This book seeks to make a contribution to contemporary phenomenological theories of body and subjectivity by studying various classical Indian texts that deal with bodily subjectivity (or the ‘bodiliness’ of being human) in ways that engage with the same concerns as contemporary Western philosophy but have different conceptual starting points. Through studies of four texts from different genres, I argue for a ‘phenomenological ecology’ of bodily subjectivity. An ecology is a continuous and dynamic system of interrelationships between elements, in which the salience accorded to some type of relationship clarifies how the elements it relates are to be identified. The paradigm of ecological phenomenology obviates the need to choose between apparently incompatible perspectives of the human. The delineation of body is arrived at by working back phenomenologically from the entire world of experience, with the acknowledgement that the point of arrival—a conception of what counts as body—is dependent upon the exact motivation for attending to experience, the areas of experience attended to, the genre in which the exploration of experience is expressed, and the expressive tools available to the phenomenologist. As a methodology, it is a pluralistic yet integrated approach to the way experience is attended to and studied, that permits apparently inconsistent intuitions about bodiliness to be explored in novel ways. Rather than seeing particular framings of our experience as in tension with each other, we should see each such framing as playing its own role according to the local descriptive and analytic concern of that text.
This paper uses a type of social scientific data, obtained by semi-structured interviewing, to investigate the extent to which and the ways in which corpus linguistics methods contribute to research in the field of Religious Studies, and in the humanities and social sciences at large. The corpus consists of 73 interviews (357,788 words) with minority communities living in the UK, from various religious (Muslims, Hindus and Christians), ethnic and cultural backgrounds. All interviewees had a strong religious identity and were considered to be well-integrated into British society; either economically, socially, or both. These interviews were conducted in 2005 as part of a government-commissioned study broadly oriented to policy-makers, but located within the disciplinary approach of Religious Studies. Here, we examine how the various communities perceived the role played by their religious faith in the process of establishing themselves in Britain. The analysis seeks to identify common patterns of self-representation, that is, discourse patterns that contribute to the collective representation of each group, focussing on patterns cutting across groups. The major contribution of this paper is to assess how corpus linguistics methods can complement, refine and offer new insights to the type of discourse analysis currently established within the humanities. At the same time, we seek to test the limits of corpus methods, given the data might not be either qualitatively or quantitatively apt in all respects for corpus techniques.
Reading a passage in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata—the attempted disrobing of Princess Draupadī after her senior husband has gambled her away (after losing all his wealth, his brothers and himself)—I suggest that we see in her attitude and angry words an expression of contempt. I explore how contempt is a concept that is not thematized within Sanskrit aesthetics of emotions, but nonetheless is clearly articulated in the literature. Focusing on the significance of her gendered expression of anger and contempt, and the positive acceptance of it in the text, I suggest that contempt can be understood as a transformative attitude in a woman (even a high-born one) towards iniquities in a patriarchal culture.
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