The implied spider

politics & theology in myth

By Doniger, Wendy

Publishers Summary:
Tapping a wealth of traditions, from the Hebrew Bible to the Bhagavad Gita, Doniger crafts a new lens for examining other cultures, and finding in the world's myths - its sacred storiesa way to talk about experiences shared across time and space. Myths, she shows, bridge the cosmic and the familiar, the personal and the abstract, the theological and the political. They encourage us to draw various, even opposed, political meanings from a single text as it travels through different historical contexts. And she demonstrates how studying myths from cultures other than our own can be exhilarating and illuminating. Myth, Doniger shows, provides a near-perfect entree to another culture. Even if scholars such as Freud, Jung, and Joseph Campbell typically overstated the universality of major myths and suppressed the distinctive natures of other cultures, post-colonial critics are wrong to argue that nothing good can come from a systematic comparative study of human cultures.

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ISBN
978-0-23111-170-6
Publisher
New York : Columbia University Press, c1998.


REVIEWS

Library Journal

Reviewed on May 15, 1998

The Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, Doniger here offers an introduction to comparative mythology. By analyzing the political, theological, and psychological structures of the sacred stories of various cultures t...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

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