In a way, and in some sense, I do agree with you that one’s acquaintance with a culture is useful in writing about that culture. It is not sufficient, of course (think of the nonsense written by most anthropologists during the last 100 years on other cultures); nor are there any compelling reasons to believe that it is a sine qua non to understanding cultures. However, I am not challenging the …
Is the model of games useful in understanding evolution of some aspect of society? If you use ‘games’ in a very, very general sense (viz. there are players, strategies, end-results, and such like), then it might. There is a flourishing branch of mathematics called ‘Game theory’ that has been used to study many things in nature and society: from the evolution of rules and norms to seeing evolution …
I do not see why I have to study the history of the last 4000 years to understand modern India. To the extent past becomes relevant (my research into some particular question will tell me whether the past is relevant, if so which part of the past is relevant, and how far I need to go in understanding the issue I want to understand), only to that extent do I need to study the past. The general …
About the possibility that I was already ‘westernized’ by the time I became a teenager. Even this question is wrongly posed. I am not claiming that there is some ‘authentic’ Indian culture, which lives somewhere or lived some when in India. Such a culture, even if it exists or existed, does not concern me. I am interested in the Indian culture as it exists today: including the aftermath of the …
I have had difficulties in understanding the use and meaning of some words, especially ’essentialism’ and its cognates. Here are some uses of “essentialism” I am familiar with.
One uses ’essences’ to designate some basic or fundamental or determining properties of an object, as in: “Water is essentially H2O”. Here the claim is that some liquid is water if and only if it has the chemical structure …
X says: if “pujya” means “worthy of worship”, wouldn’t “puja” mean worship?
‘Pujya’ means “deserving of ‘puja’”. If ‘puja’ translated as ‘worship’, quite obviously one translates ‘pujya’ as you do.
You see, what is at stake is not a mere ’translation’ problem. It has to do with how the Indian culture (and not merely this one culture, I might add) has been, and continues to be, represented not just …
It is true that the modern Jewish thought, which is more influenced by the Rabbinic than by apocalyptic or Qumranic literature, places less emphasis on the Devil. Rabbinic Judaism was less interested in building a demonology than others. It is one thing to say this, but quite another to say that the Judaic tradition knows of the Devil only in terms of the psychological ‘inclinations’ in man. (It …
Let me begin by Mujeeb’s objection to calling the Islamic people ‘Mohammedans’. Mujib’s objection was that the Muslims do not worship Mohammed, and Naseem spoke of it as an insulting appellation. They are right, of course, but they did not appear to get the authentic problem posed by a Raghavan and a Seshadri: surely ‘Mohammedans’ are those who follow the doctrines (or teachings) of Mohammed. …
About the multiple meanings for the Puja of Ganesha. Of course, there is no one ‘meaning’ to this act either now, or before, or in the future, as far as Indians (and the Westerners) are concerned. But that is not being disputed. The dispute arises when some meaning is alleged to portray the ’experience’ of a culture, when all it does is distort and deny the experience it is said to portray. …
Some consider it to be a “superstitious practice”, the implication being that it is irrational to believe that dancing causes the rain to fall: no reasonable people on earth can buy the story that dancing actually causes rain to fall. I am not willing to buy it. However, it is a fact that in some cultures people do perform ‘rain dances’. However, to explain the ‘rain dance’ by attributing a …
“Every one of us believes our own viewpoint to be the best one: such is human nature.” This is not quite how I would put it. Let me, therefore say what I think with respect to this issue.
Whenever I formulate a theory, I believe that my description is ’true’. If I thought that it was ‘false’, I would not write what I write. This is a belief about the status of my description and its relationship …
A question: Is it desirable to have a model that can simulate social and cultural changes?
I cannot see what good reason there is not to find it desirable. It would be eminently desirable. It will take some time though before we get there, but we will surely get there. Thanks to computers, we have a possibility of talking realistically about simulation. However, we have to still go a very long way …
It appears that Sir Isaac Newton was frequently complimented for being the greatest genius the world had ever known. One of his replies is alleged to have been the following: “Even a pygmy sees further than the giants if he stands upon their shoulders. And I, Sir, stand upon the shoulders of giants.” The extraordinary humility apart, there is something very important to what Newton is saying: his …
Let us begin in a very intuitive way and ask ourselves this question: where do we encounter ‘cultural differences’? In human contacts, of course. What kind of human contacts? In inter-individual contacts. That is, we see (or sense, or intuit or whatever) cultural differences in our contacts with individual human beings. You do not meet ’the western culture’ but individual Americans, Germans, …
I do not believe that any cultural practice (i.e. a practice that has survived and been transmitted through successive generations) should be explained by attributing beliefs to its practitioners in such a way that the beliefs make the practitioners come out stupid. Why do I say this? There are primarily two reasons: our ignorance and the principle of ‘charity’. Let me explain.
(a) Our ignorance. …
The first point is the difficulty involved in specifying what the “real meaning of an experience” consists of. Asking an insider would not help us here: the insider may or may not know what the real meaning of his/her own experience is or even how to go about putting it in words.
Assuming that the first problem somehow gets solved, the second problem lies in the multiplicities of such meanings: …
The general pattern that has come to the fore is that Wendy and her children (including Jeffrey Kripal) systematically portray the Indian traditions in an unfavorable light, even when compared to how religions like Christianity, Islam and Judaism are portrayed. This claim is made in several articles, independent of whether these religions and the Indian traditions are true or false, whether they …
To begin with, there is the feeling that scientific explanations, with their emphasis on rationality and objectivity, are reductive in nature. Wherein lies the root of this feeling? Let us say that some physical theory describes the motion of a snow flake gently floating down to earth or a rose petal lazily spinning in the air. Or that some branch of human genetics computes the probability of a …
Someone, let’s say her name is Wendy Doniger, comes along and sniggers ‘when you worship the lingam, you worship a phallus’. I do not identify Wendy’s statement as an ‘ad hoc’ explanation. I say that it trivializes what I am doing by providing a distorted description of what I do. Here is what I say: “I am doing Puja to Shiva.” No discussion about ‘Lingam’ or its many meanings. This is a wrong way …
Before addressing this writing to Jeffrey Kripal, I would like to very clearly stipulate some of my basic stances so that the discussion does not get derailed into these issues.
(A) Even though the communication will be directed to the person of Jeffrey Kripal, it is not ad hominem but issue-oriented. However, I will eschew making some kinds of qualifications academics are prone to make, so that …
