A time for change: modes of self-alteration

How and why do people alter themselves? To organize this investigation, the volume has been divided into four Parts. The essays of Part One examine self-alteration via people’s engagement with spiritual practices and religious cultures, where divine actors sometimes help shape persons and events. Essays in Part Two trace out self-change fostered in individuals’ varied participation in political activism. Chapters in Part Three analyse ethical self-modification through subjects’ practices of bodily discipline, as well as through their involvement, willing or otherwise, in therapeutic programs and gendered care services. Part Four’s essays discuss mutualistic self-alteration through intersubjective relationships with self and other, in particular with more-than-human beings. Together, the chapters illuminate a number of profound anthropological, psychological, and philosophical issues concerning self-alteration: the question of its [im]possibility and [un]limited scope; the complexities of its part-enabling by beyond-the-individual beings, historical traditions, institutions, and cultural affordances; and the significance of people’s experiences of, and testimonies to, self-transformation.