Faculty - Barbara A. Holdrege, Ph.D.

Ph.D. in Comparative History of Religions -
South Asian Traditions and Jewish Traditions
Harvard University

holdrege@religion.ucsb.edu

• Politics of Comparison. My work as a comparative historian of religions has emphasized the role of comparative study—and in particular the comparative study of "Hinduisms" and "Judaisms"—as a method of critical interrogation that can serve as a means to dismantle the tyranny of prevailing paradigms in the academy and to explore a range of alternative epistemologies. Long after the period of decolonization, the “postcolonial predicament” of scholars in the human sciences has involved coming to terms with the legacy of European epistemological hegemony, which still prevails as an “internal Eurocentrism” and “internal orientalism” that operate in the representational strategies, categories, and practices of many scholars. Sustained comparative analyses of Hindu and Jewish constructions of critical analytical categories—such as language, scripture, sacrifice, purity, and the body—provide alternative epistemologies to the Protestant-based paradigms that have served to perpetuate the ideals of Enlightenment discourse and colonialist projects. My earlier work focused on constructions of language and scripture in Hindu and Jewish traditions, as explored in my bookVeda and Torah: Transcending the Textuality of Scripture. Among my more recent projects, I am co-editing Beyond Hubert and Mauss: Reimagining Sacrifice in Hindu and Jewish Traditions, a collection of essays by specialists in South Asia and in Judaica that provides a critical assessment of prevailing theories of sacrifice in the academy, with particular emphasis on the ways in which Hindu and Jewish traditions develop alternative models of sacrifice to those proposed by theorists such as Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, René Girard, and Walter Burkert.
  
• Hindu Discourses of the Body. My work on brahmanical Hinduism and rabbinic Judaism has emphasized the distinctive nature of these traditions as "embodied communities," for whom the body constitutes a site of central significance. My recent research has focused in particular on Hindu discourses of the body. In the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in the body as an analytical category in the social sciences and humanities, particularly within the context of cultural studies. In recent years scholars of religion have begun to reflect critically on the notion of embodiment and to examine discourses of the body in particular religious traditions. Many of these studies are concerned with categories of the body that have been theorized by scholars in philosophy, history, the social sciences, or feminist and gender studies: the lived body, the mindful body, the social body, the body politic, the sexual body, the alimentary body, the medical body, the gendered body, and so on. While scholarship on the body in religion has made significant advances in recent years, the dominant trends of analysis are problematic in that scholars of religion have tended to adopt the categories theorized by scholars in other disciplines and have consequently not given sufficient attention to generating analytical categories and models that are grounded in the distinctive idioms of religious traditions. Hindu traditions provide extensive, elaborate, and multiform discourses of the body, and a sustained investigation of these discourses can contribute in significant ways to scholarship on the body in the history of religions as well as in the human sciences generally. My forthcoming book Bhakti and Embodiment: At Play with Krsna’s Limitless Forms maps out a broad terrain of Hindu models of embodiment and then provides an extended analysis of the multileveled discourses of embodiment and systems of embodied practices that are developed by certain bhakti (devotional) traditions.
  
• Sacred Spaces and Cultural Landscapes in South Asia. In recent years I have been involved in an extended investigation of constructions of sacred space in South Asia. Sacred space is a category of spatial perception and practice that has served as one of the principal means by which religious communities in South Asia have represented, experienced, and shaped their natural, social, and cultural landscapes. South Asian communities have used a variety of means to mark spaces as “sacred”: through architectural structures such as temples and shrines; through pilgrimage maps and other cartographic representations; through ritual performances such as festivals, pilgrimages, and temple rituals; through narratives such as mythological representations and eulogistic literature; and through iconography and other forms of visual culture. In my capacity as the Director of the Center for the Analysis of Sacred Space (CASS), I am concerned with fostering research and instructional initiatives concerned with the analysis of sacred space, with a focus on the religions and cultures of Asia. One of the objectives of CASS is to expand the research and instructional applications of geographic information systems (GIS) and technologies beyond the earth sciences and the social sciences into the humanities by developing geospatial digital models for mapping cultural and historical data. I am currently completing a multimedia digital volume, From Geographic Place to Transcendent Space: Tracking Krsna’s Footprints in Vraja-Mandala, which focuses on Vraja-Mandala, the sacred site region of Braj in North India that is celebrated as the sacred abode (dhaman) of the deity Krsna.

Selected Publications:

• Bhakti and Embodiment: At Play with Krsna’s Limitless Forms. (Forthcoming)
• From Geographic Place to Transcendent Space: Tracking Krsna’s Footprints in Vraja-Mandala. ECAI ePublications in collaboration with California Digital Library eScholarship. (Forthcoming)
• Beyond Hubert and Mauss: Reimagining Sacrifice in Hindu and Jewish Traditions. (Co-editor, with Kathryn McClymond) (Forthcoming)
• Veda and Torah: Transcending the Textuality of Scripture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.
• Ritual and Power. Journal of Ritual Studies 4, no. 2 (Summer 1990). (Editor)

• “Enraptured Devotion and Bodies of Bliss: Embodied Mysticism in Krsna Bhakti Traditions.” Essays on Mysticism and Phenomenology, eds. Jeffrey Keiser and Michelle Rebidoux. ARC: The Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University 35 (2007). (Forthcoming)
• “Vraja-Dhaman: Krsna Embodied in Transcendent Space and Geographic Place.” In A Companion to the Bhagavata Purana, eds. Ravi M. Gupta and Kenneth R. Valpey. (Forthcoming)
• “The Body.” In A Handbook for the Study of Hinduism, eds. Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby. New York: Routledge, expected 2007.
• “Embodiment.” Encyclopedia of Love in World Religions, ed. Yudit Kornberg Greenberg. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, expected 2007.
• “Interrogating Bhakti.” International Journal of Hindu Studies 11 (2007).
• “From Purana-Veda to Karsna-Veda: The Bhagavata Purana as Consummate Smrti and Sruti Incarnate.” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 15, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 31-70.
• "Dharma.” In The Hindu World, eds. Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby, pp. 213-248. New York: Routledge, 2004.
• “From the Religious Marketplace to the Academy: Negotiating the Politics of Identity.” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 11, no. 2 (March 2003): 113-142.
• "Beyond the Guild: Liberating Biblical Studies.” In African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush, pp. 138-159. New York: Continuum International, 2000.
• "Mystical Cognition and Canonical Authority: The Devotional Mysticism of the Bhagavata Purana." In Mysticism and Sacred Scripture, ed. Steven T. Katz, pp. 184-209. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• "What's Beyond the Post? Comparative Analysis as Critical Method.” In A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, eds. Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray, pp. 77-91. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
• "What Have Brahmins to Do with Rabbis? Embodied Communities and Paradigms of Religious Tradition.” Judaism and Asian Religions, ed. Harold Kasimow. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 17, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 23-50.
• "Body Connections: Hindu Discourses of the Body and the Study of Religion.” The Study of Hinduism and the Study of Religion. International Journal of Hindu Studies 2, no. 3 (December 1998): 341-386.
• "Veda and Torah: The Word Embodied in Scripture.” In Between Jerusalem and Benares: Comparative Studies in Judaism and Hinduism, ed. Hananya Goodman, pp. 103-178. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.
• "Veda in the Brahmanas: Cosmogonic Paradigms and the Delimitation of Canon.” In Authority, Anxiety, and Canon: Essays in Vedic Interpretation, ed. Laurie L. Patton, pp. 35-66. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.
• "The Bride of Israel: The Ontological Status of Scripture in the Rabbinic and Kabbalistic Traditions.” In Rethinking Scripture: Essays from a Comparative Perspective, ed. Miriam Levering, pp. 180-261. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.
  

• RS 272: Seminar in Comparative Methods in the Study of Religion
• RS 270: Seminar on Myth and Symbol
• RS 206B: Seminar on Vedic Traditions
• RS 206D: Seminar on Bhakti Traditions
• RS 206G: Seminar on Hindu Discourses of the Body
• RS 206J: Seminar on Contemporary Issues in South Asian Religions: Post-Colonial Studies