DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Language, Texts, and Society

Explorations in Ancient Indian Culture and Religion

Patrick Olivelle author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Anthem Press

Published:15th Dec '11

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Language, Texts, and Society cover

A collection of research papers by Patrick Olivelle, unified in their search for historical context and developments hidden within words and texts.

This collection brings together the research papers of Patrick Olivelle, published over a period of about ten years. The unifying theme of these studies is the search for historical context and developments hidden within words and texts.

This collection brings together a series of Patrick Olivelle’s research papers, published over a period of about ten years, whose unifying theme is the search for hidden historical context and developments within words and texts. Words (and cultural histories represented by words) that scholars often take for granted as having a continuous and long history are often new – sometimes even being neologisms. They can thus provide important indications of cultural and religious innovations. Olivelle’s book on the asramas, as well as the short pieces included in this volume, such as those on ananda and dharma, seek to see cultural innovation and historical changes within the changing semantic fields of key terms. Closer examination of numerous Sanskrit terms taken for granted as central to ‘Hinduism’ provide similar results. Indian texts have often been studied in the past as disincarnate realities providing information on an ahistorical and unchanging culture. ‘Language, Texts, and Society’ is a small contribution towards correcting this method of textual study.

ISBN: 9780857284310

Dimensions: 229mm x 153mm x 39mm

Weight: 680g

420 pages