symbol, a metaphor, an imagination. The editors maintain that the fetus has been hijacked by two dominant and powerful modes’the political and the medical’and the potential of the fetus as symbol to serve as a gateway to imagination has been reduced as a result. This volume grows out of the acknowledgment of the fact that, throughout much of human history and across most of the world’s cultures, when the fetus was imagined, it enjoyed a much wider range of symbolic and cultural subjectivities, often contributing possibilities of inclusivity, emergence, liminality, and transformation. The purpose of this book is to restore the nuance of fetal symbolism and liberate it from the stultifying parameters of the abortion/embryonic stem cell debate, giving it room once again to function as a symbol of greater and more complex human emotions, dilemmas, and aspirations.
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Introduction: Restoring Nuance to Imagining the Fetus The Story of Saṃkarṣaṇa’s and Kṛṣṇa’s Births: A Drama Involving Embryos The Great Men of Jainism In Utero: A Survey A Womb with a View: The Buddha’s Final Fetal Experience Life in the Womb: Conception and Gestation in Buddhist Scripture and Classical Indian Medical Literature Philosophical Embryology: Buddhist Texts and the Ritual Construction of a Fetus Tibetan Buddhist Narratives of the Forces of Creation Female Feticide in the Punjab and Fetus Imagery in Sikhism Embryology in Babylonia and the Bible The Leaping Child: Imagining the Unborn in Early Christian Literature “Famous” Fetuses in Rabbinic Narratives A Prophet Emerging: Fetal Narratives in Islamic Literature The Colossal Fetuses of La Venta and Mesoamerica’s Earliest Creation Story Out of Place: Fetal References in Japanese Mythology and Cultural Memory Seeing Like a Family: Fetal Ultrasound Images and Imaginings of Kin
