“They Were Talking about Themselves”: Michael Altman, American Hinduism, and Critique from the Inside of Religious Studies
Issued Date: 24 Sep 2018
Abstract
Michael Altman’s Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu offers a major contribution to the history of Hinduism in America, as it revises the standard “Transcendentalist-Theosophist-Vivekananda-1965” trajectory with a critical eye toward the nationalist and orientalist discourses of formative episodes from the Colonial era up to Chicago’s World Parliament (xvii). Altman’s genealogical approach presumes no essence or definition of ‘Hinduism,’ which both suits his source materials and serves his interest in classification quite well. Throughout this history, a rich set of examples shows how ‘hazy notions’ of Indian religion variously served as discursive foils and straw-men against white, Protestant American identity¬–from scathing missionary accounts of barbaric ‘Juggernaut’ worship (30), to the racial hierarchies in American geography schoolbooks (59), Thoreau’s Walden Pond as a River Ganges (86), and the Indian-derived, but not Hindu, ‘wisdom religion’ of the Theosophical Society (109). As Altman convincingly argues, when white, Protestant Americans talked about religion in India, “they were not really talking about religion in India. They were talking about themselves” (xxi), and thereby constituting their own racial, national, and religious identities (140).
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DOI: 10.1558/bsor.34692
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Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons
of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.<br>
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Doniger, Wendy. 2009. The Hindus: An Alternative History. New York:
Penguin Books.<br>
<br>
King, Richard. 1999. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory,
India, and ‘The Mystic East.’ London: Routledge. <br>
<br>
Kurien, Prema. 2007. A Place at the Multicultural Table: The
Development of an American Hinduism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.<br>
<br>
Lincoln, Bruce. 2012. Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars:
Critical Explorations in the History of Religions. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.<br>
<br>
Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. Invention of World Religions, Or, How
European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. <a
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Narayanan, Vasudha. 2012. “Hinduism in America.” In The Cambridge
History of Religion in America, edited by Stephen Stein. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. <a
href="https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521871082.017">https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521871082.017</a>.<br>
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Tweed, Thomas. 1992. The American Encounter with Buddhism 1844–1912:
Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent. Bloomington: Indiana
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Tweed, Thomas, and Stephen Prothero, eds. 1999. Asian Religions in
America: A Documentary History. New York: Oxford University Press.<br>
<br>
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Random House. <br>
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