Question: “In the context of puja, does Shivalinga denote or connote anything other than Shiva, in particular “phallus”? A Wendy says “Yes”, a Balu says “No”. For some person, not on this board, there is not a dialog; it is a reading of Wendy, a reading of Balu - how to decide between the two answers, which one represents the truth about Hindus?”
Depending on the patience of the visitor, a number …
Let us begin with one of the minimal conditions for inter-cultural (verbal) communication. And that is: people should be able to have conversations with each other. It is legitimate to claim that one does not need to know what a ‘conversation’ is in order to have a conversation. Therefore, whatever else we may want to say, it would be very difficult to maintain that there is no conversation in …
1.1. The inherent logic of such an enterprise forces one, as it were, to build alternate theories to the existing, ‘western’ theories. Instead of explaining this statement in the abstract, let me take a concrete example to illustrate what I mean.
1.2. In the University of Chicago, there is a certain Richard Shweder. He practices ‘Cultural Psychology’, and is (was?) professor of ‘Human …
I would like you to consider the following four kinds of answers, each pitched at a different level of generality and at a different level of description. One could provide more, but these four should be enough to give a taste of the kind of wine you might care to drink.
Suppose that one were to ask you: how to go about doing ‘science’ (in general) or, say, doing ‘physics’? What kind of an answer …
I want to raise three issues: (a) how to analyze what Rajiv portrays about Wendy and her children in the field of religious studies; (b) depending on that, what an adequate response consists of. Before we do either (this is one of the things I have discovered through my own research during the last two decades), we need to be clear about (c) how we should not analyze this situation. Given that all …
