Review: [Untitled]

Reviewed Work(s):
"The Heathen in His Blindness...": Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion by S. N.
Balagangadhara
Gerald Larson
Philosophy East and West, Vol. 47, No. 3. (Jul., 1997), pp. 433-435.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8221%28199707%2947%3A3%3C433%3A%22HIHBA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9
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BOOK REVIEWS

"The Heathen in His Blindness . . .": Asia, the West and the Dynamic of
Religion. By S. N. Balagangadhara. Studies in the History of Religions.
Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994. Pp. 563.
One of the important debates in the academic study of religion has to do
with the manner in which the very notion of "religion" is treated. Over
three decades ago, Wilfred Cantwell Smith inaugurated the debate in his
now classic book The Meaning and End of Religion (first published in
1962; subsequently, New York: Harper and Row, 1978), in which he
argues that the term "religion" is a scholarly construct and that the various "isms" in the study of religion-for example, Hindu-ism, Buddh-ism,
and so forth-are hollow abstractions that inhibit what we really should
be studying, namely "cumulative tradition" and "personal faith." While
few accepted Smith's recommendation that we stop using the term
"religion," most professionals in the academic study of religion conceded that Smith had made an important point.
One of the more recent voices in the continuing debate has been
that of an outsider in the academic study of religion, Frits Staal, who, in a
stimulating, albeit somewhat eccentric, discussion about the origins of
language in a book titled Rules without Meaning (New York: Peter Lang,
1989), argues that the term "religion" may be a naming term (or, in other
words, almost a kind of proper noun) rather than a generic or general
notion. Specifically, Staal argues that the term "religion" has an appropriate reference only in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions and
cannot meaningfully be extended to traditions in Asia such as the Hindu
or Buddhist. In the Asian context, such terms as "mysticism," "meditation," and "ritual" are much more basic than the term "religion." Here
again, few have accepted Staal's extreme views (either in regard to the
origins of language or in regard to "religion" being a proper noun), but
most professionals would concede that he has raised some critical issues.
Clearly the term "religion" continues to be in need of conceptual clarification both in religious studies as well as in comparative philosophy.
S. N. Balagangadhara's "The Heathen in His Blindness . . ." may be
considered an additional contribution to this continuing debate. The
thrust of his argument is easy to summarize. The term "religion" grows
out of Christian studies and especially the Protestant Christian theological reflection of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The idea
that "religion" is a generic or universal notion, that is, that all peoples
and cultures have "religion," is a bias or prejudice of Christian theological reflection and has really never been shown to be the case in
empirical research. Even modern "secular" studies of religion uncriti-

Reviewed by
Gerald Larson
Indiana University

Philosophy East & West

Volume 47, Number 3
July 1997
433-448
0 1997

by University of
Hawai'i Press

Philosophy East & West

cally accept the old biased notion that "religion" is a generic or universal notion.
In fact, Balagangadhara suggests, "religion" is better thought of simply as a model of "explanation." A "religion" is "an explanatorily intelligible account of the Cosmos." When taken in this simple sense, the
term clearly applies to the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, but
does not apply to the traditions of India. In India there are all sorts of
explanatory accounts of the Cosmos, and there is no effort whatever to
give a definitive account. India's rich cultural pluralism without any
definitive explanation of the Cosmos and without any clearly discernible
institutional structures for transmitting an intelligible account of the Cosmos (such as a church) is a clear example of a culture without "religion."
Hence, "religion" is not a generic or universal notion. Or, put somewhat
differently, there may be cultures, such as India, without "religion" in the
Jewish, Christian, or Islamic sense, and we should begin to study cultures
other than Western culture without the uncritical, prejudiced notion of
"religion."
Quite apart from whether the notion of "religion" can be characterized satisfactorily as "explanation" or "an explanatorily intelligible
account of the Cosmos," the obvious focus for Balagangadhara's analysis
would have to be the intellectual and social history of South Asia, and
his task should be one of showing how it is not the case that "explanation" or "an explanatorily intelligible account of the Cosmos" is a
crucial part of the cultural picture. But, alas, in a book of over 550 pages
of text, about twenty-five pages are given over to India! There are a few
quotations from the Vedas and the Upanisads and one or two citations
from modern Indology. The remainder of the book is a rambling and
repetitious survey of Western intellectual history filled with long quotations many of which are not pertinent to the development of the
argument.
The substance of the book is to be found in its basic thesis, which
could have been outlined and documented in perhaps a hundred pages.
The task would then have been to substantiate the thesis with a detailed
and carefully documented treatment of the Indian cultural context. Such
could have been accomplished in perhaps two hundred pages. Instead,
what has been published is some 550 rambling pages about Western
intellectual history (most of which is well known to most intelligent
readers) and only twenty-five pages about the context that is especially
pertinent to the author's thesis.
One can only conclude that the author was not well served by his
editors and publisher. The book has simply not been critically read and
assessed. Careful copyediting has not taken place. What could have
been an interesting monograph is a rambling, grossly overpriced book.
E. J. Brill and the editorial board of the Studies in the History of Religions

series would do well to pay more attention to the task of preparing books
for publication than is evidenced in the production of the present book
under review.

Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary

Chinese Cinema. By Rey Chow. New York: Columbia University Press,
1995. Pp. 252.
Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary
Chinese Cinema is a dense and original work in which Rey Chow
attempts to erase the facile boundary between "East" and "West" and to
replace such categories with a more fluid and postmodern anti-essentialist
notion of culture. At the same time, she wishes to dislodge a complacent
reliance on ethnographic representation of "the other" in writing,
especially by anthropologists, and to propose that in its place one might
regard film as ethnographic-even films made for entertainment. In the
course of this book of average length but much greater-than-average
depth, Chow covers a wide range of issues in cross-cultural understanding, translation, metaphors of depth and surface, gender, and (post-)
colonialism. She interweaves these topics with close readings of recent
Chinese films, especially those of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige.
Chow cannot easily be classified as a proponent of a particular
school of thinkers. Her treatment of all topics is thoughtful and independent. Though a feminist, she does not accept all readings of Chinese
cinema by feminist scholars. Though a critic of imperialist representation, she does not in a knee-jerk fashion excoriate Chinese who seek
to please Western audiences. Each topic is supported by evidence of
her profound familiarity with recent critical thought about it, and she
sketches out her own position with great persuasiveness.
The most accessible and likely the most successful sections of the
book are those that discuss particular elements-scenes, images, sounds,
origins-of
particular films. For instance, her consideration of the
meaning of Judou's decision to look back when her husband's nephew
watches her bathing, in Zhang Yimou's film Judou is nothing short of
brilliant: "As she confronts Tianqing with her naked body, Judou is . . .
taking into her own hands the 'to-be-looked-at-ness' that conventionally
constitutes femininity. If the female body in its 'to-be-looked-at-ness' is a
cultural cliche, Judou's move is that of quoting the clichk: she exhibits
her female body for the male gaze literally, in the manner that one cites a
well-used platitude" (p. 167; emphasis in original). She then extends this
defiant look at the audience to Zhang's own stance vis-i-vis his audience
and the Chinese state, showing that "exhibitionism is actually a way of

Reviewed by
Susan D. Blum
University of Colorado
at Denver

,997

by University of
Hawai'i Press