In the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in the 'body' as an analytical category in the social sciences and humanities, particularly within the context of cultural studies. Studies of the body have proliferated, representing a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, psychology, linguistics, literary theory, art history, and feminist and gender studies. Despite the proliferation of scholarship on the body in the human sciences, until recently relatively few studies have focused on discourses of the body in religious traditions--on the ways in which the body has been represented, regulated, disciplined, ritualized, cultivated, purified, and transformed in different traditions. In recent years a number of scholars of religion have begun to reflect critically on the notion of embodiment and to examine discourses of the body in particular religious traditions. However, the body has yet to be adequately theorized from the methodological perspective of the history of religions.Hindu traditions provide extensive, elaborate, and multiform discourses of the body, and I would suggest that a sustained investigation of these discourses can contribute in significant ways to the burgeoning scholarship on the body in the study of religion. I have argued elsewhere (Holdrege 1999) that the Brahman. ical Hindu tradition in particular constitutes what I term an 'embodied community,' in that its notions of tradition-identity are embodied in the particularities of ethnic and cultural categories defined in relation to a particular people (IndoAryans), a particular sacred language (Sanskrit), and a particular land (,Ary,~varta). The body is represented in the Br~hman.ical tradition as a site of central significance that is the vehicle for the maintenance of the social, cosmic, and divine orders. The body is the instrument of biological and sociocultural reproduction that is to be regulated through ritual and social duties, maintained in purity,
Up until recently the academic study of religion has been dominated by Protestant Christian paradigms of religious tradition, in which precedence is given to such categories as belief, doctrine, and theology, and tradition-identity is rooted in the missionary character of Christian traditions. The essay argues that rabbinic Judaism and brahmanical Hinduism provide alternative paradigms of religious tradition as "embodied communities" in which priority is given to issues of practice, observance, and law, and tradition-identity is embodied in ethnic and cultural categories that reflect the predominantly nonmissionary character of these traditions. The manner in which the rabbinic and brahmanical traditions construct their respective categories of scripture—Torah and Veda—reflects the more fundamental affinities shared by these traditions as representatives of a distinctive paradigm of religious tradition: as elite textual communities that have codified their respective norms 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 elaborate legal systems, sacrificial traditions, purity codes, and dietary laws.
This essay seeks to illuminate the problematics, methods, and dynamics of comparison by interrogating how certain analytical categories in the study of religion, such as scripture and the body, can be fruitfully reimagined through a comparative analysis of their Hindu and Jewish instantiations. I consider a range of issues that are critical to any productive comparative study, and I reflect more specifically on the principal components of my own comparative method in light of Oliver Freiberger's analytical framework: the goals of comparative analysis; the modes of comparison; the parameters that define the scope and the scale of the comparative inquiry; and the operations involved in the comparative process, beginning with selection of the specific traditions and analytical categories to be addressed and formulation of the organizational design of the study and culminating in the re-visioned categories and models in the study of religion that constitute the fruits of the comparative inquiry.
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