Susan Starr Sered
Biographic Data
| ID | 91477 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susan Starr Sered |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susan Starr |
| FAMILY NAME | Sered |
| SIGNATURE | SERED S S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Suffolk University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5348-1624 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 127 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Gender and Religion
Anthropologists conceptualize both “religion” and “gender” as contested cultural categories with constitutive power to shape social normativities. This chapter explores ways in which mutual engagements of religion and gender strengthen the power of both sets of social institutions. On the one hand, gender naturalizes religion. Empirically compelling experiences of heterosexual intercourse and of childbearing present tangible “proof” that religiou…
Cooking up religion
This paper explores how religious sensibilities intersect with the gendering of food preparation in diverse cultures. My own fieldwork with Kurdish Israeli women as well as ethnographic research from other parts of the world reveals both patterns and variations in women’s ambiguous power as food-preparers. Women often predominate in food preparation activities and expertise and cooked foods tend to carry existential and symbolic meaning. However,…
Kasstan, Ben
Anthropos is the international journal of anthropology and linguistics, founded in 1906 by Wilhelm Schmidt, missonary and member of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD). Its main purpose is the study of human societies in their cultural dimension. In honor of Wilhelm Schmidt‘s legacy, the cultivation of anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, and religious studies remain an essential component oft he Anthropos Institute – the organizational carrier…
Beyond Recidivism and Desistance
Reflecting on research following formerly incarcerated Massachusetts women for more than a decade, this paper questions whether conventional understandings of recidivism and desistance are meaningful frames for understanding women’s life trajectories. Drawing on our ongoing ethnographic work we argue that conventional measures of recidivism and desistance tend to (1) overstate the significance of distinctions between licit and illicit behavior—es…
Diminished citizenship in the era of mass incarceration
This paper lays out a model of diminished citizenship as a tool for understanding the experiences of the large population of people who, at least in part by virtue of their relations with criminal justice apparatuses, do not benefit from the full complement of responsibilities and rights associated with citizenship in a modern democracy. The frame of diminished citizenship places mass incarceration within a larger historical and social context, m…
“Suffer the Children”
The opioid crisis and the infrastructure of social capital
Unrequited Engagement
Can't Catch a Break
Based on five years of fieldwork in Boston, Can’t Catch a Brea k documents the day-to-day lives of forty women as they struggle to survive sexual abuse, violent communities, ineffective social and therapeutic programs, discriminatory local and federal policies, criminalization, incarceration, and a broad cultural consensus that views suffering as a consequence of personal flaws and bad choices. Combining hard-hitting policy analysis with an intim…
Criminalized Women and Twelve Step Programs
Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous hold a uniquely institutionalized status within the United States correctional system. Twelve Step meetings are held in rehabilitation and detoxification programs and inside prisons; Courts often mandate Twelve Step participation for parolees; and women who have been under correctional supervision may need to show proof of attending Twelve Step meetings in order to regain custody of their children. Dra…
Whose Higher Power? Criminalized Women Confront the “Twelve Steps”
Drawing on 3 years of fieldwork with a community of criminalized women in eastern Massachusetts, this article explores their ambivalent, often negative, relationship with and feelings about Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous (AA/NA). We suggest that coerced participation in AA/NA undermines any potential value that these programs may have for other types of participants and that the Twelve Step ideology of personal responsibility and turnin…
Gender overdetermination and resistance
This article explores the notion of gender overdetermination in relation to a community of criminalised women in Massachusetts. Re-examining classic writings on overdetermination by Louis Althusser, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, we query the notion of gender overdetermination and posit it as an effective lens for thinking about the persistence of gender as a social construct. The combination of the structural processes of over…
Women and Indigenous Religions
Women and Indigenous Religions, edited by Sylvia Marcos, Praeger: Santa Barbara, California, 2010, x + 256 pp. ISBN 978 0 27599 157 9, US$44.95 (hardback) The academic field of women and religion b
Lessons for Women’s Health From the Massachusetts Reform
Lived Religion
Health Disparities in the United States
Women and Reiki
Holistic sickening
This paper introduces the concept of holistic sickening to the sociological literature on illness narratives. Drawing on interviews with 46 Boston-area complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioners who treat breast cancer patients, we found that the CAM practitioners redefine their patients' breast cancer diagnoses in ways that expand and transform their illness, sometimes into a lifetime journey. The practitioners, for the most part…
Introduction
The practice of assigning gender to artefacts and natural objects is common but not universal in religions. Treating objects, substances, and places as gendered is a form of anthropomorphism that both expresses and furthers gender ideals and power relationships among people based on gender distinctions. The degree to which sacred objects are gendered varies, reflecting how important gender is in particular religious worldviews
Prologue
The articles that comprise this special issue make a convincing case for the importance of anthropological research in the field of gender and religion. Based upon the work of a panel presented at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, these articles demonstrate the anthropological facility for moving back and forth between ‘great traditions' and local conditions. In different ways and in different contexts, these ar…
Taxonomies of Ritual Mixing
Religion and healing in America
Americans have long been aware of the phenomenon loosely known as faith healing. During the 1990s the American cultural landscape changed and religious healing became a commonplace feature in our society. This is a look at this new reality.
Afterword
This article does not have an abstract
Religiously Doing Gender
Anthropology of Religion Section
Holistic sickening
This paper introduces the concept of holistic sickening to the sociological literature on illness narratives. Drawing on interviews with 46 Boston-area complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioners who treat breast cancer patients, we found that the CAM practitioners redefine their patients' breast cancer diagnoses in ways that expand and transform their illness, sometimes into a lifetime journey. The practitioners, for the most part…
Food and Holiness
Techniques et pratiques culinaires, ritualisation et sacralisation d'une activite initialement profane, identite religieuse et religiosite des juives de Jerusalem, alors meme qu'elles se trouvent exclues de la plupart des activites religieuses traditionnelles
Health Disparities in the United States
You Are a Number, Not a Human Being
In the course of interviews with Israeli women who had recently been treated for breast cancer, we found that our informants tended to offer us "treatment narratives" rather than, or sometimes in addition to, the "illness narratives" made famous by Arthur Kleinman. For the women we interviewed, treatment narratives constitute verbal platforms on which to explore what it means to be human during a period in which one's body, spirit, and social ide…
The Domestication of Religion
Analyse de la religiosite des femmes juives orientales âgees de Jerusalem (Israel). Le but de leurs pratiques religieuses et des nombreux rites qu'elles accomplissent est centre sur la protection de leur famille etendue passee, presente et a venir. Cette domestication de la religion (Fustel de Coulange) est a mettre en relation avec le role de la femme dans la famille juive
Women, Religion, and Modernization
Modernization affects the religious lives of women in diverse and dramatic ways. On the one hand, women may find increased arenas for religious involvement, both inside and outside of traditional religious frameworks. Simultaneously, women's rituals and beliefs are often especially vulnerable to attacks from the forces of modernization. This paper focuses on the experience of elderly Jewish women of Asian origin who now live in modern Israel. The…
Women and Religious Change in Israel
Journal Article Women and Religious Change in Israel: Rebellion or Revolution Get access Susan Sered Susan Sered * Bar-Ilan University * Direct correspondence to Susan Sered, Sociobgy-Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 58, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 1–24, https://doi.org/10.2307/3712103 Published: 01 January 1997
Diminished citizenship in the era of mass incarceration
This paper lays out a model of diminished citizenship as a tool for understanding the experiences of the large population of people who, at least in part by virtue of their relations with criminal justice apparatuses, do not benefit from the full complement of responsibilities and rights associated with citizenship in a modern democracy. The frame of diminished citizenship places mass incarceration within a larger historical and social context, m…
Rachel, Mary, and Fatima
Beyond Recidivism and Desistance
Reflecting on research following formerly incarcerated Massachusetts women for more than a decade, this paper questions whether conventional understandings of recidivism and desistance are meaningful frames for understanding women’s life trajectories. Drawing on our ongoing ethnographic work we argue that conventional measures of recidivism and desistance tend to (1) overstate the significance of distinctions between licit and illicit behavior—es…
Symbolic illnesses, Real Handprints, and Other Bodily Marks
Okinawan kaminchu priestesses and yuta (shaman-type practitioners) describe histories of illness on the path to accepting their religious roles. These illness narratives fit a socially recognizable formula for women religious leaders, a formula that shows the Okinawan listener that the teller is a legitimate religious leader. The types of illness, however, are quite different. Priestesses typically report minor illnesses that involve some type of…
Religious Rituals and Secular Rituals
Women interviewed at a maternity hospital in Jerusalem were found to have selected childbirth rituals from a very large ritual reservoir, gleaned from diverse religious and nonreligious sources. This chapter argues that previous studies of childbirth rituals may well have underestimated the extent to which the precise ritual packages of individuals are idiosyncratic. Factors encouraging idiosyncratic ritual selection among the women of this study…
Conflict, Complement, and Control
This article presents a cross-cultural exploration of the interaction between religion and family in the lives of women. It focuses on elderly Middle Eastern Jewish women who, during the course of their life spans, moved from a conflicting to a complementary experience of family and religion. The author argues that opposition between religion and family seldom arises for women who control their own time or resources, or who control a domestic sph…
The Religion of Relating
A participant observer study is reported. It is argued that, for elderly Jewish women in a Day Center in Jerusalem, the mundane relational realities of life are given religious significance, so that relationships become `sacralized'. It is also shown that, for these women, religious duties are couched in relational terms. Relationships are not so much a series of discrete activities but rather the paradigm through which they interpret and organiz…
Cooking up religion
This paper explores how religious sensibilities intersect with the gendering of food preparation in diverse cultures. My own fieldwork with Kurdish Israeli women as well as ethnographic research from other parts of the world reveals both patterns and variations in women’s ambiguous power as food-preparers. Women often predominate in food preparation activities and expertise and cooked foods tend to carry existential and symbolic meaning. However,…
Unrequited Engagement
Husbands, Wives, and Childbirth Rituals
Pregnant dreaming
Rachel's tomb
An examination of records left by pilgrims visiting Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem reveals flourishing themes and rituals during the 1940s. These years were also a time of major cultural upheaval for the Jewish community of Palestine. The author suggests that an increase in pilgrimage to shrines of saints can be seen as an attempt to make sense out of current reality by linking it to sacred history. An important impetus for the development of a pilgr…
Leisure participation and satisfaction in two European communities
Whose Higher Power? Criminalized Women Confront the “Twelve Steps”
Drawing on 3 years of fieldwork with a community of criminalized women in eastern Massachusetts, this article explores their ambivalent, often negative, relationship with and feelings about Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous (AA/NA). We suggest that coerced participation in AA/NA undermines any potential value that these programs may have for other types of participants and that the Twelve Step ideology of personal responsibility and turnin…
Afterword
This article does not have an abstract
Religiously Doing Gender
Religion, Gender, and Okinawan Studies
Rachel's Daughters
The liberation of widowhood
Leisure participation and satisfaction in two European communities
Food and Holiness
Techniques et pratiques culinaires, ritualisation et sacralisation d'une activite initialement profane, identite religieuse et religiosite des juives de Jerusalem, alors meme qu'elles se trouvent exclues de la plupart des activites religieuses traditionnelles
The Domestication of Religion
Analyse de la religiosite des femmes juives orientales âgees de Jerusalem (Israel). Le but de leurs pratiques religieuses et des nombreux rites qu'elles accomplissent est centre sur la protection de leur famille etendue passee, presente et a venir. Cette domestication de la religion (Fustel de Coulange) est a mettre en relation avec le role de la femme dans la famille juive
Rachel's tomb
An examination of records left by pilgrims visiting Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem reveals flourishing themes and rituals during the 1940s. These years were also a time of major cultural upheaval for the Jewish community of Palestine. The author suggests that an increase in pilgrimage to shrines of saints can be seen as an attempt to make sense out of current reality by linking it to sacred history. An important impetus for the development of a pilgr…
The Religion of Relating
A participant observer study is reported. It is argued that, for elderly Jewish women in a Day Center in Jerusalem, the mundane relational realities of life are given religious significance, so that relationships become `sacralized'. It is also shown that, for these women, religious duties are couched in relational terms. Relationships are not so much a series of discrete activities but rather the paradigm through which they interpret and organiz…
Women, Religion, and Modernization
Modernization affects the religious lives of women in diverse and dramatic ways. On the one hand, women may find increased arenas for religious involvement, both inside and outside of traditional religious frameworks. Simultaneously, women's rituals and beliefs are often especially vulnerable to attacks from the forces of modernization. This paper focuses on the experience of elderly Jewish women of Asian origin who now live in modern Israel. The…
Gender, Immanence, and Transcendence
This article examines the candle-lighting ritual repertoire of Middle-Eastern Jews in Israel. It is demonstrated that the men's rituals sanctify and symbolically manipulate sacred time and space, whereas the women's rituals sanctify and symbolically manipulate personal relationships. Traditional Middle-Eastern Jewish culture is highly sexually segregated, with men and women expressing different values and concerns. It is suggested that the ways i…
Rachel, Mary, and Fatima
Conflict, Complement, and Control
This article presents a cross-cultural exploration of the interaction between religion and family in the lives of women. It focuses on elderly Middle Eastern Jewish women who, during the course of their life spans, moved from a conflicting to a complementary experience of family and religion. The author argues that opposition between religion and family seldom arises for women who control their own time or resources, or who control a domestic sph…
Women As Ritual Experts
Women as Ritual Experts reveals how in gender segregated religions like Orthodox Judaism women develop their own autonomous religious sphere and activities that sacralize female roles. Until recently, this female world of religion has been all but invisible to both anthropologists and scholars of religion, who typically speak as though the male sphere of religion were the only definition of religion or the sacred. By exploring this separate spher…
Tradition, Innovation, Conflict
Pregnant dreaming
Rachel's Daughters
Religious Rituals and Secular Rituals
Women interviewed at a maternity hospital in Jerusalem were found to have selected childbirth rituals from a very large ritual reservoir, gleaned from diverse religious and nonreligious sources. This chapter argues that previous studies of childbirth rituals may well have underestimated the extent to which the precise ritual packages of individuals are idiosyncratic. Factors encouraging idiosyncratic ritual selection among the women of this study…
Women as Ritual Experts
Journal Article Women as Ritual Experts, by Susan Starr Sered. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, 174 pp. $32.50 Get access Reia Geffen Monson Reia Geffen Monson Gratz College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 54, Issue 4, Winter 1993, Pages 439–440, https://doi.org/10.2307/3711795 Published: 01 December 1993
Husbands, Wives, and Childbirth Rituals
Ideology, Autonomy, and Sisterhood
All known women's religions provide transient help for specific women. Some women's religions also affect, or at least work toward, permanent and structural advantages to women as a group. A variety of factors explain these two models. Those women's religions that offer long-term collective betterment for women tend to be situated in societies in which women form ongoing 'sisterhoods,' in which women have autonomy regarding their own sexuality an…
Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister
Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister
Conversations with Rabbanit Zohara
Journal Article Conversations with Rabbanit Zohara: An Exploration of Gender and Religious Autobiography Get access Susan Starr Sered Susan Starr Sered Susan Starr Sered is a member of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel Acknowledgment I would like to thank Vanessa Ochs for sharing her ideas with me Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American A…
Women as Ritual Experts
Women as Ritual Experts reveals how in gender segregated religions like Orthodox Judaism women develop their own autonomous religious sphere and activities that sacralize female roles. Until recently, this female world of religion has been all but invisible to both anthropologists and scholars of religion, who typically speak as though the male sphere of religion were the only definition of religion or the sacred. By exploring this separate spher…
Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister
This book provides an examination of the critical impact of the social rather than the biological aspects of motherhood on women's religions. Women's social roles as nurturers, healers, primary child care providers, and emotional supporters are celebrated in women's religions more so than in traditional religions. This book explores the shared experiences of women across great cultural divides and offers a new understanding of the role gender pla…
Conclusion
This book has proposed two conditions sufficiently widespread to account for the patterns or motifs that we might uncover in women's religions situated in dissimilar cultural contexts: patriarchy and motherhood. It has also argued that women's religions tend to occur in societies characterized by a relatively high level of autonomy for women. Most of the patterns described in this book can be understood as functions of women's social role as moth…
The Examples
Women's religions are, from a cross-cultural perspective, anomalous. Most of the religions of the world are dominated by men. This chapter presents twelve examples of religions dominated by women. First, it points out ways in which these religions differ from one another. Some of the examples are self-consciously independent religions that exist in a society where the dominant religion is male dominated (Feminist Spirituality, Afro-Brazilian reli…
Sociology (52 works) · History (30 works) · Philosophy (28 works) · Gender Studies (22 works) · Political science (21 works) · Religious studies (19 works) · Anthropology (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (16 works) · Psychology (16 works)