The Kalash Tribe of Pakistan

[Zankou]

Originally Posted by SnakeEyes

I can't remember if the Stoic/Mahayana thing was mentioned in the Mceviley book, it might have been because it sounds familiar. Anyways its not something I'mespecially familiar with but something I'd definitely like to hear about. You're bang on about the Greek influence in depictions of the Buddha, though; some of the first statues have him rocking slightly curly hair and even wearing a Greek style toga.

Finally, yes, I studied PIE reconstruction. I did Sanskrit first, tried Avestan and Hittite, a little Homer in the linguistics program (not classics) and worked extensively for two years on Indo-European and PIE as an undergraduate. I was super lucky to find the program that I did in Canada, actually.

You bastard, that's a fantastic course of study. How I envy you!!! What are you doing now?

Btw, have you ever read Roberto Calasso's books? He is like a God unto me.

[SnakeEyes]

Originally Posted by Zankou

You bastard, that's a fantastic course of study. How I envy you!!! What are you doing now?

Btw, have you ever read Roberto Calasso's books? He is like a God unto me.

Well, IE studies proved so fruitful and lucrative that Ive been teaching English in Japan all year like a schmuck with no opportunity to make more money, which has hurt my ability to take a chunk out of my loans, which meant I didn't enroll for Graduate studies next year like I wanted, meaning I'll be going back to BC next Fall to do so while I get a real job and try to make it so I can afford to study in 2009. Luckily I have friends who are tradesmen with their own companies in various areas like Sawyering, Tile-setting and Construction, so I'll not want for work and hopefully that can happen. I'm a "take your time" kinda guy, which is why I never shied away from doing whatever interested me most in school. I know that as broke as I could possibly get I come from a country where you can always rack in tons of dough being somebody's bitch or getting your hands dirty.

I don' know about this Calasso fellow; I'm gonna google him but please tell me more.

[Jay Pan ROKK]

Follow your dream Snake, you are doing a good job.

[SnakeEyes]

Just read a review about "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony", Zankou. Looks awesome, actually, I'll definiely pick it up. They may even have it here, the main bookstore in Sapporo has a strangely awesome section on the humanities, and a section on linguistics that is actually superior to my University's.

[Zankou]

Originally Posted by SnakeEyes

Well, IE studies proved so fruitful and lucrative that Ive been teaching English in Japan all year like a schmuck with no opportunity to make more money, which has hurt my ability to take a chunk out of my loans, which meant I didn't enroll for Graduate studies next year like I wanted, meaning I'll be going back to BC next Fall to do so while I get a real job and try to make it so I can afford to study in 2009. Luckily I have friends who are tradesmen with their own companies in various areas like Sawyering, Tile-setting and Construction, so I'll not want for work and hopefully that can happen. I'm a "take your time" kinda guy, which is why I never shied away from doing whatever interested me most in school. I know that as broke as I could possibly get I come from a country where you can always rack in tons of dough being somebody's bitch or getting your hands dirty.

I don' know about this Calasso fellow; I'm gonna google him but please tell me more.

Ah, a JET eh. After law school I stayed for six weeks with my buddy who was a JET in Saitama. A cool program, I might've considered doing it myself if I wasn't already signed up with BigLaw at the time.

IE studies definitely ain't lucrative. Then again, neither is philosophy (my area of undergraduate study), unless you go to law school and start slavin' for the man.

As I've said, Calasso is a pure God. He is so unique that there really is no remote analogue to describe him by. I guess the closest would be a mix between Ovid and Kafka, if that makes any sense. It's very hard to describe, but he writes like a modernist writer retelling the stories of antiquity as though he was actually living at that time ... he makes the gods come alive in a peculiar way, by recasting them through the lens of perfected Continental literature. You'll just have to read for yourself. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is a great place to start, a phenomenal book, but the other one I think you'd love is "Ka," which is a similar project except in the context of Indian stories.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/0...=1&oref=slogin

Wendy Doniger has hailed it as the best book about Hindu mythology that anyone has ever written, and having read a substantial amount in the area, even calling it a contest is an insult to Calasso in my book. He is just like no other. A true Vedic rsi gifted with the pen of Mallarme. An Aryan Holderlin.

[SnakeEyes]

Originally Posted by Zankou

Ah, a JET eh. After law school I stayed for six weeks with my buddy who was a JET in Saitama. A cool program, I might've considered doing it myself if I wasn't already signed up with BigLaw at the time.

IE studies definitely ain't lucrative. Then again, neither is philosophy (my area of undergraduate study), unless you go to law school and start slavin' for the man.

As I've said, Calasso is a pure God. He is so unique that there really is no remote analogue to describe him by. I guess the closest would be a mix between Ovid and Kafka, if that makes any sense. It's very hard to describe, but he writes like a modernist writer retelling the stories of antiquity as though he was actually living at that time ... he makes the gods come alive in a peculiar way, by recasting them through the lens of perfected Continental literature. You'll just have to read for yourself. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is a great place to start, a phenomenal book, but the other one I think you'd love is "Ka," which is a similar project except in the context of Indian stories.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/0...=1&oref=slogin

Wendy Doniger has hailed it as the best book about Hindu mythology that anyone has ever written, and having read a substantial amount in the area, even calling it a contest is an insult to Calasso in my book. He is just like no other. A true Vedic rsi gifted with the pen of Mallarme. An Aryan Holderlin.

Lol. Cool. Reading that review, though, Im not sure if it's totally for me. I notice his field is Literature from the wiki bio; kinda makes sense, because his work sounds more up the alley of Joseph Campbell than someone like Watkins or Witzel. I'd definitely read it, but to be honest I started out in Indian studies doing philosophy and Lit; I kind of moved away from it because I'm really into asking real questions about Ancient History and Culture, and comparing the stories with the archeology and linguistic evidence. I'm not a strictly academic dude but I don't like to fuck around too much either. Calasso doesn't strike me as the kind of guy that cares too much if his ideas and interpretations match up with comparative evidence for Iranian and IE religion, he seems to be an immersive experience kind of writer; which is cool, but different from what I do.

Doniger raised an eyebrow for me, because even though she was mentored by Eliade, who I totally respect and admire, I find her kind of crazy. She's one of those Jungian influenced people that mixes half-baked psychology in with hard evidence, and she's kind of a highly sexual writer, too, which gets in the way of her objective thinking sometimes. She wrote a book about Siva that I have but (to be extremely cocky) intend to discredit later on in life. When it comes to Indian studies, Witzel and Stephanie Jamison are my dogs, and they diss Doniger on a regular basis for going too far out on theories that aren't even tenable. She trained a guy I studied under in the Religion department, and he had weird stories of parties she would throw where she had dildos floating in weird moats in her house and shit. Seems like a quirky broad.

Still, like I said, I'll give it a go. I've read other kinds of books on Ancient Religion that go outside the boundaries of academia and they can still be very useful (The Seven Story Tower especially). But I prefer works that can do the "challenge how you look at mythology" thing while sticky to methods that are reasonable and clear-headed (Like When They Severed Earth From Sky, and excellent book that I highly recommend). I won't judge this fellow until I read him, though, and the content definitely sounds interesting . Cheers for the suggestion!

[_mothra_]

how much is modern lithuanian supposed to be like PIE? and are the roma of similar ethnic stock to the kalash?

[SnakeEyes]

Originally Posted by _mothra_

how much is modern lithuanian supposed to be like PIE? and are the roma of similar ethnic stock to the kalash?

Its not really thats its exactly like PIE or anything, because it has changed a lot like any languages, but more that it looks like a mix of a bunch of the IE languages, like has Sanskrit type roots with Greek and Latin type inflexional endings, a little Slavic sort of feel mixed in there, etc. It's considered (by Lithuanian linguists especially) to be the most conservative and archaic of the IE languages, because it has words now that look really close to the oldest forms of words like two thousand years ago in languages like Sanskrit and Latin. I mentioned before that Lithuanian religion is where a lot of innovation happens, and doesn't always yield the expected themes and stories (although some of the gods in Lithuanian have names that look almost EXACTLY like what PIE names reconstructed from various cognates would look like, like Perkunas). It has changed though, like I said, apparently they do some weird things with verbs that are new. The Wiki article on Lithuanian is awesome:

Lithuanian language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As far as Roma go, if you're interested, the best book I ever read on the subject was Bury Me Standing. It's by this woman who travels around Eastern Europe trying to unravel the mysteries of Gypsy heritage and culture. It addresses recent history and past, and she even drags up records in Romanian libraries of Gypsy slave auctions and traces how they came into Europe as slaves bought for the purposes of fighting the Turks and Moors *by Dracula's cousin, no fucking joke), but then became this sort of thrall society that got sold around Europe and were used as dowries and cattle. From what I remember, the best theory about exactly where they came from was a specific caste of Indians in the Gandhara region or somewhere around there that got cast out or fled from some skirmish or war, and ended up in the hands of people who sold them to Europe from Afghanistan. As far as I know nobody disputes that their original language was Indic, but I don't know what branch.

[adren@line]

Originally Posted by SnakeEyes

Don't rag on Siva, dude. McEviley proposed that he literally came out of a weird hodge-podge of IE gods floating around at the time (including Poseidon, from where the original Trident might have arisen, and Hercules, from where McEviley believes the club and lionskin might have popped up). I'm kinda down with that theory, because the humanoid dread locked Siva with his all his awesome weapons (aside from the trident and club we have the axe, spear and bow, typical arsenal of a Saka nomad) riding on his white bull smoking hemp and hanging out in grave yards eating out of a human skull is strange even for that period of Hinduism, with all the Advaita Vedanta and Ajivika shit going down (which led to Jainism and Buddhism a little later)

*correction: Advaita came nearly 1000 years after Buddhism. The Upanishads pre-date Buddhism however. Ofcourse, you already know this, but im just being a bitch.

IE studies were something I really wanted to do, but I just couldn't figure out how to make money off of it, so I passed it up. Either way, kudos for pursuing it. Im more of an "armchair-expert" in comparison to the layman, but its cool that you have actually received a degree in this stuff and possess a legitimate expertise..

And I find it hard to believe that after reading all of that Indian and Greek philosophy that you aren't impressed by any of it and haven't adopted some of the logic.

[SnakeEyes]

Ah, touche. Advaita Vedanta is the term for a much later specific school headed by Shankara. That was a slip on my part, but what I meant was just Vedanta, which just means "end of the Vedas". This is the period of the Upanishads, and actually includes for most people the later Brahmanas (specifically a style of Brahmana that came later called the Aranyakas). It's basically the transition period where people aren't really commenting on the Vedas anymore like they were with the mantas and early Brahmanas, but were sort of commenting on the commentaries and coming up with a lot of the signature Hindu ****physical ideas like Karma, Dharma and Yoga (but Yoga might be much older). It's roughly contemporary to the switch that was happening in Greece at the same time with the pre-Socratics, and interestingly the focus, Jnana, is cognate with the later Greek focus on Gnosis (knowledge). That's why there's a lot of interesting questions to ask about why this shit went down at the same time, and whether the fact that a huge Persian Empire was straddling the edges of both these cultures with their Scythian cousins galloping back and forth conducting trade and warfare and adventurous Greeks making forays into unknown territory in the East, has anything to do with it.

The tricky thing depending on who you talk to is how Buddhism came out of this, whether it was drastically innovating in its own ideas or whether it codified something that was already happening. Cocky hindus even today see Buddhism as an essentially Hindu religion, with only the pesky little matter of a Universal soul being a problem, while scholars of Buddhism will try to convince you that Buddhism influenced it's parent culture more than the reverse. I figure it was all going down in India, and religious shit in India is usually the domain of that vague and presumptuous word "Hinduism", and so for me the Hindus win it. But then I think Sikhs are pretty much Hindus, too.

Also, the oldest Upanishad, the Brhadaranyaka, is dated to the 7th-8th century BC in composition, whereas the most generous dating anyone will give you on the Buddha is the 6th (really most scholars will have it at around the 4th somewheres).

Basically, my thing with Siva is that his attributes and images come out of the same crazy milieu, in the same geographical area (roughly) as all these Greeks, Yogins, Jains, Buddhists and Scythian shamans (that still doesn't really do justice to the variety that was around then) that are floating around at that time giving headaches to the Brahmin Orthodoxy, and that it's hard to figure out just where he gets his mojo from.