ABSTRACT
Overlooking Siegel's characteristic American-academic style potshot at anthropology, the author therefore uses in this oeuvre her own personal interpretive vantage point as a Tantrika/mystic and native Indologist-cum-anthropologist for the exegesis of her ethnographic data. She employs this in conjunction with her considerable knowledge, linguistic and other, of the Western natives and their culture/civilisation—a knowledge much greater, be it said, than the Indological equipment of many Western anthropologists working in South Asia, and acquired both through her experience as a Westernised Indian, and her stay in the USA for about five years, over the last decade. This chapter expatiates on the varied sources of bias in the Western anthropology of South Asia. It explicates the philosophical underpinnings of Indic religious ritual. The chapter points out the difference between Indic non-modernity, Western pre-modernity and modernity. It argues that both Western pre-modernity and modernity share this rigid either/or character of Aristotelian thought, alchemised with the many dichotomous splits of the Judaeo–Christian world-view.
