Browsing by Subject "Hinduism"
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Item Cursing Kṛṣṇa : gender, theodicy, and time in the Mahābhārata(2016-05) Wilson, Jeff Scott; Brereton, Joel P., 1948-; Freiberger, OliverIn this paper, I will discuss the doctrines of theodicy and time in the Mahābhārata, with particular attention to the concept of gender in the epic milieu. I argue that the parallel narratives of Draupadī and Gāndhārī play a central role in establishing what Emily T. Hudson refers to as “the aesthetics of suffering.” Draupadī and Gāndhārī’s respective arguments against Kṛṣṇa, especially, raise a number of crucial theodicean questions that ultimately contribute to the overall argument of the text in regards to the necessity of detachment (vairāgya) and the ravages of Time (kāla). As such, this paper endeavors to provide a reading of the text that contextualizes Draupadī and Gāndhārī’s theodicean arguments in terms of Kṛṣṇa’s identification with the epic’s concept of Time, the interplay of gender and ethics that inform these arguments, and finally, a possible answer to these arguments that incorporates the above insights. In the end, I hope to provide a fitting testament to both the moral and theological depth of the epic as a whole.Item Rational belief in classical India : Nyaya's epistemology and defense of theism(2010-05) Dasti, Matthew Roe; Phillips, Stephen H., 1950-; Sosa, Ernest D.; Koons, Robert C.; Bonevac, Daniel; Juhl, Cory; Bryant, Edwin F.Nyāya is the premier realist school of philosophy in classical India. It is also the home of a sophisticated epistemology and natural theology. This dissertation presents a distinctive interpretation of Nyāya’s epistemology and considers how it may be developed in response to various classical and contemporary challenges. I argue that it is best understood as a type of reliabilism, provided relevant qualifications. Moreover, I show that a number of apparently distinct features of Nyāya’s approach to knowledge tightly cohere when seen as components of a thoroughgoing epistemological disjunctivism. I defend Nyāya epistemology as a viable contemporary option, illustrating how it avoids problems faced by generic reliabilism. In the second portion of the dissertation, I examine the way in which Nyāya’s knowledge sources (perception, inference, and testimony) are deployed in support of a theistic metaphysics, highlighting Nyāya’s principled extension of its views of knowledge acquisition. In an appendix, I provide a full translation and commentary on an argument for God’s existence by Vācaspati Miśra (a 10th century philosopher who is unique in having shaped several distinct schools), found in his commentary on Nyāya-sūtra 4.1.21.Item Transnational perfromances : race, migration, and Indo-Caribbean cultural production in New York City and Trinidad(2010-08) Tanikella, Leela Kumari; Visweswaran, Kamala; Gordon, Edmund T.; Costa Vargas, João H.; Godreau, Isar P.; Scher, Philip W.This dissertation examines the production of culture among Indo-Caribbean communities in New York City and Trinidad. It seeks to understand how cultural producers use performance as a way to mediate their experiences of racialization in local, national, and transnational spheres. Based on a multisited ethnographic study, I analyze the Indo-Caribbean diaspora as a result of nineteenth and twentieth century indentured labor migration and as a focus of post-1965 transnational migration. To do so, I introduce the idea of "transnational performances," which I employ to examine how expressions of Indo-Caribbean identity are performed in Trinidad and New York City as a way of mediating global processes. Specifically, this dissertation begins with a geographic and historical overview of Indo-Caribbean transnational populations, then provides an ethnographic study of contemporary Hindu religious festivals in Trinidad, an Islamic festival held in both New York City and Trinidad, Indo-Caribbean media in New York, and a cultural and arts center in New York. In all these sites Indo-Caribbean cultural producers engage the politics of public representation of Indo-Caribbean identity. I argue that while Indo-Caribbean religious, festival, media, and cultural producers engage with diasporic formations of identity and develop diasporic narratives that address Indian origins, they simultaneously develop new, creative, and flexible Indo- Caribbean transnational performances in the public sphere often coproducing their identities in relation to other diasporic communities. Concerns about authenticity exist alongside the desire to create new cultural practices that employ hybridity as a strategy to assert belonging. These transnational performances are spaces from which Indo-Caribbean communities develop a public voice that responds to perceived exclusions and erasures. The geographies of belonging that are central in the transnational performances of Indo-Caribbean cultural producers suggest that we must attend to the cultural practices developed within and across boundaries while taking a historical perspective on global processes that are reconfigured in the contemporary period.