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The Living and the Dead
Explores the social treatment of death in South Asian religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and other traditions. Includes material on women and marginalized groups.
The Eternal Food
An interdisciplinary study of the cultural meaning and uses of food in India and Sri Lanka, drawing on the abundant commentary by saints, ritualists, poets, and the divine, in both religious and literary contexts. The eight papers, some from a January 1985 conference, Food Systems and Communications Structures, in Mysore, India, focus on the long-term, wide spread significance of food, rather than on caste differences, changing diets, or a comparison between Hindu and Buddhist approaches. Includes a glossary without pronunciation. Paper edition (unseen), $17.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The Indo-Europeans
The existence of an Indo-European linguistic family, allowing for the fact that several languages widely dispersed across Eurasia share numerous traits, has been demonstrated for several centuries now. But the underlying factors for this shared heritage have been fiercely debated by linguists, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists. The leading theory, of which countless variations exist, argues that this similarity is best explained by the existence, at one given point in time and space, of a common language and corresponding population. This ancient, prehistoric, population would then have diffused across Eurasia, eventually leading to the variation observed in historical and mode...
Ashes of Immortality
"At last, she arrives at the fatal end of the plank . . . and, with her hands crossed over her chest, falls straight downward, suspended for a moment in the air before being devoured by the burning pit that awaits her. . . ." This grisly 1829 account by Pierre Dubois demonstrates the usual European response to the Hindu custom of satis sacrificing themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands—horror and revulsion. Yet to those of the Hindu faith, not least the satis themselves, this act signals the sati's sacredness and spiritual power. Ashes of Immortality attempts to see the satis through Hindu eyes, providing an extensive experiential and psychoanalytic account of ritual self-sacrifice and self-mutilation in South Asia. Based on fifteen years of fieldwork in northern India, where the state-banned practice of sati reemerged in the 1970s, as well as extensive textual analysis, Weinberger-Thomas constructs a radically new interpretation of satis. She shows that their self-immolation transcends gender, caste and class, region and history, representing for the Hindus a path to immortality.
On the Name
"The name: What does one call thus? What does one understand under the name of name? And what occurs when one gies a name? What does one give then? One does not offer a thing, one delivers nothing, and still something comes to be, which comes down to giving that which one does not have, as Plotinus said of the Good. What happens, above all, when it is necessary to sur-name, renaming there where, precisely, the name comes to be found lacking? What makes the proper name into a sort of sur-name, pseudonym, or cryptonym at once singular and singularly untranslatable?" Jacques Derrida thus poses a central problem in contemporary language, ethics, and politics, which he addresses in a liked series...
Cooking the World
The fifteen essays collected in this book deal with various aspects of Vedic and Brahmanic ritual. The author attempts to explore the implications of the classical Hindu definition of man: of all the animals fitted to be sacrificial victims, only man can perform sacrifices.
The Empire of Value
An argument that conceiving of economic value as a social force makes it possible to develop a new and more powerful theory of market behavior. With the advent of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, the economics profession itself entered into a crisis of legitimacy from which it has yet to emerge. Despite the obviousness of their failures, however, economists continue to rely on the same methods and to proceed from the same underlying assumptions. André Orléan challenges the neoclassical paradigm in this book, with a new way of thinking about perhaps its most fundamental concept, economic value. Orléan argues that value is not bound up with labor, or utility, or any other property that pre...
Vedic Voices
For countless generations families have lived in isolated communities in the Godavari Delta of coastal Andhra Pradesh, learning and reciting their legacy of Vedas, performing daily offerings and occasional sacrifices. They are the virtually unrecognized survivors of a 3,700-year-old heritage, the last in India who perform the ancient animal and soma sacrifices according to Vedic tradition. In Vedic Voices, David M. Knipe offers for the first time, an opportunity for them to speak about their lives, ancestral lineages, personal choices as pandits, wives, children, and ways of coping with an avalanche of changes in modern India. He presents a study of four generations of ten families, from tho...
Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400-1800
A study of Persian travel accounts, dealing with India, Iran and Central Asia between 1400 and 1800.
Religion
What do we talk about when we talk about "religion"? Is it an array of empirical facts about historical human civilizations? Or is religion what is in essence unpredictable--perhaps the very emergence of the new? In what ways are the legacies of religion--its powers, words, things, and gestures--reconfiguring themselves as the elementary forms of life in the twenty-first century? Given the Latin roots of the word religion and its historical Christian uses, what sense, if any, does it make to talk about "religion" in other traditions? Where might we look for common elements that would enable us to do so? Has religion as an overarching concept lost all its currency, or does it ineluctably retu...
