[INDOLOGY] Rgveda complete study material and reverse word index

[Dominik Wujastyk]

On Sun, 25 Apr 2021 at 21:38, Nagaraj Paturi <nagarajpaturi at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> The category 'western' as a label for a certain worldview , a certain
> approach to understanding things has been used widely in the academic
> studies world over.
>

I know, and it's a curse.

In my view, it's impossible to use this category without rapidly descending
into jingoistic language or implications. That's why I never use it.

I find Madhav's contrasting terms, westernized-indian and
indianized-westerner fun and thought-provoking.  What I draw from this is,
again, that using "west" as a meaningful category to refer to something
cultural is never going to help.  The term is useful for the
clash-of-civilizations type of narrative, that has goals other than
deepening understanding, but not for serious work by serious people.

In my thinking and writing in recent years I say "European and North
American" if I want to refer to ideas or people from Europe and N.
America.  I make it specifically geographical, as Camillo too suggests.  To
do otherwise is to essentialize harmfully, to be Toynbee redivivus, heaven
forbid.
Best,
DW

PS,
Jack Goody, 2005
<https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii36/articles/jack-goody-the-labyrinth-of-kinship>:


> Following the lead of Malthus, many demographers, like other social
> scientists, have drawn a sharp distinction between the European and
> non-European family systems, particularly those of Asia. But it is often an
> error to oppose the West and the Rest in a categorical manner, as large
> numbers of anthropologists, sociologists and historians continue to do.
> That leads to the kind of mistakes Malthus made about China. Comparable
> errors have been made by anthropologists—Durkheim treating the Chinese as
> exemplars of ‘primitive classification’, Dumont positing a decisive break
> between a hierarchical India and a more egalitarian West, or Lévi-Strauss
> bracketing early Chinese with Australian marriage systems.
>
> Such positions have done considerable harm to social and historical
> studies.
>
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