Religions Reviewed

Doniger uses a myth from a medieval Sanskrit philosophical treatise to set up a dichotomy between Hunters and Sages, i.e. ordinary people who simply lead their own lives and scholars who pursue a vicarious understanding of other lives. She supplements this idea with a (false, she says) distinction between “head” and “heart,” and holds up her ideal of a scholar of religion as a “hunting sage.” She provides a couple of autobiographical anecdotes regarding how the “other people’s myths” that she had apprehended with her head managed to effect her heart as well. Then she sets out a “spectrum” between scholarly analysis of myths, and nonscholarly acceptance of them. Having concluded that the extremes of objective dispassion and subjective enthusiasm need to be shunned, she asks whether the scholar will most usefully adopt a sympathetic, hostile or neutral engagement with the object of study. She insists, “There should be a place for honest affect” (20) in scholarship on myths. She also provides a brief discussion of “relativism,” in which she distinguishes between moral relativism and ontological relativism, to the unspecified discredit of the former and the commendation of the latter. Finally, after positioning the scholar of religions between the hazards of cryptotheology and superrationalism, she returns to the “hunting sage” idea, and offers a defense of eclecticism.

• On p. 9, Doniger observes, “We can never know whether or not we have become trapped inside the minds of people whose consciousness we have come to share.” This reminds me of another metaphor to describe the scholar of religions: espionage, and in particular double agency. Do you work for your “native country” (personal perspectives and passions) or do you work for the country to which you’ve “defected” (academic expectations and standards)? (Answer: You do both, and each enables you to do the other.)
• Is there a “more modest, passive word” for eclecticism, for which Doniger expresses a desire (24)?
• Is religion still “the academic Scarlet Woman,” as Doniger asserts (18)? (It doesn’t seem so to me, but my data could well be skewed.)