Religions Reviewed

This chapter defending Doniger’s comparativist methodology can also be read as a later reflection and enlargement on the “irreducible tension” described by Eliade, but using the poles of historicism and structuralism (rather than historicism and phenomenology). The structuralist approach includes Eliade’s “archetypes” (as “exemplary models” or “paradigms”), as well as Levi-Strauss’ structures. Doniger quickly and elegantly dismisses the idea that the work of identifying “archetypes” (or other “givens”) in inherently conservative, or even reactionary. In a discussion of diffusionist theory and “borrowing,” she concludes that while similarities in myth are more likely to be the result of borrowing than of independent parallel development, “Tracing the genealogy of a story is a mug’s game,” and “the lineage of a story does not explain its persistence.” (140-141) In this chapter, Doniger alludes to her larger project of arguing against the “dichotomization of thought,” (148) and she points to Ginsburg as someone who manages to integrate historicism and structuralism, and observes historicizing effort in Levi-Strauss’ structuralism (151), as well as issuing a defense of methodological eclecticism that would engage both poles. Other dichotomies which she finds potentially “distorting” include: homology/analogy, contextualist/comparativist, and fieldworker/textualist. She advocates making room for multiple interpretations of data (“textual pluralism”), and then proceeds directly to a plea for a diverse body of scholars working on shared material (“academic pluralism”), through her objection to a trend that groups (religions, races, genders) be studied only by “insiders” with vetted sympathies.

·         Doniger asks of Levi-Strauss, “what makes him insist that he is doing science” (147)? What indeed? Is that a rhetorical question?

·         At the very end of this chapter/book, Doniger indicates that nonscholars have more strategic flexibility than scholars. How does this square with her characterizations of Hunter and Sage in the earlier piece? (It seems almost like a reversal, to me. These “Hunters” are “nonpolarized,” and therefore have the both/and of Hunter and Sage behavior open to them.)