Professor Alexis Sanderson, Emeritus Professor of Sanskrit, Oxford University
This two-day workshop will offer Sanskrit scholars across the Bay Area the opportunity to engage deeply with Mīmāṃsā, the preeminent school of Indian hermeneutics, while thinking more broadly about the state of philology in the field of South Asian Studies. Organized by Lisa Brooks, Kashi Gomez, Priya Kothari, and Janet Um, the workshop will take up the issues of scriptural interpretation, philology and methodological recuperation.
Our proposed engagement with mīmāṃsā stems from two key concerns. Firstly, while mīmāṃsā initially emerged as the discipline of Vedic exegesis, it was further developed into a more diffuse theory of language which finds its way into a wide array of genres, from ritualistic texts and scientific treatises to exegetical discourse, poetics and literary commentary. Secondly, in recent years, leading scholars have cast mīmāṃsā as the philological school par excellence of premodern India.
As such, we have identified philology as one of the key disciplines of South Asia studies. We recognize that mīmāṃsā continues to shape how we read Sanskrit texts in modernity and engage in discourse about Indic traditions and Hindu and Buddhist theology and practice. This workshop is a unique opportunity to enrich our own textual engagements and encourage discussion about the potentials and limits of such philological recuperation efforts in the field of Indology. With these goals in mind, we pose the following workshop questions: What does it mean to cast the mīmāṃsā school of scriptural interpretation as an Indic philology? And what does it mean to claim philology as the pre-eminent mode of engagement with Sanskrit texts?
Friday, October 4
3:00–5:30 pm Reading Session 1
5:30–6:30 pm Reception
Saturday, October 5
9:30 am–12:30 pm Reading Session 2
12:30–2:00 pm Lunch
2:00–4:00 pm Reading Session 3
Co-sponsored by the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, the Center for Buddhist Studies, the Institute for South Asia Studies, the South Asia Studies Theories and Methods Townsend Working Group and the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.
Robert Braun combines archival work with geographical information systems to study civil society and intergroup relationships in times of social upheaval. He has recently finished a book, Protectors of Pluralism: Religious Minorities and the Rescue of Jews in the Low Countries During the Holocaust (Cambridge University Press). His new research project studies the political causes and consequences of anti-Semitism by exploring racial themes in German children’s stories. In the past he has worked on the geographical spread of different types of political violence such as terrorism, anti-immigrant attacks, and soccer hooliganism.
Stefania Pandolfo studies theories and forms of subjectivity, and their contemporary predicaments in the Middle Eastern and Muslim world, investigating narrative, trauma, psychoanalysis and the unconscious, memory, historicity and the hermeneutics of disjuncture, language and poetics, experimental ethnographic writing, anthropology and literature, dreaming and the anthropological study of the imagination, intercultural approaches to different ontologies and systems of knowledge, modernity, colonialism and postcolonialism, madness and mental illness. Her current project is a study of emergent forms of subjectivity in Moroccan modernity at the interface of “traditional therapies” and psychiatry/psychoanalysis, exploring theoretical ways to think existence, possibility and creation in a context of referential and institutional instability and in the aftermath of trauma, based on ethnographic research on spirit possession and the “cures of the jinn,” and on the experience of madness in a psychiatric hospital setting.
Ronit Y. Stahl is a historian of modern America. Her work focuses on pluralism in American society by examining how politics, law, and religion interact in spaces such as the military and medicine. Her book, Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2017), traces the uneven processes through which the military struggled with, encouraged, and regulated religious pluralism in the twentieth century. Her current research examines the rise of institutional and corporate rights of conscience in health care. This project weaves together the court decisions, legislation, medical and bioethical arguments, religious ideas, and lived experiences that shaped the disparate trajectories of reproductive healthcare, LGBT healthcare, and end-of-life care from the 1970s to the present.
