Colonialism’s religious domain from The Immanent Frame by Paul S. Landau
Recently I am
struck by the ambiguity of the concept of the religious. Reading Linda Heuman’s review of
Robert Bellah’s Religion
in Human Evolution, and then turning to Bellah’s book itself,
after having been reading Ernst Kantorowicz’s The
King’s Two Bodies, I feel as I have before how uncertain it is that we
who write about religion in history are all writing about the same thing! [...]
The
history of this working-out of religion and not-religion, insofar as we know
it, unfolded from the later half of the nineteenth century, not before. It was
only then that ordinary black peasants in the middle of South Africa midwived
the religious domain among themselves, and the process was (in-line with Paul
Feyerabend’s argument in Against Method) not
instantaneous. After about 1840 one could adopt a new faith and meaningfully
protest that one’s loyalty to a chief would continue; after 1880 one could preach as
an Anglican and be a Sotho even during wartime (never before); after 1915, one
could for the first time be a Christian and Zulu at the same time.
Talal
Asad has
shown how problematic colonialism makes the whole project of
describing what people “believe,” as has Greg
Dening. Among archaeologists, the category of cultic or religious (as
is well known) is conveniently large, good for grouping together objects whose
functions are mysterious. On slender evidence (it seems to me) whole lost
societies are imagined to have operated as religious centers. It has often been
much the same in ethnographies of African and Polynesian societies (on which
archaeologists draw), wherein opaque chains of reference or ritual are grouped
together as religion. My view is they may be better positioned within the
realms of ideology, politics, and art. The danger in factoring in “religion” to
political explanations of preconquest societies is that scholars sometimes
imagine that their own lack of knowledge was a native opacity, and so a source
of indigenous occult power. The sign of their ignorance slips somehow into the
evidence pile.
...the
wide cross of the
universe; To enjoy my agony God built the earth, My passion he has made his
drama’s theme. He has sent me naked into his bitter world And beaten me
with his rods of grief and pain That I might cry and grovel at his feet And
offer him worship with my blood and tears.
Comment on Difference between religion and spirituality by
Sandeep from Comments for IYSATM by Sandeep
Bryan Magee, British writer and politician on the
difference between Western and Eastern religions:
Almost
the first thing a Christian has to believe if he is to be a Christian at all is
that certain historical events took place in the Middle East about two thousand
years ago – that God came and lived on earth as a man, was crucified, and after
three days rose again from the dead, and so on. In this important sense Christianity is a history-based religion:
it centrally involves believing that certain things happened. (Bryan Magee. The
Story of Philosophy, New York: DK Publishing, 1998, p 146)
*Rome: An Empire’s Story* from Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen
That
is the new book by Greg Woolf. Could it now be the best
single-volume introduction to the history of ancient Rome?
The Question of God
from Centre Right India by Vijay Vikram
God is man’s first and longest-lasting devotion
to something beyond him and greater than him. God was the first entity to imbue
animal man with a sense of divinity and divine purpose. If I were to employ
wholly utilitarian reasoning I would say that God should not be sought to be
banished from this Earth as he provides a source of meaning and sustenance for
most humans. To de-sacralise the Earth (not that we have the power) would lead
to an anarchy so dangerous that it would destroy civilisation as we know it.
But, that is an aside. What I wish to say is that it is possible to
passionately believe in thephysical-material non-existence of God
but still believe in the divine and pursue the divine.
Lacan, Anarchy, Masculinity, and Psychosis from Larval Subjects (Levi Bryant)
Now
what is an anarchic ontology? It is an ontology that forecloses
transcendent terms such as God, Platonic forms, a-historical essences,
sovereigns, fathers, a-historical structures, transcendent subjects, etc.
All of these beings are treated as naturalistic, social, nation, and
psychological transcendental illusions (cf. Difference and Givenness).
Within an anarchistic ontology, everything unfolds within immanence, without
anything standing outside of history, becoming, time, etc. An anarchic
ontology is an ontology without fathers; or rather, it is an ontology where the
name-of-the-father is foreclosed or banished both ontologically and socially as
a necessary term. It is a queer ontology.
Hindu ethos: Prevent the loss; retrieve the lost; bring back
glory Dr. Sastry Putcha
But
works like Aurobindo’s “The Secret of the Veda” written about a century ago is
an antidote to such travesties. The Secret of the Veda obliterates the
ignorance about the sublime Sruti. Sri Aurobindo decoded the inner meaning of
the Rig Veda through such tools as philology and etymology. For example, Ashwa
is not a horse but Energy/Force, and Cow means Light/Illumination,
and Soma is not alcohol, but Divine Bliss. The yogi thus fetched the sublimity
of the mystic poetry to the vicinity of a commoner. Vande Mataram and Jana Gana Mana enjoy equal status A Letter From Grandpa By Niranjan Shah nshah32@hotmail.com My dear Nikita and
Sanjna:
On
August 7, 1906, Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) started his paper Vande Mataram,
which became an immortal and unforgettable newspaper in the history of Indian
Journalism.
As
an aside, I always find it amusing when people raised in Western culture refer
to “marriage” as an “institution”. I guess its because over the past 4-5
centuries, people in the West have fought to reclaim their individuality
against the artificial diktats of the Church (no divorce, no sex for
recreational purposes, etc) as well the cumbersome rules of government.
In
India, people see marriage not as an institution but as a natural stage of
life. Since ages, people have been taught that there are four stages of life: […]
The
Mother had to battle against these ancient ideas as well. Old and retired
people would come to her asking for admission to the Ashram. From her
perspective, it was too late for any yogic transformation. She used to tell
them to apply to the graveyard instead (or some such thing). Its somewhere in
the Agenda but I can’t find it right now.
Voice of Yoga: The error of psychoanalysis and the
yogic corrective by Govind Nishar on July
10, 2012 From Rishabhchand's "The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo",
Chapter IX, "The purification of nature"
My New Book from sunayana.com
My
new book “Sri Aurobindo and the Cripps Mission” is finally out. This is a
collection of essays and documents which show the various sides of the story of
how Sir Stafford Cripps brought a proposal to India from the … finish reading
Sri Aurobindo’s
prose style – by Goutam Ghosal Posted on July 10, 2012 Goutam
Ghosal is the Head of the Department of English and Other Modern
European Languages at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan
This
is English on the surface, but Sanskrit at bottom. Sri Aurobindo does not
sacrifice the principle of the English sentence structure, but he infuses in
his impeccable English the rhythm of Sanskrit verse.
Some emerging thoughts on a philosophy of style from An und für sich by Brad Johnson Jul 10, 2012
By
this I mean to say I am not interested in the removal of reference from
language. On the contrary, I want its referents to live and breathe with even
more vitality than words themselves. The style of a work, I’m saying, is not an
effect of the language; language, rather, is but the ornament to what I might
suggestively call style’s intensity.
Second,
I should mention my old mentor Alphonso Lingis, the most dazzling prose stylist and most interesting human character I've ever known.
He's one of the few people who took phenomenology in any sort of realist ... (
Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (zerO
Books, 2011) ...Harman is
associated with Speculative Realism in philosophy, which was the name ... Amazon.com: Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making ...
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