World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

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nine as wholeness within the Confucian tradition or as Mother in the Christian tradition, can be cause for caution when proclaiming the unique access to the feminine. This analytic position is different from that of a corrective in the history of representation of women's voices within the phallocentric theological traditions. It is a beginning to the process of cross dialogue about the richness of polysemic religious symbols, rather than a feminist rallying cry. It entails a phenomenology rather than sociology of difference, essentially a mediation on the construction and meaning of text and audience. The works of Geertz, Victor Turner and Paul Ricoeur on the nature of the symbol helps us understand how we give meaning to experience, arising and shaping at the same time. Turner's term "polysemic multivalent quality of symbolsì. Active process of appropriation" capture the nature of this work.
Smith's work on the narrative aspects of autobiography as means of subversive assertion of selfhood, at the same time recruiting the new forms of subjectivity, has meaning for the experiences and expressions of women's subjectivity. Henrietta Moore in 'A Passion for Difference brings into dialogue feminist theory with current concerns in social and cultural anthropology around issues of identity, subjectivity, collectively, and the limitations of theoretical language. The struggle to identify the complexity and provisional nature of difference from within feminist frameworks undergirds the notions of we and not we, identification and differentiation; position and location; insider and outsider; authenticity and alienation. Moore takes a Merleau-Pontian approach to this matter, speculating on the embodied nature of identities and experience: A notion of 'lived anatomy' and bodily practice as a mode of knowledge draws on an understanding of experience as a form of embodied intersubjectivity. Experience is thus intersubjective and embodied, irredeemably social and processual.
A number of anthologies on Women and World Religions have now arisen, such as those edited by Arvind Sharma, Denise Carmody, and Marianne Ferguson. These, to varying degrees, attempt to locate women's religious experience within the traditions of origin. Humans are born into gender and religion simultaneously, each affecting the other in complex ways. The historical constructions of religion affect the intimate and personal ways of being and self perception as well as more legal rules of child and family laws. These include rites of passage for giving birth, encountering death, dealing with sexuality and reproductive health, as well as notions of the divinite or istadeva and other symbolic referents. The notion of a universal civil code of legal rulings, irrespective of religion, is a site of contention with respect to the current status of religious laws.
There are various reinterpretations of religious laws from feminists and theologians, but what remains unclear is the role of choice in the matter of individual decisions. Rifat Hassan's interpretation of the Koran, in regard
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