[INDOLOGY] Comparison of Brahmins (and their cultural context) with Nazis (and their cultural context)? both inappropriate and inapt

Caley Smith smith.caley at gmail.com
Mon May 10 01:34:10 UTC 2021 

Dear Joanna,

I suspect that all *varṇa*s participated in the "Mantra period" era
ceremonies although with different ritual roles/restrictions. When the
Spalding Symposium lectures go online, I talk a bit about my preliminary
research on this subject. In short, I think *varṇa *as represented in the
Saṁhitās is a radically different institution with virtually none of the
associations that it would have by the Dharmasūtras. In the Rājasūya as we
have it, I don't think we can equate the figure of the *vaiśya* with a
particular "professional type" just yet.

Best,
Caley

On Sun, May 9, 2021 at 6:23 PM Joanna Jurewicz <j.jurewicz at uw.edu.pl> wrote:

> Thank you, Caley, for your inspiring remarks.
>
>  Am I right that a Vaiśya is one among those who sprinkled water over a
> king during the Rajasuya? This could be a hint that the merchants were also
> to some extent included into creation of royal power. My copy of
> Heesterman's analysis of this ritual is somewhere lost among the papers...
>
> best wishes,
>
> Joanna
>
> ---
>
> Prof. dr hab. Joanna Jurewicz
>
> Katedra Azji Południowej /Chair of South Asia Studies
>
> Wydział Orientalistyczny / Faculty of Oriental Studies
>
> Uniwersytet Warszawski /University of Warsaw
>
> ul. Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28
>
> 00-927 Warszawa , Poland
>
> Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages
>
> College of Human Sciences
>
> UNISA
>
> Pretoria, RSA
>
> Member of Academia Europaea
>
> https://uw.academia.edu/JoannaJurewicz
>
>
> niedz., 9 maj 2021 o 21:06 Caley Smith via INDOLOGY <
> indology at list.indology.info> napisał(a):
>
>> Dear Artur,
>>
>> Thank you for your interest, but my latest research on the way Vedic
>> texts conceptualize and reflect ideas like society, lineage, family, etc.
>> and their conceptual history in the post-Vedic period...is not published
>> yet and I'm still trying to think through it (some of my thoughts on this
>> are in "The Invention of Vedic Authority" which will come out in Bloomsbury'*s
>> A Cultural History of Hinduism in Antiquity *ed by Jarrod Whitaker). I
>> will instead refer to other scholars' work which has influenced my thinking
>> about the *yajña *a great deal (too name just a few: Proferes 2007 *Vedic
>> Ideals of Sovereignty and the Poetics of Power, *Ferrara 2016 "One
>> Yajña, Many Rituals" and Ferrara 2016 "The Function of the Yajña Between
>> Practitioners and Clients", Jamison 2019 "Vedic Ritual: The Sacralization
>> of the Mundane and the Domestication of the Sacred" (in the same volume as
>> Jan's "Ecology of Ritual Innovation in Ancient India: Textual and
>> Contextual Evidence.” ed. by Lauren Bausch)
>>
>> Most of my published work focuses on theorizing Vedic
>> performativity/textuality (
>> https://www.academia.edu/39608974/Adhiyaj%C3%B1a_Towards_a_Performance_Grammar_of_the_Vedas
>> )
>> and then using this performative lens to read Vedic narrative through
>> that specific context
>> (
>> https://www.academia.edu/39278725/How_is_a_Vehicular_Homicide_Like_the_Sacrifice
>> )
>> (https://www.academia.edu/28122184/Exploring_impossible_authors_)
>>
>> Best,
>> Caley
>>
>>
>> On Sun, May 9, 2021 at 1:13 PM Artur Karp <karp at uw.edu.pl> wrote:
>>
>>> Dear Caley,
>>>
>>> Thanks for your thoughts - good material for meditation. Would you,
>>> please, attach here the list of your publications?
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> Artur
>>>
>>>
>>> <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail> Wolny
>>> od wirusów. www.avast.com
>>> <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail>
>>> <#m_-3365320953737592997_m_4815751820438796764_m_5368552174539207762_m_8649802251600418683_DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
>>>
>>> niedz., 9 maj 2021 o 18:12 Caley Smith <smith.caley at gmail.com>
>>> napisał(a):
>>>
>>>> Dear Artur,
>>>>
>>>> I would say... I don't know? Most Vedic ritual activities depict
>>>> themselves as being ideally patronized by a materially-wealthy financiers
>>>> or hoping for that (and despising stingy ones). The ritual moment is a kind
>>>> of public moment when many clans are together and so the proto-śrauta
>>>> system, I see, as a kind of inter-clan negotiation one
>>>> which can produce a coalition, a detente to hostilities, as well as
>>>> consecration, marriage, funerary activities. So the focus is really on the
>>>> poetic-priestly tradition and these patrons as the audience. Not much
>>>> mention of cities, urban life, etc. but it's also not necessarily the case
>>>> that a clan that patronized Vedic ritual
>>>> could not be construed through the categories of "farmers, craftsmen,
>>>> merchants" in addition to what we expect (that is ranchers). I would say
>>>> the texts care little for this kind of vision of society, and rather are
>>>> focused on a society made of  generous and hospitable patrons (as opposed
>>>> to stingy ones), and those in our coalition (as opposed to
>>>> enemies/outsiders). But on urban life in the Vedas proper I have heard a
>>>> vast silence---and that makes sense because cities were not "on the ritual
>>>> ground" and nearly everything topical and of concern to the Vedas is
>>>> happening on the ritual ground or is embedded in an aetiological narrative
>>>> justifying something happening on the ritual ground. That does not mean
>>>> that they didn't know about cities, but in my published work I don't write
>>>> about urban life either because it is not the topic at hand (as I imagine
>>>> Buddhist dhāraṇīs, for instance, don't have much to say about urban
>>>> logistics either...). In which case, we wouldn't speak of "Vedic
>>>> civilization" either, we would speak of Vedic "ceremony-networks" from
>>>> which perhaps we can infer things about the historical political
>>>> organizations that employed them.
>>>>
>>>> On the other hand, by this description I am inherently assuming Vedic
>>>> tradition is something that has to do with the "Vedic period" and "the
>>>> Vedas," there are of course much later (pre/post Classical) texts that
>>>> would claim the mantle of the Vedic tradition that *may* have a good deal
>>>> to say about urban life, but if so I am ignorant of them currently and
>>>> would love to know more.
>>>>
>>>> Best,
>>>> Caley
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, May 9, 2021 at 11:49 AM Artur Karp <karp at uw.edu.pl> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Tak.
>>>>>
>>>>> A few questions, perhaps simplistic, but nevertheless necessary.
>>>>>
>>>>> Did something described as "Indian civilization" actually exist
>>>>> (Caley:  <I am not sure if we should continue to call it "Vedic
>>>>> civilization" at that point.>).
>>>>>
>>>>> If so - then when, where, in what forms?
>>>>>
>>>>> Did farmers, craftsmen, merchants fully participate in it?
>>>>>
>>>>> Were the religious messages preserved in the Vedic texts accessible to
>>>>> them linguistically - and conceptually?
>>>>>
>>>>> Were early urban organisms administered by reference to Vedic legal
>>>>> formulas, including, but not limited to, the cleaning up of urban spaces of
>>>>> refuse, of animal and human excrement? Including taxation?
>>>>>
>>>>> I would like to know where in the Vedic tradition I could find these
>>>>> kinds of formulas. I see them in the Buddhist tradition, clearly - but in
>>>>> the Vedic tradition?
>>>>>
>>>>> Best,
>>>>>
>>>>> Artur
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail> Wolny
>>>>> od wirusów. www.avast.com
>>>>> <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail>
>>>>> <#m_-3365320953737592997_m_4815751820438796764_m_5368552174539207762_m_8649802251600418683_m_-9035632625090394276_m_696913473187357508_m_4192862688876529753_DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
>>>>>
>>>>> niedz., 9 maj 2021 o 16:51 Caley Smith via INDOLOGY <
>>>>> indology at list.indology.info> napisał(a):
>>>>>
>>>>>> Dear Jan,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Thank you for making this PDF available, I have a hard copy but it's
>>>>>> always useful to have a digital one too.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I too feel the comparison is fraught, please correct me if my musings
>>>>>> are completely wrong, but it seems to narrowly define Nazism as a kind of
>>>>>> anti-urban sentiment, and I don't think that is the case at all. Rather,
>>>>>> the Nazis who patronized the House of German Art were *urban*! We
>>>>>> know of many lyric poetic traditions (from the Sangam to the troubadours of
>>>>>> Provençe) who loved to represent the bucolic scene in their verbal art yet
>>>>>> that art was performed at a courtly non-rural setting. So are all these
>>>>>> "anti-urban" and thus some species of Nazism? Hardly. There is a much more
>>>>>> immediate reason why urban Nazis might have preferred landscapes, namely
>>>>>> they figured themselves to be natural inherent landlords of the country
>>>>>> (the Volk) and thus the sole owners/stakeholders of the government.
>>>>>> Everyone else is either an outsider or a service tenant in this model, no?
>>>>>> Urbanites viewing scenes of ruralia seems to me to be more about
>>>>>> constructing a vision of themselves as these landlords, like the
>>>>>> slave-owning plantation owners in the US that Hitler admired (and of course
>>>>>> a feature of classical liberalism is that only landed gentry can vote, that
>>>>>> is "own" the govt; "manifest destiny" easily becomes the quest for
>>>>>> Lebensraum). In other words, the museum becomes a way for urban Nazis to
>>>>>> conceive of their place in their domain.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> And maybe this isn't the whole story, but it seems to be radically
>>>>>> different from the middle (even late) Vedic situation, which derives
>>>>>> directly from a real pastoral/horticultural mode of subsistence in which
>>>>>> pasturage/fields are not part of self-idealization but actually the basis
>>>>>> of food production. The elaborate inter-clan hospitality rituals of the
>>>>>> Vedas speaks more to an anxiety of the fragile nature of that existence and
>>>>>> the tenuous balance of power. Rather than anti-urban, I imagine that urban
>>>>>> centers were simply irrelevant to Vedic civilization at first, their more
>>>>>> immediate concerns were inter-clan politics on the ground. Now,
>>>>>> post-Alexander and post-Aśoka we may have a very different story but I am
>>>>>> not sure if we should continue to call it "Vedic civilization" at that
>>>>>> point. And if we are talking about post-Alexander/post-Aśoka then we are
>>>>>> talking about a radically different community, arguably traumatized, and
>>>>>> newly reactionary. I think that's a very different and new set of aesthetic
>>>>>> commitments and social concerns guiding the proto-Dharma tradition than
>>>>>> that of the middle/late Vedic period proper.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Perhaps there is something in the comparison I have completely
>>>>>> misunderstood, and if so mea culpa, but otherwise I don't get it.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Best,
>>>>>> Caley
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Sun, May 9, 2021 at 9:59 AM Jan E.M. Houben via INDOLOGY <
>>>>>> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Dear All,
>>>>>>> A fascinating symposium on "Greater Magadha" is at present taking
>>>>>>> place at Edmonton (Alberta), Canada, and on account of the ongoing epidemic
>>>>>>> it is entirely online: the announcement (
>>>>>>> http://eventleaf.com/GreaterMagadha) is accessible on several
>>>>>>> lists.
>>>>>>> In a brief presentation and subsequent discussion of his theory at
>>>>>>> the beginning of this symposium -- a detailed argument and extensive
>>>>>>> references to pieces of evidence for this stimulating and well-researched
>>>>>>> theory is found in his *Greater Magadha: Studies in the culture of
>>>>>>> early India* (Leiden 2007) --   Johannes Bronkhorst referred
>>>>>>> briefly to his comparison between Brahmins (and their cultural context) and
>>>>>>> the German Nazis (and their cultural context). On this specific reference
>>>>>>> by Johannes Bronkhorst during the symposium, I posed a question in the
>>>>>>> special section set up by the organizers of the conference: "Questions and
>>>>>>> answers will be conducted over a separate service, sli.do."
>>>>>>> Since my question, although it received several "upvotes", did not
>>>>>>> pass the censorship of the anonymous "moderator" of the online questions --
>>>>>>> who wrote to me "3 days ago (only visible to you) There was no such
>>>>>>> comparison" -- it would be useful to pose the question in other fora such
>>>>>>> as this Indology List.
>>>>>>> Those familiar with the work and especially the *Greater Magadha*
>>>>>>> book of Johannes Bronkhorst -- this apparently does not include the
>>>>>>> anonymous moderator of the Questions section of the symposium -- will have
>>>>>>> immediately recognized that the remark by Johannes Bronkhorst refers to pp.
>>>>>>> 251-252 of *Greater Magadha* (and similar passages elsewhere),
>>>>>>> where we read:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> "when it came in contact with cities, Vedic civilization did not
>>>>>>> like them.
>>>>>>> ...
>>>>>>> It is hard to resist the temptation of a comparison with the Third
>>>>>>> Reich.
>>>>>>> Among the hundreds of paintings brought together in the House of
>>>>>>> German Art
>>>>>>> in Munich, opened by Hitler in 1937, not a single canvas depicted
>>>>>>> urban and
>>>>>>> industrial life (Watson, 2004: 311-312)."
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The comparison is both inappropriate and inapt, especially since a
>>>>>>> very different analysis of the situation of the community of practicing
>>>>>>> Brahmins in ancient India is possible, for instance the one proposed by me
>>>>>>> in:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> “From Fuzzy-Edged ‘Family-Veda’ to the Canonical Śākhas of the
>>>>>>> Catur-Veda: Structures and Tangible Traces.” In: *Vedic Śākhās:
>>>>>>> Past, Present, Future. Proceedings of the Fifth International Vedic
>>>>>>> Workshop, Bucharest* 2011, ed. by J.E.M. Houben, J. Rotaru and M.
>>>>>>> Witzel, p. 159-192. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University, 2016.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> As the book is at present no more available but will soon again be
>>>>>>> available in a new edition, I have made this study *temporarily* accessible
>>>>>>> on my Academia.edu page.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The main principles followed in this study to explain the situation
>>>>>>> of the community of practicing Brahmins in ancient India are (1) "natural
>>>>>>> selection" in the transmission of knowledge through any current medium of
>>>>>>> transmission (at first exclusively ritual, next ritual plus written texts,
>>>>>>> inscriptions and manuscripts -- much later printing is added and at present
>>>>>>> the internet...): see e.g. Houben 2001; (2) ritual in the context of an
>>>>>>> *evolving* economical and ecological world: see Houben 2019 (see also:
>>>>>>> Gadgil and Guha, *This Fissured Land: an Ecological History of
>>>>>>> India*, 1992 and Perennials edition 2013).
>>>>>>> N.B. Both Houben 2001:
>>>>>>> “’Verschriftlichung' and the relation between the *pramāṇa*s in the
>>>>>>> history of Sāṁkhya.” *Études de Lettres* 2001.3: *La rationalité en
>>>>>>> Asie / Rationality in Asia*, ed. by J. Bronkhorst: 165-194.
>>>>>>> and Houben 2019:
>>>>>>> “Ecology of Ritual Innovation in Ancient India: Textual and
>>>>>>> Contextual Evidence.” [NB: partly comparing and contrasting Vedic and
>>>>>>> ancient Iranian ritual.] In: *Self, Sacrifice, and Cosmos: Vedic
>>>>>>> Thought, Ritual, and Philosophy. Essays in Honor of Professor Ganesh
>>>>>>> Umakant Thite’s Contribution to Vedic Studies*, ed. by Lauren M.
>>>>>>> Bausch, pp. 182-210 (References to this article integrated in id.,
>>>>>>> “Bibliography,” pp. 223-238.) Delhi: Primus Books
>>>>>>> are now accessible on my Academia.edu page.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I hope and expect the issue will lead to further fruitful
>>>>>>> discussions.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> All best, Jan Houben
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> *Jan E.M. Houben*
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Directeur d'Études, Professor of South Asian History and Philology
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> *Sources et histoire de la tradition sanskrite*
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE, Paris Sciences et Lettres)
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> *Sciences historiques et philologiques *
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Groupe de recherches en études indiennes (EA 2120)
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> *johannes.houben [at] ephe.psl.eu <johannes.houben at ephe.psl.eu>*
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> *https://ephe-sorbonne.academia.edu/JanEMHouben
>>>>>>> <https://ephe-sorbonne.academia.edu/JanEMHouben>*
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> *https://www.classicalindia.info* <https://www.classicalindia.info>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> LabEx Hastec OS 2021 -- *L'Inde Classique* augmentée: construction,
>>>>>>> transmission
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> et transformations d'un savoir scientifique
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> INDOLOGY mailing list
>>>>>>> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info
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>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
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>>>>>
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