Description

Tapping a wealth of traditions, from the Hebrew Bible to the "Bhagavad Gita," Doniger crafts a new lens for examining other cultures, and finding in the world's myths - its sacred storiesa way to talk about experiences shared across time and space. Myths, she shows, bridge the cosmic and the familiar, the personal and the abstract, the theological and the political. They encourage us to draw various, even opposed, political meanings from a single text as it travels through different historical contexts. And she demonstrates how studying myths from cultures other than our own can be exhilarating and illuminating. Myth, Doniger shows, provides a near-perfect entree to another culture. Even if scholars such as Freud, Jung, and Joseph Campbell typically overstated the universality of major myths and suppressed the distinctive natures of other cultures, post-colonial critics are wrong to argue that nothing good can come from a systematic comparative study of human cultures.