Authority, Anxiety, and Canon elucidates a principle fundamental to Hinduism's self-understanding—the Veda—while at the same time examining the methodological issues of the role of canon in religious tradition. Spanning the early periods of Indian religious history up to the twentieth century, the book combines theoretical sophistication and detailed scholarship to produce one of the first comprehensive works on Vedic interpretation since Louis Renou's Le Destin Du Veda.

This volume contains the papers read at the Leiden Conference on Canonization and Decanonization of 9-10 January 1997. The emphasis in this rich and wide-ranging contribution to the subject is on the processes of canonization and decanonization in several religions and on the phenomenon of religious canons as well. It has two sections: (De)canonization and the History of Religions, and (De)canonization and Modern Society. In the first section processes out of which canons eventually emerge are highlighted in contributions devoted to particular religions, viz. African religions, Judaism and Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. The articles of the second section are of particular relevance to the contemporary situation in the western world, dealing with aspects such as forms of the survival of a canon in processes of modernization, canonization and the challenge of plurality, and canonization and hermeneutics. The reader may benefit even more from this volume as it contains also An Annotated Bibliography on the subject.

"This volume seeks to delineate the history of the production, dissemination, and reception of texts from the earliest pictograms of the mid-4th millennium to recent developments in electronic books."--Page xi.

The Upaniṣads are among the most sacred foundational scriptures in the Hindu religion. Composed from 800 BCE onwards and making up part of the larger Vedic corpus, they offer the reader "knowledge lessons" on life, death, and immortality. While they are essential to understanding Hinduism and Asian religions more generally, their complexities make them almost impenetrable to anyone but serious scholars of Sanskrit and ancient Indian culture. This book is divided into five parts: Composition, authorship, and transmission of the Upaniṣads; The historical, cultural, and religious background of the Upaniṣads; Religion and philosophy in the Upaniṣads; The classical Upaniṣads; The later Upaniṣads. The chapters cover critical issues such as the origins of the Upaniṣads, authorship, and redaction, as well as exploring the broad religious and philosophical themes within the texts. The guide analyzes each of the Upaniṣads separately, unpacking their contextual relevance and explaining difficult terms and concepts. The Upaniṣads: A Complete Guide is a unique and valuable reference source for undergraduate religious studies, history, and philosophy students and researchers who want to learn more about these foundational sacred texts and the religious lessons in the Hindu tradition.

RGVV (History of Religion: Essays and Preliminary Studies) brings together the mutually constitutive aspects of the study of religion(s)—contextualized data, theory, and disciplinary positioning—and engages them from a critical historical perspective. The series publishes monographs and thematically focused edited volumes on specific topics and cases as well as comparative work across historical periods from the ancient world to the modern era.

Cosmopolitan Political Thought asks the question of what it might mean for the very practices of political theorizing to be cosmopolitan. It suggests that such a vision of political theory is intimately linked to methodological questions about what is commonly called comparative political theory--namely, the turn beyond ideas and modes of inquiry determined by traditional Western scholarship. It is therefore an argument for applying the idea of cosmopolitanism--understood in a particular way--to the discipline of political theory itself. As Farah Godrej argues, there are four crucial components of this cosmopolitan intervention: the texts under analysis, the methods for interpreting non-Western texts and ideas, the application of these ideas across geographical and cultural boundaries, and the deconstruction of Eurocentrism. In order to be genuinely cosmopolitan, Godrej states, political theorists must reflect on their perspectives inside and outside various traditions and immerse themselves in foreign ideas, languages, histories, and cultures--ultimately relocating themselves within their disciplinary homes. The result will be a serious challenge to accepted solutions to political life.

For a number of centuries Indian philosophers of all persuasions were convinced that there was a particularly close connection between language and reality, also, or even primarily, between sentences and the situations they describe. This shared conviction was responsible for a perceived problem. Different currents in Indian philosophy can be understood as different attempts to solve this problem; these include the satkāryavāda of the Sāṃkhyas, the anekāntavāda of the Jainas, the śūnyavāda of the Buddhists, and many others. By bringing to light the shared problem underlying almost all schools of Indian philosophy, this book shows the interconnectedness of currents that had hitherto been thought of as quite independent of each other.

How did the Bhagavadgãtà first become an object of German philosophical and philological inquiry? How were its foundational concepts initially interpreted within German intellectual circles, and what does this episode in the history of cross-cultural encounter teach us about the status of comparative philosophy today? This book addresses these questions through a careful study of the figures who read, translated and interpreted the Bhagavadgãtà around the turn of the nineteenth century in Germany: J.G. Herder, F. Majer, F. Schlegel, A.W. Schlegel, W. von Humboldt, and G.W.F. Hegel. Methodologically, the study attends to the intellectual contexts and prejudices that framed the early reception of the text. But it also delves deeper by investigating the way these frameworks inflected the construction of the Bhagavadgãtà and its foundational concepts through the scholarly acts of excerpting, anthologization, and translation. Overall, the project contributes to the pluralization of Western philosophy and its history while simultaneously arguing for a continued critical alertness in cross-cultural comparison of philosophical and religious worldviews.

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance centers on an insular community of Smarta Brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India who are required to don stri-vesam (woman’s guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. Impersonation is not simply a gender performance circumscribed to the Kuchipudi stage, but a practice of power that enables the construction of hegemonic Brahmin masculinity in everyday village life. However, the power of the Brahmin male body in stri-vesam is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian dance form. This book analyzes the practice of impersonation across a series of boundaries—village to urban, Brahmin to non-Brahmin, hegemonic to non-normative—to explore the artifice of Brahmin masculinity in contemporary South Indian dance.

In Hindu India both orality and sonality have enjoyed great cultural significance since earliest times. They have a distinct influence on how people approach texts. The importance of sound and its perception has led to rites, models of cosmic order, and abstract formulas. Sound serves both to stimulate religious feelings and to give them a sensory form. Starting from the perception and interpretation of sound, the authors chart an unorthodox cultural history of India, turning their attention to an important, but often neglected aspect of daily religious life. They provide a stimulating contribution to the study of cultural systems of perception that also adds new aspects to the debate on orality and literality.