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Indlæser... The Hindus: An Alternative History (original 2009; udgave 2010)af Wendy Doniger (Forfatter)
Work InformationThe Hindus: An Alternative History af Wendy Doniger (2009)
   Reading list (101) Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog.   ritaer | Jul 22, 2021 |   ) AnupGampa | Jun 30, 2018 | ) seschanfield | Mar 7, 2016 |  ) le.vert.galant | Jan 26, 2015 | Wendy Doniger's style is direct, and she does not hide behind academic jargon or specialized vocabulary. She is witty, punny, and incisive. Yes, she is erudite and yes, the references and complexities do come thick and fast, but she is never deliberately oblique or unnecessarily difficult. As others have said, The Hindus: An Alternative History isn't by itself an introduction to Hinduism. In the decade since I took a basic undergrad one-semester intro to Hinduism, I have read a modern translation of the Ramayana and a heavily abridged translation of the Mahabharata, and spent about a month studying the Mughals in a grad history seminar. So I had some very basic foundations in place to read this—enough to make sense of much of this text at first go. For others I would suggest, as Doniger does in her introduction, that a little preparatory/supplementary reading would not hurt. There are easier starting points. It may sound like a slightly awkward recommendation, but this is a perfect second book to read about Hinduism—compelling enough to keep this reader thoroughly engaged through 700 pages of fairly dense prose. More than enjoyable, it is also important, and not merely because of the well-publicized censorship fight around it. Doniger herself has written (last week in the New York Review of Books) about the censorship fight in India, and also about parallel conflicts over public school curricula in the US. We can’t allow a situation to emerge where only religiously-authorized voices can speak publicly about religions. Scholarship *about* religions needs to have a public face. Our world needs more Wendy Donigers. (  )3  jrcovey | May 19, 2014 |
Another Incarnation Visiting India in 1921, E. M. Forster witnessed the eight-day celebration of Lord Krishna’s birthday. This first encounter with devotional ecstasy left the Bloomsbury aesthete baffled. “There is no dignity, no taste, no form,” he complained in a letter home. Recoiling from Hindu India, Forster was relieved to enter the relatively rational world of Islam. Describing the muezzin’s call at the Taj Mahal, he wrote, “I knew at all events where I stood and what I heard; it was a land that was not merely atmosphere but had definite outlines and horizons.” Passages From India Any of us might make the same mistake: I didn't really notice the subtitle of Wendy Doniger's massive study, "The Hindus." I knew that she was an eminent Sanskrit scholar at the University of Chicago, author of many books about cultural, religious and folkloric beliefs, and a translator of several Indian classics, including "The Rig Veda" and "The Kamasutra." Her annotations to the latter, that notorious manual of sexual practice, are, I can attest, as entertaining and informative as the book itself. A People and Their Karma When I first picked up "The Hindus" -- a tome seemingly rich with scholarship and, at 780 hardbound pages, as hefty as the legendary demon Kumbhakarna -- I was struck most of all by the author's name on its cover: Wendy Doniger. A mist of apprehension spritzed my Hindu soul. Could this lady (a professor at the University of Chicago) be the same Wendy Doniger who wrote last year -- in one of the more batty commentaries in an election season replete with unhinged scrivenings -- that Sarah Palin's "greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman"? If so, could this author really be trusted with a history of my people, the Hindus? Understanding Hinduism The self-appointed custodian of Hinduism who threw an egg at Wendy Doniger at a lecture hall in London in 2003 was evidently ignorant of her credentials. Doniger, a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago, is arguably the foremost, and unarguably the most prolific, scholar of Hinduism in the western world. Apart from translating the Rig Veda, Manu and Kamasutra into English, she has authored a number of monographs. When a scholar of her stature brings to bear half-a-century's work and understanding to provide a synthesised account of the subject, it necessarily evokes wide interest. Simply put, the reader is not disappointed. Beheading Hindus And other alternative aspects of Wendy Doniger's history of a mythology Hæderspriser
A narrative account of history and myth that offers a new way of understanding one of the world's oldest major religions, this book elucidates the relationship between recorded history and imaginary worlds. Hinduism does not lend itself easily to a strictly chronological account: many of its central texts cannot be reliably dated; its central tenets--karma, dharma, to name just two--arise at particular moments in Indian history and differ in each era, between genders, and caste to caste; and what is shared among Hindus is overwhelmingly outnumbered by the things that are unique to one group or another. Yet the greatness of Hinduism--its vitality, its earthiness, its vividness--lies precisely in many of those idiosyncratic qualities that continue to inspire debate today. Wendy Doniger, one of the world's foremost scholars of Hinduism, illuminates those moments within the tradition that resist forces that would standardize or establish a canon.--From publisher description. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Indlæser...GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)294.509Religions Other Religions Religions of Indic origin Hinduism Hinduism by placeLC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit: (3.98)
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