Hindus, Jews, and the Politics of Comparison: Embodied Communities and Models of Religious Tradition

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In Hindus, Jews, and the Politics of Comparison: Embodied Communities and Models of Religious Tradition, Barbara A. Holdrege emphasizes the role of comparative study as a method of critical interrogation that can serve as a means to challenge hegemonic taxonomies and categories in the academy and to reconstitute our scholarly discourse to allow for a multiplicity of epistemologies. Holdrege provides an extended series of reflections on the politics, problematics, and dynamics of comparison in which she explores how certain analytical categories in the study of religionsuch as the body, scripture, sacrifice, purity, and foodcan be fruitfully reimagined through a comparative analysis of their Hindu and Jewish instantiations. The author argues that this re-visioning of analytical categories through sustained comparative historical studies of a range of Hindu and Jewish traditions can provide the basis for generating alternative imaginaries to the prevailing Eurocentric and Protestant-based paradigms in the academy that have perpetuated the ideals of Enlightenment discourse and colonial and neocolonial projects. Such studies can serve as an important corrective to the scholarly practices through which certain categories and models have been privileged over others in the social sciences and humanities and in religious studies more specifically.

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Barbara Holdrege is a pioneer of responsible cross-cultural comparison in the study of religion. Taking into account recent methodological approaches in the field, in this book she demonstrates how a thoughtful analysis of Jewish and Hindu traditions, with a particular focus on scripture and food, enriches the study of either religion. Most importantly, the book makes a larger theoretical argument. It shows that, while the similarities in how Jewish and Hindu texts conceptualize their traditions as embodied, locative communities set them apart from missionizing traditions such as Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam, both Jewish and Hindu thinkers also developed hermeneutical techniques that allowed them to expand their traditions by discursively incorporating new concepts and practices. It is this dual comparative approach, which juxtaposes not only Judaism and Hinduism but also these two with other religious traditions, that makes the book so unique. Only thoughtful comparative research can produce these important insights. -- Oliver Freiberger, author of Considering Comparison: A Method for Religious Studies
Extending the work of Oliver Freiberger and other theorists of comparison, in this book Barbara Holdrege returns to the comparative study of Hindu and Jewish traditions with new questions and insights. Ranging religious traditions on a spectrum between embodied particularism and disembodied universalism, she demonstrates the parallels between Hindu and Jewish traditions, showing in the process their differences from Buddhist, Christian, and even Islamic traditions. Beyond the finely detailed comparisons between Vedic and post-Vedic texts and rabbinic and kabbalistic textseven an entire chapter on food taxonomies and dietary regimes!it is this attention to new theoretical ways of thinking about Hindu and Jewish communities that is the greatest contribution of this book. Indeed, after reading this book I think about Hindus, Jews, and what Holdrege calls the politics of comparison in a much more nuanced fashion. Her models are inspiring, even exciting. -- Rachel Fell McDermott, co-author of A Hindu-Jewish Conversation: Root Traditions in Dialogue

Author Bio

Barbara A. Holdrege is professor of religious studies and chair of the South Asian Studies Committee at the University of California, Santa Barbara.