It happens time and again that a male colleague or student I never met writes me addressing me as “Madam” (or any other form of it). This is not a crime, but I wonder whether they are aware of what they are implicitly communicating by doing it, namely that they consider the fact of being a woman more relevant than the fact of being a scholar. Fine, if you are inviting someone to the opera, but somehow weird if you are asking them to review a book, write an article or participate in a conference…
Category Archives: methodology
The ultimate level of interpretation
Suppose you are a devout Christian and you think that the Bible has been inspired by God. Would this mean that you cannot discuss the historical layers of the Bible? Or would you continue to investigate them, thinking of them as the way in which God assumed a historical form and communicated with human beings? In other words, does not faith regard only the ultimate level, leaving all the others unchanged?
How should we call half-baked editions?
After my last post on critical and diplomatic editions, a colleague wrote me inviting me to consider the case of half-baked editions. How should we call them?
Collations, critical and diplomatic editions
Is any text which reports variant readings from other manuscripts a “critical edition”? And what is a diplomatic edition?
A text which reports all variant readings from various manuscripts without selecting a preferred one is a collation. In a collation, one typically reproduces also variant readings which are clearly wrong and will later be eliminated. Some of these details are irrelevant for the sake of the constitution of the critical text, but can be relevant for the history of the transmission. For instance, a manuscript often writing śa or ṣa instead of sa might be an evidence of the fact that the text was transmitted (at a certain point of its history) within an environment in which the dental sibilant was not distinguished, e.g., in Bengal. The same could be repeated, mutatis mutandis, about the use of retroflex ḷ for non Vedic words, the confusion between sounded and unsounded occlusives and so on.
“Do you know of any recent literature on X?”
This post is part of my series of suggestions for younger colleagues and students. I put here all the pieces of good advice I would have loved to hear while I was in their position…
Thinking in Sanskrit in order to understand texts?
A student recently asked me how to think in Sanskrit. Her point was that thinking in English or in any other foreign language immensely helps one in translating a text, so that this should be desirable also in the case of Sanskrit.
Dividing words in transcription
I am often busy correcting my students’ essays and I often notice, when they decide to transcribe Sanskrit texts, that they have no idea about where to introduce white spaces. Hence, I thought of explaining it here, in case other students may need help with that.
- Be clear about what you are doing: You are transcribing a text from one writing system to another. It does not make sense to retain in the new writing systems peculiarities which only make sense in the original one.
- Therefore, you don’t need to reproduce in Roman alphabet the white spaces of the Devanagari (or of any other South Asian alphabet). For instance, mām eva, not māmeva, although the Devanagari would have मामेव.
- Just use spaces between words.
- What is a word? Use the Grammarians’ definition “whatever has a verbal or nominal ending” and add that the ending has to be visible (no lopa admitted).
- Accordingly, you don’t need a white space within the elements of a compound. For instance, kṛṣṇacaraṇāravindayugalaṃ vande and not kṛṣṇa caraṇa aravinda yugalaṃ vande.
- What about en-dashes, you might ask? You can use among elements of compounds, in order to make the life of your audience easier, especially in the case of longer compounds. Just be consistent and remember that the actual ending of the members of a compound are not visible. For instance, śrī anavadhikānantaprītisahitā can be transcribed as anavadhika-ananta-prīti-sahitā, but NOT as anavadhikā-ananta-prīti-sahitā.
- Some authors use conventions to show that a sandhi has taken place. For instance, anavadhikânanta, meaning that there has been a sandhi of a+a.
Good luck with your essays and transcriptions!
Is a Christian scholar better equipped to understand and translate early Christian texts? Yes and no
Or, better: Is a culturally Christian scholar better equipped to understand and translate early Christian texts?
Let me stipulate that “culturally Christian” denotes a scholar who was educated in a Christian milieu and knows Christianity from the inside. She might be more or less devout at the present point of her life. This stipulation is needed in order to avoid deciding about the inner life of people, which is, by definition, imperceptible and therefore undecidable.
Now, a culturally Christian scholar surely has some advantages over a non-Christian one, insofar as she will immediately recognise what is meant by short hints in a text. She will probably also be more likely to apply the principle of charity which —in my humble opinion— is a needed approach to the study of ancient philosophy.
However, a non-Christian scholar will have the opposite advantage, namely he will not try to understand small hints found in the text, because he will not immediately see them against the background of their successive evolution.
For instance, let us take the controversial problem of whether Jesus defined himself as God in the synoptic Gospels. The synoptic Gospels, unlike the Gospel of John, do not contain clear statements in this regard. Jesus rather defines himself as “the son of Man” (ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου). A culturally Christian scholar knows that Jesus is believed to be the second person of God (no matter how sure she is in her faith) and will therefore interpret the ambiguous statements of Jesus in the Gospels according to this knowledge. By contrast, a non-Christian scholar will be freer to think that perhaps Jesus was not at all claiming to be God in the synoptic Gospels.
Hence the question: Given the same degree of scholarship (and assuming that this can be ascertained), should we prefer scholars who are culturally close to the texts they are going to study and translate? In the case of texts which need to be approached by a team of scholars, should we prefer them to be ALL culturally close to the texts?
Can we speak of “multiple Renaissances”? What are the historical and political consequences of this use?
I just came back from a conference on the many Renaissances in Asia. Since it was part of the Coffee Break Conference project, it was meant to be most of all an open discussion on a fascinating topic (rethinking the concept of Renaissance and asking whether this could be applied also outside its original context, and more specifically in South Asia). The starting point of the discussion was Jack Goody’s book “Renaissances: The one or the many?”, which has been analysed from very different perspectives in the opening talks by Camillo Formigatti and Antony Pattathu and to which most of the following talks referred back to. There was a general consensus about the fact that Goody’s depiction of South Asia is at best incomplete and at worst repeats some orientalist prejudices about its being changeless.
Die Lange Nacht der Forschung: How do we present our research to the public?
Two days ago I visited a part of the “Long night of research”, an event having the purpose of presenting research to the public. Universities, the academy of sciences and various private funds supporting scientific research (like the Rotary club) had a small portion of an open space to present their highlights. The idea is that people just stroll from one location to the other and spend only some minutes in each. Thus, an effective communication needs to be essential, catchy and striking enough to mould the audience’s memory.
The public included many children and their parents. It goes without saying, I guess, that the institutes focusing on natural sciences were way more successful in gaining the attention of young visitors. In the photograph, you can see two 13 ys old boys operating a fake brain.
