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Curiously, I'd never heard of Ms. Doniger until I saw an article in the NYTimes about her involvement in a mini-controversy; some folks are apparently upset that a white woman is such an expert in Sanskrit religious texts and their interpretation. Immediately I bought a couple of her titles, and I've flown through half of The Implied Spider in two hours. Exquisitely written, witty, erudite, and unafraid to mix pop-culture references into discussions of the Bagavata Purana. She tackles big questions here: how to define myth, how to study myth, how to compare mythologies, and her examples are challenging and very enlightening.
We are always in danger of drawing our own eye, for we depict our own vision of the world when we think we are depicting the world; often when we think we are studying an other we are really studying ourselves through the narrative of the other.
--Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider, p. 11
4 comments:
Last night I was kind of making light of this guy and T gave me a hard time...but ended up reading the article and it touches on some very interesting things. No images here but that's what got me into trouble in the first place! Anyway your post made think of it...
Interesting, a lot like a chapter out of Oliver Sacks. Thanks!
I try to explain to my 102 students that what we consider sight--that when we see something--it is only a constructed image in our brains based on a variety of sensory inputs, but I can never make the point clearly enough for them to get it--this article will help.
To play the other side, why even bother to think about it. Get out there and take it all in.
Are you teaching?
And, for no reason at all, sawdust
Hell, no. Not teaching this semester, and I just dropped the class I was taking. Pure, precious laziness.
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