1996 AAR --"Hinduisms" & "Judaisms"--Call for Papers (fwd)

Tue Feb 20 00:46:44 UTC 1996

Dear Colleague:

The Consultation in Comparative Studies in "Hinduisms"
and "Judaisms" of the American Academy of Religion was
established in 1995 as a forum to bring together
specialists in South Asia and Judaica to discuss topics
pertaining to "Hinduisms" and "Judaisms," with the
intention of developing alternative categories and
conceptual frameworks to the Christian-based paradigms
that have tended to dominate the academic study of
religion.  The first session of the Consultation was
held at the 1995 Annual Meeting of the American Academy
of Religion in Philadelphia and focused on the theme of
purity, hierarchies, and boundaries.  The 1995 session
was a great success and featured a keynote address by
the eminent anthropologist Mary Douglas along with
papers by specialists in Judaica and South Asia.

We invite paper proposals for the 1996 Annual Meeting
of the AAR in New Orleans, in which we intend to
convene two sessions.  The first session will focus on
language, orality, and textuality, with emphasis on the
ways in which cosmological and theurgic conceptions of
language in Hindu and Jewish traditions challenge
prevailing scholarly conceptions of oral and written
traditions.  The second session, which will be co-
sponsored by the AAR Group on the Ascetic Impulse in
Religious Life and Thought, will be concerned with
problematizing the category of "asceticism," with
emphasis on the need to re-vision and expand the
category to account for disciplines pertaining to food,
sexuality, and other practices within Hindu and Jewish
communities not generally classified as "ascetic" (for
example, brahmanical priestly families and Hasidic
communities).  Paper proposals should address one of
the two topics within either Hindu or Jewish traditions
and need not be comparative.  Presenters need not have
expertise in both Hindu and Jewish traditions.

Please send copies of proposals, in accordance with the
guidelines delineated in the AAR Call for Papers 1996,
to me at the following address:  Department of
Religious Studies, University of California, Santa
Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106 (Tel. 805-968-6100).

Sincerely,

Barbara A. Holdrege
Co-Chair
Consultation in Comparative Studies in
"Hinduisms" and "Judaisms"

-----------------------------------------------

American Academy of Religion Consultation
COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN "HINDUISMS" AND "JUDAISMS"

The American Academy of Religion Consultation in
Comparative Studies in "Hinduisms" and "Judaisms" has
been established to bring together scholars of South
Asia and Judaica to engage in a series of sustained
reflections on topics within "Hinduisms" and Judaisms,"
with the intention of developing alternative categories
and conceptual frameworks to the Christian-based
paradigms that have tended to dominate the academic
study of religion.

The politics of comparison has played a major role in
the academic study of religion, and comparative studies
in particular are replete with evaluative scales that
hierarchize traditions or specific aspects of
traditions. Up until recently the comparative study of
religion, and the academic study of religion generally,
has been dominated by evaluative scales based on
paradigms of religious tradition that arose out of a
specific and discernible Christian context.  These
paradigms have emphasized a series of hierarchical
dichotomies between such categories as sacred and
profane, belief and practice, doctrine and law,
individual and community, universals and particulars,
and tradition and modernity.  While perhaps appropriate
for the study of some religious traditions, such
taxonomies become a strait jacket when applied to
others.  The Consultation focuses on traditions--Hinduisms 
and Judaisms--that construct other categories that bring 
to light different sets of relationships, such as those 
between religion and culture, ethnic identity and religious 
adherence, observance and nonobservance, and purity and 
impurity. Such relationships are obscured by the application 
of the prevailing models.

While Christian paradigms give precedence to such
categories as belief, doctrine, and theology and
delineate notions of tradition-identity that are rooted
in the missionary character of Christian traditions,
Hinduisms and Judaisms provide alternative paradigms of
religious tradition, in which priority is given to
issues of practice, observance, and law, and notions of
tradition-identity are delineated primarily in terms of
ethnic and cultural categories that reflect the
predominantly nonmissionary character of these
traditions.  It could be argued that brahmanical
"Hinduism" and rabbinic "Judaism" in particular
constitute two species of the same genus of religious
tradition:  as elite textual communities that have
codified the norms of orthodoxy in the form of
scriptural canons; as ethnocultural systems concerned
with issues of family, ethnic and cultural integrity,
blood lineages, and the intergenerational transmission
of traditions; and as religions of orthopraxy
characterized by hereditary priesthoods and sacrificial
traditions, comprehensive legal systems, elaborate
regulations concerning purity and impurity, and dietary
laws.  The purpose of the Consultation is to challenge
scholars of religion to reconsider the Christian-based
models that have tended to dominate the study of
religion and to reconfigure our scholarly discourse to
include alternative paradigms of religious tradition
arising out of case studies of Hinduisms and Judaisms.

Barbara A. Holdrege (co-chair)
Department of Religious Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
USA
Tel: 805-968-6100
Fax: 805-893-2059
email: 71431.1046 at compuserve.com

> From 71203.2563 at compuserve.com 19 96 Feb EST 20:42:43
Date: 19 Feb 96 20:42:43 EST
From: Swami Gitananda <71203.2563 at compuserve.com>
Subject: Re: urdu wordprocessing system

On  Sat, 17 Feb 1996 17:53:00, Martin Bemmann wrote:
>I am looking urgently for a good Urdu wordprocessing system.

Although I haven't used them myself, I know of a number of solutions available.
You will find them at http://www.lainet.com/clr

PC Magazine run a review of at least one of these packages. You can find it at:
http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/issues/1420/pcm00058.htm
Besides, you may conduct a search on zdnet, which will include all their
publications. Their home page is at http://www.zdnet.com

Good luck,

Swami Gitananda
71203.2563 at compuserve.com