ABSTRACT
The other chapters in this book introduce various religions of India or South Asia. Those chapters, and this one, were composed during what many would call a poststructural, postmodern, or postcolonial era. Whatever the label, the period through which we are currently passing is characterized by calling into question all categories, definitions, and assertions. This means that basically accepted notions are actively doubted – such as that Hinduism and Buddhism are world religions or even that we can distinguish religion (or a religion) from everything else. Within such a skeptical and ambivalent era, the context from which one writes is crucially important – in particular whether one writes as an insider or an outsider. The insider/outsider problem raises questions about objectivity, subjectivity, interpretive presuppositions, authenticity, and fundamental fairness in relation to the focus of one’s study. These problems are connected to issues of cross-cultural sensitivity and the question of whether (and, if so, how) it is possible to grasp ideas and practices that are totally foreign to a scholar. If a scholar is an outsider to the religious tradition being studied, this fact also raises questions about the nature of the comparative method.
