Anna Hennessey
https://annahennessey.com
Published widely for academic and broader audiences on the topics of birth, rebirth, natality, genesis, and coming into being in the humanities, I am the author of Imagery, Ritual, and Birth: Ontology Between the Sacred and the Secular (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018 bit.ly/2BoLOJu), a book that examines a philosophy of social ontology in the context of birth as a rite of passage. I am also the current director of the Society for the Study of Pregnancy and Birth (https://www.ssprb.org), an academic hub for the study of a wide range of topics related to pregnancy and birth in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and psychology.
My academic background is in the History of Chinese Religions (PhD, UC Santa Barbara), Art History (MA, UC Santa Barbara), and Philosophy and Romance Language (BA, double major, NYU), and I have also continued my research on Chinese religions, including Buddhism, Daoism, and Neo-Confucianism. My PhD dissertation examined the intersection of art, religion and philosophy in the context of China's medieval period. One of my current projects looks at the production of new ideological space related to human bodies and the natural world through art, specifically in the context of medieval China. The project references both the concept of natality (Hannah Arendt) and a theory of space (Henri Lefebvre). An important part of my dissertation revolved around Daoist representation, visualization, and alchemy, which includes discussion of cultivating immortal embryos and transforming symbolic wombs. This interest has impacted other areas of my study on birth and rebirth.
In addition to my academic work, I am an associate editor for Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions (Springer), the founder of visualizingbirth.org, and the co-founder of the sfbirthcircle.org. I have published popular essays for outlets such as Aeon's Psyche Magazine, the Institute of Art and Ideas, the Mission Local, the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper and Counterpunch. I have been interviewed on KPOO-FM, Poor People's Radio, and write more broadly about class equity.
Since 2023, I have also been creating Rebirth Tunnel art immersive installations, receiving a grant from the American Academy of Religion (AAR) to develop one iteration of the project at a regional conference held at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in March 2024. At this time, I am working on two similar installations in the public sphere of San Francisco, my hometown, and have received donations from nonprofit organizations to bring these installations to completion.
Published widely for academic and broader audiences on the topics of birth, rebirth, natality, genesis, and coming into being in the humanities, I am the author of Imagery, Ritual, and Birth: Ontology Between the Sacred and the Secular (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018 bit.ly/2BoLOJu), a book that examines a philosophy of social ontology in the context of birth as a rite of passage. I am also the current director of the Society for the Study of Pregnancy and Birth (https://www.ssprb.org), an academic hub for the study of a wide range of topics related to pregnancy and birth in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and psychology.
My academic background is in the History of Chinese Religions (PhD, UC Santa Barbara), Art History (MA, UC Santa Barbara), and Philosophy and Romance Language (BA, double major, NYU), and I have also continued my research on Chinese religions, including Buddhism, Daoism, and Neo-Confucianism. My PhD dissertation examined the intersection of art, religion and philosophy in the context of China's medieval period. One of my current projects looks at the production of new ideological space related to human bodies and the natural world through art, specifically in the context of medieval China. The project references both the concept of natality (Hannah Arendt) and a theory of space (Henri Lefebvre). An important part of my dissertation revolved around Daoist representation, visualization, and alchemy, which includes discussion of cultivating immortal embryos and transforming symbolic wombs. This interest has impacted other areas of my study on birth and rebirth.
In addition to my academic work, I am an associate editor for Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions (Springer), the founder of visualizingbirth.org, and the co-founder of the sfbirthcircle.org. I have published popular essays for outlets such as Aeon's Psyche Magazine, the Institute of Art and Ideas, the Mission Local, the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper and Counterpunch. I have been interviewed on KPOO-FM, Poor People's Radio, and write more broadly about class equity.
Since 2023, I have also been creating Rebirth Tunnel art immersive installations, receiving a grant from the American Academy of Religion (AAR) to develop one iteration of the project at a regional conference held at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in March 2024. At this time, I am working on two similar installations in the public sphere of San Francisco, my hometown, and have received donations from nonprofit organizations to bring these installations to completion.
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This video explores how through their representations of birth, modern and contemporary Catalan artists have captured a spirit of the eternal return in the physical form of art. Catalan art-making about birth coincides with a shared interest among Catalan artists in representing cultural and personal renewals and the beginnings of new life that take place after destruction. The video traces different themes of birth as they appear in the art of five Catalan artists working over the course of Catalonia’s tumultuous past century. These artists, who represent a diversity of style, medium, politics and personality, include Eugènia Balcells (b.1942), Xicu Cabanyes (b.1946), Mari Chordà (b.1942), Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) and Joan Miró (1893-1983).
Books by Anna Hennessey
Reviews of my book: "Imagery, Ritual, and Birth" by Anna Hennessey
Dissertation by Anna Hennessey
This thesis asserts that Song Chinese people used art and other material objects not only for the purpose of representing the world in which they lived, but also as a means of expressing, developing and empowering their religions and ideologies. So powerful were these material representations, in fact, that in certain cases they may have acted as a primary conduit through which the religion was experienced. As the dissertation will show, the interaction between the non-material activity of visualization, or how people create images in their minds, and representation, or how people create material objects to reify the images in their minds, is often pivotal, as opposed to accessory, to some of the later ideological developments of the Chinese people.
This thesis also examines sacred space of the Song period, theorizing that an important spatial synergy took place between physical representations and the religions of medieval China: images had become intertwined with how different groups of people visualized their bodies, as well as how these groups represented a human relationship at work with the natural world. In essence, Song representations of mountains, landscape and other natural formations act as material records of how people visualized their own bodies in microcosmic and macrocosmic form."
Book Chapter by Anna Hennessey
Articles and Essays by Anna Hennessey
The word ‘propaganda’ comes from the Latin propagare, which simply means ‘to spread’ or ‘propagate’, and finds its origins in the context of furthering Catholic missionary activity. However, its contemporary usage connotes the spreading of an idea or ideology through any means, often of a negative, manipulative nature. Some therefore view the concept of ‘positive propaganda’ as an oxymoron due to the word’s association with manipulation. However, propaganda can also bring about a real transformation of a public mindset for the good. Martin Luther King Jr believed in the need for positive propaganda, as did W E B Du Bois, the latter of whom spoke of propaganda’s power in the arts. The intelligent use of words and images is of central importance to these undertakings.
Proceedings from the 2019 annual conference of the International Society for Information Studies (IS4SI), held at UC Berkeley, 2-6 June 2019.
This paper investigates how new social ontologies emerge when individuals and social groups from around the world utilize technology to promote the use of religious, secular, and re-sacralized imagery in preparation for birth as a rite of passage. In particular, the paper looks at how these participants share religious and nonreligious imagery related to birth through websites, social media, multimedia exhibitions, and other formats, examining how the imagery is used to construct meaning around the topics of birth and ritual. This social ontology of birth shows how humans utilize technology to create new meaning related to the birthing body.
This video explores how through their representations of birth, modern and contemporary Catalan artists have captured a spirit of the eternal return in the physical form of art. Catalan art-making about birth coincides with a shared interest among Catalan artists in representing cultural and personal renewals and the beginnings of new life that take place after destruction. The video traces different themes of birth as they appear in the art of five Catalan artists working over the course of Catalonia’s tumultuous past century. These artists, who represent a diversity of style, medium, politics and personality, include Eugènia Balcells (b.1942), Xicu Cabanyes (b.1946), Mari Chordà (b.1942), Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) and Joan Miró (1893-1983).
This thesis asserts that Song Chinese people used art and other material objects not only for the purpose of representing the world in which they lived, but also as a means of expressing, developing and empowering their religions and ideologies. So powerful were these material representations, in fact, that in certain cases they may have acted as a primary conduit through which the religion was experienced. As the dissertation will show, the interaction between the non-material activity of visualization, or how people create images in their minds, and representation, or how people create material objects to reify the images in their minds, is often pivotal, as opposed to accessory, to some of the later ideological developments of the Chinese people.
This thesis also examines sacred space of the Song period, theorizing that an important spatial synergy took place between physical representations and the religions of medieval China: images had become intertwined with how different groups of people visualized their bodies, as well as how these groups represented a human relationship at work with the natural world. In essence, Song representations of mountains, landscape and other natural formations act as material records of how people visualized their own bodies in microcosmic and macrocosmic form."
The word ‘propaganda’ comes from the Latin propagare, which simply means ‘to spread’ or ‘propagate’, and finds its origins in the context of furthering Catholic missionary activity. However, its contemporary usage connotes the spreading of an idea or ideology through any means, often of a negative, manipulative nature. Some therefore view the concept of ‘positive propaganda’ as an oxymoron due to the word’s association with manipulation. However, propaganda can also bring about a real transformation of a public mindset for the good. Martin Luther King Jr believed in the need for positive propaganda, as did W E B Du Bois, the latter of whom spoke of propaganda’s power in the arts. The intelligent use of words and images is of central importance to these undertakings.
Proceedings from the 2019 annual conference of the International Society for Information Studies (IS4SI), held at UC Berkeley, 2-6 June 2019.
This paper investigates how new social ontologies emerge when individuals and social groups from around the world utilize technology to promote the use of religious, secular, and re-sacralized imagery in preparation for birth as a rite of passage. In particular, the paper looks at how these participants share religious and nonreligious imagery related to birth through websites, social media, multimedia exhibitions, and other formats, examining how the imagery is used to construct meaning around the topics of birth and ritual. This social ontology of birth shows how humans utilize technology to create new meaning related to the birthing body.
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A growing body of research in fields across the sciences has shown the profound impact that early parent-child relationships have on the physical, social, emotional and psychological developments of children. On a primary level, the architecture of a child’s brain is significantly affected by social experiences with parents and caregivers during the first three years of life. In Families of Virtue, Erin Cline addresses the importance of these findings and relates them to Chinese philosophy, exploring how early Confucian thinkers emphasized a critical connection between parent-child relationships and human development, especially as pertains to moral development. Cline’s work shows that the Confucian treatment of these relationships is a philosophical aspect of which we do not find exact parallels in either canonical Western philosophy or contemporary feminism. Going beyond the philosophical, however, Cline also promotes the practical use of Confucian ideas to influence policy change and to transform cultural views more broadly on the topic of early parent-child relationships. Successfully highlighting how a child’s early development is foundational in the making of a moral human being, this book is an important contribution to philosophy and other disciplines within the humanities.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) published a copy of this report in its archive of Experience Reports on virtual conferences. ACM's archive was created to help those needing to quickly restructure their conferences.
This talk examined the work of Eugènia Balcells and Mari Chordà, two contemporary female Catalan artists, focusing on how cultural and personal memory, as well as the concept of rebirth, are key to understanding their work. The talk included a discussion of the historical and cultural contexts in which the artists were living, which had a major impact on their work. Research on the two artists is part of a broader project that looks closely at themes of birth and rebirth in the context of Catalan art and identity.
In the material culture of Song China (960–1279 CE), a synthesis of the human body with mountains and the natural world emerges in the paintings of monumental landscape artists, the writings and paintings of the Chinese literati, Neo-Confucian architectural developments on sacred mountains, Chan Buddhist art, and Daoist alchemical body charts. This paper looks at how mountain-body representations emerged specifically in the visual contexts of Song landscape painting and Daoist alchemical diagrams (or maps tu圖).
See full video link below (Vimeo)
This talk examines how some artists working within the political sphere of China's Song period represented a merging of human bodies and mountains in their artwork, and how Confucian and Neo-Confucian thought of the time influenced their artistic production. Additionally, the research explores how during the Song period, Neo-Confucians built or restored academies in geographical locations that had previously been considered sacred within the religious and philosophical traditions of Buddhism and Daoism.
This talk examines collective intentionality, one of the three fundamental elements in a classic theory of social ontology, and how we locate its emergence in the way that individuals and social groups transform the meaning of art and other objects used in the context of contemporary birth rituals. In this context, religious art and other objects often undergo an ontological transformation during the rituals of birth when participants secularize them, marking them with new status functions that diverge from their original functions as religious objects. However, some of these same objects are then re-sacralized when used ritualistically during birth. In these cases, the social ontology of the object shifts away from that of a religious or secular identification, collectively recognized instead as encompassing sacred meaning. This sacredness is not part of the object’s original symbolic function as a religious object, however. Instead, the object is re-sacralized and takes on a new ontological status associated with a collective understanding that the nonreligious act of birth is a sacred act in itself.
Born in Barcelona in 1942 during the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1892-1975), Contemporary Catalan artist Eugènia Balcells has since 1968 lived and worked between the United States and Catalonia, calling both Barcelona and New York her homes. Known for her multimedia installations, Balcells exemplifies a Catalan artist whose work looks broadly at a theme of the eternal return: the repetitive intervals of time between birth and death, and destruction and renewal, including the renewal of earth, culture and people. This paper explores how Balcells’ art about rebirth and time emerged from the physical, emotional and cultural tolls of Catalonia during the twentieth century, as well as from the region’s long history of renewal after destruction. Through this theme of renewal in Balcells work, similar to the work of other Catalan artists of her generation, a Catalan identity of rebirth and eternal return after trauma emerges, represented in artistic form. In studying Balcells’ artwork, this paper also examines the history of “the eternal return” in our intellectual history, looking, for example, at the scholarship of Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). Eliade mapped out how humans repeat certain acts, creating a type of existential porthole through which their experiences connect them to a cosmogonic myth or an original time.
This paper explores how through their representations of birth, modern and contemporary Catalan artists have captured a spirit of the eternal return in the physical form of art. Catalan art-making about birth coincides with a shared interest among Catalan artists in representing cultural and personal renewals and the beginnings of new life that take place after destruction. The paper traces different themes of birth as they appear in the art of five Catalan artists working over the course of Catalonia’s tumultuous past century. These artists, who represent a diversity of style, medium, politics and personality, include Eugènia Balcells (b.1942), Xicu Cabanyes (b.1946), Mari Chordà (b.1942), Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) and Joan Miró (1893-1983).
This paper hypothesizes a specific correlation at work between the rise of internal alchemy (neidan 內丹) and the creation of alchemical body maps (or charts tu 圖) during China's Song period (960-1279 CE). Daoists utilized the images to depict the human body as a microcosm that contained inner landscapes of both natural and cosmic dimensions, and even today, the extant of these representations offer their viewers the visualization of a system of microcosmic and macrocosmic correspondences perceived to be at work between body and world. Much compelling research has already been conducted to explain and interpret the meanings of the images. My inquiry is a simple one. Although many Daoists of the Song had moved away from external alchemy (waidan 外丹) to internalize the alchemical process, they also embraced physical representations of the internal process as found in body charts. Expressing mental visualizations in the form of physical representations, such charts thus acted in part to make the internal an external phenomenon once again.
This paper brings to light ways in which a study of childbirth and social ontology have an impact on the philosophy of religion. The thesis of the talk is that certain objects undergo a transformation between religious, secular, and re-sacralized ontologies during the contemporary rituals of birth. In each instance of the transformation, there is collective recognition of a symbolic function, be it of a religious, secular, or sacred nature, as attached to the object. This function does not exist intrinsically in the object. Collective representation of the object's function is public, and we can locate speakers within various institutional contexts related to birth who intentionally convey information to any of a wide number of hearers such that these hearers understand the purpose of the religious object X counts as something that has a nonreligious status function Y in the context of birth (C), thereby assigning new deontic powers to the user of the object in the secular context of birth.
This paper examines an interesting issue that arises in the philosophy of mind when one considers therelationship between mental imagery and the phenomenology of birth. When objects are used for visualization purposes during birth or in preparation for the event, the ontological status of the mental image is neither objective nor subjective but somewhere in between. Sacred objects are often used in this context.
Some philosophers contend that mental content can never in itself be an object. A clear case that mental content is not entirely subjective emerges when a specific type of mental phenomenon, the visualized birth object, is recognized as dissimilar from other mental phenomena (such as memories, dreams, hallunciations, passing thoughts, etc.), and is utilized during the experiences of pregnancy, labor, and birth almost as an external object would be used, though the construing of the object is still of a nature that is entirely subjective. I propose that evidence of how this type of mental content is categorically different emerges in cases where the phenomenology of birth is connected to the visualization of a mental object. Similar cases showing the connection between mental imagery and physiological transformation of the body are available in other contexts, such as contemplative practices, mental learning, and sports psychology. On a fundamental level, however, this paper reveals a crucial way that the phenomenology of birth, a deeply marginalized topic within the area of philosophy, can have an impact on the philosophy of mind.
Iris Marion Young’s 1984 piece, “Pregnant Embodiment” is an important project in phenomenology in which Young points to how the embodied pregnant self, while unified and not dualist in nature, also represents an instance of a body with shifting boundaries. This body is not an object for the pregnant woman. Rather, it is the material weight that the woman is in movement with. Young and other feminist phenomenologists such as Luce Irigaray (The Ethics of Sexual Difference), have developed feminist embodiment theories on pregnant phenomenology, inspired in part by the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), who himself focused on embodiment in The Phenomenology of Perception. In this paper, I am not focusing on pregnant embodiment. Rather, the project is to look at how the phenomenology of birth—the actual experience of the birthing process merges with mental visualization, thereby impacting philosophies of mind. For this reason, I do refer frequently to concepts in the philosophy of mind, and in particular, to classical theories found in analytic philosophy. However, based on my limited knowledge of the field of phenomenology, I would say that Francisco Varela’s discussion of embodiment in the context of Buddhist meditation, as found in his 1999 work, The Embodied Mind, is similar to a type of embodiment described here:
"What we are suggesting is a change in the nature of reflection from an abstract, disembodied activity to an embodied (mindful), open-ended reflection. By embodied, we mean reflection in which body and mind have been brought together. What this formulation intends to convey is that reflection is not just on experience, but reflection is a form of experience itself—and that reflective form of experience can be performed with mindfulness/awareness" (27).
However, my study also examines this embodiment as it coalesces with the physiological experience of birth. The internal observation of a visualized object, as a concept, points to two ideas relevant to the philosophy of mind: First, that the mind can purposefully see an object within its own mental space, focus on it as an intentional object, albeit a mental one, without also seeing a real-world counterpart, an idea suggesting that mental content, which is subjective, has the capacity to be an object in itself. Second, that the mind’s ability to create mental objects has the capacity to relate to the phenomenology of the body, including its experiences of physiological transformation. If there is evidence that the internally observed object is connected to such transformation, then this evidence in turn strengthens the view that some types of mental objects are categorically different both from other mental objects and from objects existing in the external world.
Similarly, if visualized mental images do have the capacity to be intentional objects, then their ontological statuses are quite different when compared to the statuses of either objects seen in the real world or of those imagined by way of hallucination, dreaming, normal stream-of-consciousness thought, etc. It is in these cases of internally observed images, a concept that the visualization of objects for birth encapsulates so well, that the creation of mental images in a concentrated, attentive manner emerges as having the capacity to change both the brain and other parts of the body, sometimes in profound ways. This phenomenological occurrence provides evidence that this particular aspect of consciousness is categorically different from other aspects of it.
The thesis of this talk is that certain objects undergo a transformation between religious, secular, and re-sacralized ontologies during the contemporary rituals of birth. The objects that I am studying often depict birth, or they represent maternal religious figures, such as the Virgin Mary, who are attached to birth in some way. In each instance of the transformation, there is collective recognition of a symbolic function, be it of a religious, secular, or sacred nature, as attached to the object. This function does not exist intrinsically in the object. Collective representation of the object’s function is public, and we can locate speakers within various institutional contexts related to birth who intentionally convey information to any of a wide number of hearers, such that these hearers understand the purpose of the religious object X to count as something that has a nonreligious status function Y in the context of birth (C), thereby assigning new deontic powers to the user of the object in the secular context of birth.
Similar to the way in which secularization of the religious object occurs, there are instances in which the ontologies of these objects shift again, in this case away from a secular ontology and towards a re-sacralized one in which the object functions in a sacred but non-religious way. This sense of the sacred is humanistic and stems from an understanding of childbirth as a sacred or spiritual act in itself. When the object is re-sacralized in this way, we again locate public, collective representation of it in its new form. New status functions and deontic powers are again assigned.
This paper examines how Chinese people affiliated with different religions and ideologies of the Song period (960-1279 CE) utilized artistic, literary and visual representations to merge the natural world with the human body. This fusion of natural and human worlds in representation appears in a variety of contexts, including paintings of famous Song landscape artists, writings of literati thinkers, body charts recorded in the Daoist Canon, and artwork connected to Chinese Buddhism. The paper asserts that Song Chinese people used art and other material objects not only for the purpose of representing the world in which they lived, but also as a means of expressing, developing and empowering their religions and ideologies. So powerful were these material representations, in fact, that in certain cases they may have acted as a primary conduit through which the religion was experienced. As the paper shows, the interaction between the non-material activity of visualization, or how people create images in their minds, and representation, or how people create material objects to reify the images in their minds, is often pivotal, as opposed to accessory, to some of the later ideological developments of the Chinese people.
This paper examines how the content of perception is the object of perception during neiguan 內觀, the Daoist practice of inner observation, and that this understanding of mental content as object has an impact on the philosophy of mind. John Searle’s theory of intentionality forms the philosophical foundation from which I depart. My intent is not to argue against Searle’s assertion that humans can have direct perceptual access to the real world, nor to claim that consciousness exists outside of the brain in an extended way. I examine Searle’s bifurcation of images into the categories of content and object, as well as his division of perception into the categories of the ontologically objective and the ontologically subjective. Certain types of visualized images, I maintain, are part of a third ontological category of perception in which mental content is an intentional object. Furthering the discussion of neiguan, I look at recent studies in neuroscience and psychology that have shown how conscious or directed visualization has the capacity to transform the brain on a physical level, while also contributing to physiological changes in the body. The fleeting mental images of everyday thought, including imagination, memory, hallucination, dreaming, daydreaming, etc. do not have these same capabilities. I contend that these findings support a theory that visualized mental images do have the capacity to be intentional objects, and that their ontological status is neither purely objective nor entirely subjective but somewhere in between.
In her comprehensive work on ritual, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, Catherine Bell describes childbirth and birth rituals as providing of some of the most foundational models for the ritual processes of most traditional or religious societies. Medical anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd has also examined the profound impact birth rituals have within the secular context. From their theories, it follows that how societies experience birth ritualistically is highly influential in the way that those societies develop other traditions. With this in mind, it is surprising that a gap persists in scholarly and theoretical approaches to the topic of childbirth, commonly thought of as coming into being or immanence, and death, the end of being or transcendence, both in religious studies and in other areas of the humanities. In the case of religious studies, research overwhelmingly prioritizes the topic of death over that of birth. We see this clearly when we examine the treatments of both childbirth and death in academic literature, conference topics, and teaching materials. As for philosophy, philosophers have historically focused on universals in the human experience, including the universal of death, but they have given little attention to the biological maternal relation. In the fields of fine arts and art history, the same curious lack of focus on birth exists: artistic representations of childbirth are virtually nonexistent in the context of museum and gallery collections, as are art historical discussions of them, while art about death is easy to locate. In this talk, I first show evidence of this intellectual preference for death over birth. I then broadly map out possible reasons for the occurrence of this status. Finally, I contend that this underrepresentation, as well as the academic prioritization of death over birth, has profound implications, both ideological and actual. The topic of this paper does not represent the thrust of my work but only something I have noticed over the course of my research. My current work is devoted to exploring the philosophical, artistic, and religious dimensions of birth.