On Sat, 31 Jul 1999 18:41:37 -0400 (EDT) Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
> Ken, I can't argue with you about what has been said in
classroom discussion about the acceptability of sati (the most
common defensive response I have come across is to
compare it to European witchcraft burnings, but if you insist
students urge tolerance on the grounds of religious pluralism,
what can I say?).
Witchcraft burnings? Hmmm... I'd have to think about that connection. There is a tremendous difference between the logic of sacrifice and inquisition. I'm not sure... but I often think that students find themselves in an awkward position regarding sati. On the one hand, they tend oppose it, on the other hand, they are "taught" to respect religious diversity [whatever the cost!]). It gets even worse with euthanasia (I remember sitting in a christian ethics class and hearing some guy say "well, if you can't contribute to society in a meaningful way, why would you want to live?"). Abortion is another issue that gets tossed around. In Justification and Application Habermas notes that the arguments on both sides are equivalent so, as of yet, the issue is undecided (he notes that it might not be decideable). But this is unbelievable. Has he listened to the reasons given by the pro-lifers? - the usual stuff like, "you go to Hell" or because God says so or "the Bible tells told me so." But this debate too has been dirempted by the religious question. The folks looking for common ground simply assume that no one has the right or capacity to criticize religion. Even the local Toronto Star religious ethics reporter summed it up this way: "Religious faith is beyond all questioning. It is simply a matter of choice." Nuts. Just nuts.
> I must ask you however to at least give me the authors for
the essays in which sati is unchallenged because it is just
another religious institution.
Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder (1990). "The Subject of Sati: Pain and Death in Contemporary Discourse on Sati" Yale Journal of Criticism 3 (2): 1-23. The article focuses on the common ground of pain as a means of divergent views talking about the issue. I'm just wonder why these things can't be tackled head on. Maybe Zizek would shake his finger at me and say, "If you call an idiot and idiot, it just encourages people to identify themselves with idiocy" but I just can't get over how auto-immunized religion becomes both in religious discourse and in [so-called] philosophical, social, historical, political discourse....
> So I must ask you whom are you citing as evidence of
tolerance for the religious justification of sati?
I'm not citing anyone that directly argues for tolerance in regards to the religious justification of sati, I'm just wondering on-line about how debates about things involving religion get mutilated because the issue is too "sensitive" or "politically incorrect" or whatever. Generally when people start to employ mythic language there is a kind of "respect" and distance that participants in the dialogue grant the speaker. I'm not sure why. But it is easier to get away with saying "God created the earth" than saying something about history as dialectic...
For more details on sacrifice - see Nancy Jay, "The logics of sacrifice" in Throughout Your Genderations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity (Chicago University Press) or Bruce Lincoln or Ronald Grimes.
I'm not all that up on the issue (I haven't read Spivak's work on this). My familiarity with it stems from a discussion about the phenomenology of religion and general issues of method and theory.
ken