Figuring Religions

Description

Figuring Religions offers new ways of comparing prominent features of the world's religions. Comparison has been at the heart of religious studies as a modern academic discipline, but comparison can be problematic. Scholars of religion have been faulted for ignoring or reinterpreting differences to create a universal paradigm. In reaction, many of today's scholars have placed chief emphasis on the differences between traditions. Seeking to reinvigorate comparison and avoid its excesses, contributors to this volume use theories of metaphor and metonymy from the fields of philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology to look at religious ideas, images, and activities. Traditions considered include Hinduism, ancient Greek religions, Judaism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Christianity, and Islam. By applying trope theories, contributors reveal elements of these religions in and across their cultural contexts.
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Wendy Doniger
Introduction by Shubha Pathak

Part I. Figuring Religious Ideas

1. Marking Religion’s Boundaries: Constitutive Terms, Orienting Tropes, and Exegetical Fussiness
Thomas A. Tweed

2. “Epic” as an Amnesiac Metaphor: Finding the Word to Compare Ancient Greek and Sanskrit Poems
Shubha Pathak

3. Conceptions of the Self in the Zhuangzi: Conceptual Metaphor Analysis and Comparative Thought
Edward Slingerland

4. Theorizing Embodiment: Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Comparative Study of Religion
James Egge

Part II. Figuring Religious Images

5. Bathed in Milk: Metaphors of Suckling and Spiritual Transmission in Thirteenth-Century Kabbalah
Ellen Haskell

6. Metaphors and Images of Dress and Nakedness: Wrappings of Embodied Identity
Terhi Utriainen

Part III. Figuring Religious Activities

7. Poetry, Ritual, and Associational Thought in Early India and Elsewhere
Laurie L. Patton

8. Spatial Metaphors and Women’s Religious Activities in Ancient Greece and China
Yiqun Zhou

9. In Search of Equivalence: Conceiving Muslim-Hindu Encounter through Translation Theory
Tony K. Stewart

Afterword by Glen Alexander Hayes

Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Comparative religion
• Psychology

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 02 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438445397
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

FIGURING RELIGIONS
Comparing Ideas, Images, and Activities
EDITED BY
Shubha Pathak

Cover Art: “Angel Caryatids,” photograph by Esther Kutnick, © Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu
Cover Artist: Amane Kaneko
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2013 State University of New York
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For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Figuring religions : comparing ideas, images, and activities / edited by Shubha Pathak.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4537-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Religions. I. Pathak, Shubha, 1972-
BL87.F54 2013
200—dc23
2012009850
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my womenfolk, whose love lives on …
Acknowledgments
T HIS BOOK BEGAN as a thematic paper session that I organized for the Comparative Studies in Religion Section at the 2004 meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Since then, the project grew into an intergenerational and international endeavor that could not have been completed without the efforts of many people. Above all, I am grateful to the volume's other contributors for allowing me to include their work. Among them, I am especially thankful to Laurie L. Patton, who gave me the idea to expand our AAR paper session into an edited volume and who went on to cheer it on at its various milestones; to Wendy Doniger, my then dissertation advisor, who generously agreed to pen her pithy foreword even before the book's contents were complete; and to Glen Alexander Hayes, who provided an illuminating afterword and strong moral support as the manuscript approached its completion under duress. I would like to acknowledge as well American University's Department of Philosophy and Religion for the material and technical support that helped make this work possible—many thanks indeed to Shelley Harshe, the Department's stellar senior administrative assistant, who helped me print and package the manuscript in preparation for its trips to the publisher; and to Bree del Sordo and William Brandon, the diligent graduate research assistants who tracked down much-needed resources for me. Additionally, I appreciate the patience and expertise of Nancy Ellegate and her colleagues at the State University of New York Press as they guided this volume into its final form and brought it to the public's attention. Also invaluable was the frank feedback offered by the Press's anonymous readers, who identified areas in the initial version of Figuring Religions that warranted further reflection and elucidation. For the index, I thank Jim Blenko.
Four chapters of the volume were reprinted, with minor revisions, from previously published works:
Chapter 1 : “Marking Religion's Boundaries: Constitutive Terms, Orienting Tropes, and Exegetical Fussiness,” by Thomas A. Tweed, © 2005 by the University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois. Published in History of Religions 44, no. 3: 252–76.
Chapter 3 : “Conceptions of the Self in the Zhuangzi : Conceptual Metaphor Analysis and Comparative Thought,” by Edward Slingerland, © 2004 by the University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, Hawaii. Published in Philosophy East & West 54, no. 3: 322–42.
Chapter 7 : “Poetry, Ritual, and Associational Thought in Early India: The Theories,” pp. 38, 45–58 of chapter 2 in Bringing the Gods to Mind: Mantra and Ritual in Early Indian Sacrifice , by Laurie L. Patton, © 2005 by the Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, California.
Chapter 9 : “In Search of Equivalence: Conceiving Muslim-Hindu Encounter through Translation Theory,” by Tony K. Stewart, © 2001 by the University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois. Published in History of Religions 40, no. 3: 260–87.
These four essays appear in Figuring Religions with the permission of the University of Chicago, University of Hawaii, and University of California Presses.
In the time during which this book took shape, I lost many loved ones in my matriline, including my great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother. Although I am sad that they have not lived to see this work, it bears marks of the strength and persistence of these remarkable women and is dedicated to them for this reason. I also am indebted to my menfolk—my father, my husband, and my brother—for their unremitting love and unrelenting good cheer over these challenging years. Finally, I would like to thank for their time everyone who has read or will read this book, a collaboration of comparative religion scholars for their colleagues within and without classrooms present and future.
Foreword
W ENDY D ONIGER
S HUBHA PATHAK'S introduction speaks of the earlier wave of comparatists, the worst of whom (the universalizers) tried to reduce various religions to a much too common denominator, and the very worst of whom (the hierarchizers) strove primarily to demonstrate how their own religion was better (which usually meant older and/or Truer) than all the others. Mircea Eliade was the prime mover of this generation of comparatists, with C. G. Jung and Joseph Campbell providing less and less acceptable (and more and more popular) versions of the universalist approach. Reacting against them, a second wave—a generation of younger scholars—sought to emphasize difference (in order not to universalize) and/or cultural context (in order not to hierarchize, but also to nuance still admitted resemblances). Jonathan Z. Smith carried the banner for this generation. 1
The problem of the same and the different had become a crucial issue within the field of comparative religion. My own response to this problem included a challenge to difference and a cautious defense of sameness:
… any discussion of difference must begin from an assumption of sameness; Wilhelm Dilthey has said that “Interpretation would be impossible if expressions of life were completely strange. It would be unnecessary if nothing strange were in them.” 2 If we start with the assumption of absolute difference there can be no conversation….
… Either similarity or difference may lead to a form of paralyzing reductionism and demeaning essentialism, and thence into an area where “difference” itself can be politically harmful. For where extreme universalism means that the other is exactly like you, extreme nominalism means that the other may not be human at all. Many of the people who argued (and continue to argue) that Jews or blacks or any other group defined as “wogs” were all alike (that is, like one another) went on to argue (or, more often, to assume) that they were all different (that is, different from us white people, us Protestants), and this latter argument easily led to the assertion that such people did not deserve certain rights like the rest of us. Essentialized difference can become an instrument of dominance; European colonialism was supported by a discourse of difference. 3
The present volume presents a much more complex response to the problem of the same and the different, and amounts to a third wave. It seizes a moment when the pendulum has swung back again from the extreme emphasis on difference, to recapture some of the good parts of the old agenda of comparatism—without falling into the worst of the deep pits that it dug for itself. I think the volume succeeds admirably. It swings just far enough to make responsible comparison possible, but never sinks into romantic universalizing, let alone arrogant or even just inadvertent hierarchizing. And, by gathering together a team of scholars who study different cultures and, moreover, employ a wide range of different theoretical approaches to comparison, this collection makes possible a far wider scope of comparison than any single scholar could ever responsibly muster. The volume also demonstrates a number of ways to compare not merely texts (in the broad sense of the word—including rituals, visual icons, and media events, as well as words, both written and oral) but also contexts. More precisely, the individual essays compare the relations of texts to their contexts in two or more cultures, an agenda that allows the comparatists to reach a kind of middle ground between old-fashioned morphological comparison and newfangled micro-historical comparison.
This volume also does something more, and important, in advancing the comparatist agenda. The book focuses on metaphor and metonymy, both in theories about comparison and in the precise tropes that can be compared across cultures. The first chapters use the concept of metaphor to illuminate some of the most basic challenges to the comparative enterprise, starting from the realization that there is a natural, but lamentable, human tendency to use our own world as the dominant metaphor for other worlds, so that their gods are more or less “like” our gods, their religions more or less like ours—a tendency that the first-wave comparatists often failed to resist. But metaphor can function in a more positive way when it flows in the other direction, when we allow our own metaphors to be refreshed by infusions of images from other religions. This is one of the many benefits that come to us from engaging in comparison, since comparison functions as a kind of metaphor, a more self-conscious version of the sort of metaphorical thinking that we all do—often unconsciously—all the time. 4
Figuring Religions begins with Thomas A. Tweed's essay, located firmly in the secon