At this time of heightened political sensitivities, it may seem
impossible to make serious comparisons among different cultures.
And at a time when human difference is so relentlessly celebrated,
it may even seem impossible to talk about the traditions and
experiences that join us across race, religion, and nation. Wendy
Doniger offers a powerful antidote to the paralysis of postcolonial
intellectual life. In this spirited, enlightening book, she shows
just how to make sense of, and learn from, the extraordinary
diversity of cultures past and present. Tapping a wealth of
traditions, from the Hebrew Bible to the "Bhagavad Gita, " Doniger
crafts a new lens for examining other cultures, and finding in the
world's myths--its sacred stories--a way to talk about experiences
shared across time and space.
"Of all things made with words," Doniger writes, "myths span the
widest of human concerns, human paradoxes." Myths, she shows,
bridge the cosmic and the familiar, the personal and the abstract,
the theological and the political. They encourage us to draw
various, even opposed, political meanings from a single text as it
travels through different historical contexts. And she demonstrates
how studying myths from cultures other than our own can be
exhilarating and illuminating.
Myth, Doniger shows, provides a near-perfect entree to another
culture. Even if scholars such as Freud, Jung, and Joseph Campbell
typically overstated the universality of major myths and suppressed
the distinctive natures of other cultures, postcolonial critics are
wrong to argue that nothing good can come from a systematic
comparative study of human cultures. Doniger offers an engaged,
expansive critical tool kit for doing just that. She suggests
critical and responsible ways in which to compare stories--or texts
or myths or traditions--from different cultures by revealing
patterns of truth from themes that recur time and again.
In this book, Doniger helps expand the arena of meaning we live
in, leaping, in her words, "from myth to myth as if they were
stepping stones over the gulf that seems to separate cultures." She
enables us to see, at last, the "implied spider" that weaves the
web of meaning that sustains all human cultures-the fabric of our
shared humanity.
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