Welcome to RELI 113: Texts and Contexts: Textual Communities in South Asia, Winter 2010, with Professor Richard S. Cohen.
The class meets on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, from 2:00 – 2:50, in Peterson 104.
Please consult the upper tabs or the Pages section (in the sidebar) for information that normally would appear on a printed syllabus: a course description, schedule of readings, information on class policies, grading, and assignments, and my office hours and email. I strongly recommend that you read through all these pages at the beginning of the quarter..
Also please note that you will need a password in order to access the Online Readings. I will give you this password in class.
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The historian Brian Stock used the phrase “textual community” to designate a collection of people whose social and religious lives are organized in relation to a special text. Members of a textual community attempt to order their everyday lives in close correspondence with what their chosen text prescribes – or, at least, what they believe it prescribes. It is not essential that every member of a textual community be able to read or recite the central text. What is necessary, however, is that some members are accepted by the rest as having the authority to explain and interpret the text.
Stock’s conceptual model is the foundation of RELI 113. The class looks at the Bhagavad Gîtâ and the Devî Mâhâtmya, two texts from India and the communities that have been organized in response to them. We will use the Bhagavad Gîtâ and the Devî Mâhâtmya in order to consider stories that South Asian peoples tell themselves about themselves; to understand their expressions of communal identity. As social bases for social union, texts also occasion discord and dissent. Accordingly, we will also consider the battle for interpretive authority as a factor in communal strife.