Jinamanjari 1999 04 No 19

SR No.: 524019
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Jinamanjari
Publisher: Canada Bramhi Jain Society Publication
Publication Year: 1999
Total Pages: 88
Language: English
Classification: Magazine, Canada_Jinamanjari, & Canada
File Size: 5 MB

Page 84

Open Boundaries: Jain Communities and Cultures in Indian History. Editor, John E. Cort. Albany: State University of New York Press. 1998. Pp. vii + 264 with references and index. SUNY Series in Hindu Studies: Wendy Doniger, editor. ISBN 0-7914-3786-8 (Softbound).
In his critical analysis of the relationship between language and literary interpretation during the 1970s, Stanley Fish comme Foucault posits that the interpretive activities of a particular community should never be considered self-contained phenomena operating with a fixed language system. Instead, it should be thought of in terms of being an entity whose capacity to interpret meaning is interwoven within the fabric of an interactive social context (Is There a Text in This Class?).
A parochial community, therefore, derives meaning from the practices and assumptions of its own institutions, and to a varying degree, from those institutions that surround it. From this perspective, Fish continues, the meaning of either an utterance or text "is not a function of the values its words have in a linguistic system that is independent of context; rather, it is because the words are heard as already embedded in a context that they have a meaning (309)."
Pushing past the margins of literary criticism, the contemporary discourse over meaning, identity and context has solidly entered the parlance of ethno-historians, and is what lies at the heart of each of the ten essays that comprise Open Boundaries: Jain Communities and Cultures in Indian History. As John Cort states in his introduction:
A sense of self-identity, whether in terms of the individual person or a social group, in never constructed in isolation, but rather is always a contextualized process, in which the sense of "self" is in dialogue, opposition, or dialectical relationship to a sense of what is "not-self" or "other."...Jains have always been active participants in larger contexts, and that therefore any adequate understanding of the Jains and Jainism must take into account both the larger contexts and the forms of Jain participation in those contexts (1-2).
Though admittedly not a new methodological approach, what makes this text superbly unique is its ground-breaking application to such a wide range of subject material (i.e., philosophy, the use of mantra, narratives, art, ritual, sex, politics, and issues of gender). Beginning with discussions held at the 1991 University of WisconsinMadison Conference on South Asia and a four-day workshop held in the summer of 1993 at Amherst College, it was agreed that for too long the Jaina tradition has been studied in both the West and Indian as either a
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