Reviews for Soul Spa: Spiritual Therapy for Women in Leadership

The average rating for Soul Spa: Spiritual Therapy for Women in Leadership based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-08-28 00:00:00 Jammin Torres This book was sloppily edited and random in its choices of sources, jumping from portraits to pubs to websites in a way that leads me to suspect that the author found the sources to fit the argument rather than an argument to explain the sources. This combined with some glaring historical inaccuracies and a complete absence of Sikh voices from this 'historical anthropology' of the Sikh diaspora make me doubt the credibility of the study. The book gets two stars however for its discussion of the male Sikh body as the marker of community identity (and thus the target for violence against the community). While there have been several academic studies about the ways in which the gendered body becomes the barer of communal/ethnic identity, in all other scholarly works I have read the focus has been on the female body in this role. And indeed a cursory look around the world demonstrates that nine times out of ten the men in a given community will don jeans and business suits while the women wear 'traditional' garb. This is especially true in the South Asian context which is the only non-Western context I can speak about with any degree of knowledge. But it is also true of Islamic society, which to most of the world is represented by veiled women. My class was able to come up with a few other global examples of male bodies serving as the icon of the community (the Masaai, Hasidic Jews) but this phenomenon has been undertheorized leading to the idea that the female body as the boundary of community is universal, or at leas that if a gendered body will be the icon of identity, it will a female body. This book, however poorly researched, at least opens the door into the possibility of exploring the ways that gendered bodies, both masculine and feminine, serve as markers of community.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-08-02 00:00:00 Mark Proctor Good, but not great. Heavy on theory but light on ethnographic content, most of the chapters were good, but some were very weak (particularly the Glassy Junction chapter, which was honestly painful). I wasn't at all surprised to read in the conclusion that the book was based on fieldwork undertaken for a completely different project, as it had the feel of someone going back through their fieldnotes, attempting to make a lot out of a little. Still, it was very sophisticated, and theoretically rigorous.