Reviews for Ethnic Identity and Religion in the India-Bangladesh Borderlands

The average rating for Ethnic Identity and Religion in the India-Bangladesh Borderlands based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-05-08 00:00:00 Brad Davis Book review. Cordova, V.F. How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V.F. Cordova. Arizona UP: Tucson, 2007. This book was put together by her friends and colleagues after Dr. Cordova suddenly passed away of a brain hemorrhage. It includes biographical information and is compiled from excerpts of lectures, her personal notes, correspondence, and discussions. Cordova writes that there are three question philosophy must answer: (1) What is the world? (2) What is it to be human? (3) What is the role of a human in the world? Compare Cordova's answer with Heidegger's: "Martin Heidegger says of these foundations that there were once answers to 'open' questions that are not 'quiescent'--that is, we no longer ask questions concerning what the world is or what man is. The Native American cannot afford to forgo those questions. The 'answers' we have grown up with--our definitions of man, the world, and their relationship--do not rest 'quiescent' for any of us" (51). Native Americans are generally excluded from the practice of philosophy in academia: "There are . . . almost no Native Americans in philosophy departments at our universities . . . we have not yet been accorded the right to speak for ourselves . . . the time has come for American native peoples to give their own explanations. And that is the relevance of the study of philosophy for Native Americans: not to see ourselves as others see us, but to look at ourselves through our own eyes" (53). Or, ghettoized: "A Native American with a background in philosophy is assumed to be fit only to teach Native American philosophy . . . [however] any Euro-American philosopher can teach a Native American philosophy course, regardless of his qualifications to do so. and very few Native American philosophers are allowed to teach Western thought" (58). Here is an example of how Native American students are marginalized: "Meaning for the Native American, is embedded in context--is, in fact, given meaning through context" (73). "I sat on the committee overseeing the thesis of a Native American graduate student. She had prefaced her research with a chapter 'about herself' (as the non-Native Americans on her committee described it). I, too, had faced such criticism as a graduate student" (73). All too often, "The Euro-American classroom is an exercise in authoritarianism" (80). The beginning of Cordova's book provides the context of her life. One of the lessons she learns as a child is: "Just as one cannot tell another person what to do, one can also not ask for anything. To ask for something is to imply an inability to be independent. To ask for anything is to imply the person asked that he or she has failed to be perceptive to the other's existence or needs" (26). You have to read the entire book to fully appreciate it, but here are some notable excerpts about significant philosophical topics: Usen, the unidentifiable IS. "The American aboriginal concept of Usen is a term of such abstraction that is has, thus far, proven too complex for Europeans to understand. The idea of Usen, or its manifestations, was mistaken by early Christian missionaries for the Western concept of God. 'Great Spirit' is the name the missionaries gave it" (107). "A reification of the concept of time allows Westerners to speak of traveling 'in' time. They can postulate traveling into the future or into the past as thought the past and future were places or things that exist somewhere out there" (108). "The Native American's response to the terror and awe inspired by the universe is to call it sacred . . . it is sacred because it is beyond reification" (109). "In a dynamic model of the universe, something is always happening without an agent having to cause anything, because that is what the universe, by its very nature, does" (111). "For the Christian . . .God and his creations are never 'one thing'. God exists always outside and apart from whatever it is that exists" (115). "Man is created and placed in a specific and slightly unearthly place: The 'Garden' of Eden implies a place that is separate from the normal earth--it is cultivated, trimmed, and so on--it is a garden. When man is ousted from the Garden, je is confronted with a harsh and stingy land--he is furthermore cursed to struggle to make a living" (116). "By contrast, in American Indian legends, man is placed on Earth within specific boundaries but he is not given anything specially created to make his life easy. He is given 'sweet grasses,' the waters, the animals as both food and medicines. Man is not placed in a harsh environment, nor is he cursed by his maker . . . overall the Earth is seen as a good and rightful place for man to be. Secondly, the sense of being in the 'right' place is essential to the understanding of American Indian's concept of the Earth as mother. Man was created by the Earth and belongs to the Earth. He does not think of or postulate another or 'better' home." (116). "Time means something different when it is based on a concept of an infinite universe. Time is merely a measure of motion . . . Time, as a measure, is not a self-existing 'thing'; it is not even a dimension--it is a human construct. . . Many Native American groups portray themselves as active participants in the making of the present--we are, in effect, 'cocreators' with a natural process in constructing the future. The future is not 'there'--we are creating it through our present actions . . . We do not exist in a preordained universe; our actions bring the 'future' universe into existence" (118-9). "The Greco-Roman world depicted the universe as infinite but cyclical . . . some even postulated that the new cycle would repeat exactly the old cycle. Nietzsche dubbed this 'eternal recurrence' . . .There is, in this view, a scent of fatalism in that we are preordained to do the things we do. We can catch a glimpse of this preordination in the Greek dramas" (119). "The 'Old Testament' God makes promises to his people as a people. The 'New Testament' addresses itself to individuals who are require to make a choice between their former identities and the new Christian identity" (145). "The society, as a whole, is held together in the Native American context by individuals, all thinking for themselves and contributing to the greater whole. This perspective has very deep implications for how children are taught to become persons" (148). 'An individual set apart from his group, can more easily be manipulated by others. He has no value except 'self-interest'" (156). "I believed there are no self-made persons. There are only those who cannot (or refuse to) acknowledge their debts" (158). "The residents of formerly self-sufficient homelands now swarm into the cities in search of a means of survival. The world's people grow accustomed to seeing this displacement called 'progress' . . . 'development'. We do not acknowledge that the price paid for the West's access to world's foodstuffs and the world's ores" (162). "Who questions the reality of something called 'progress'? I know of no work to match the critique in J.B. Bury's The Idea of Progress, though today's evolutionary biologist questions the idea of a progressive evolutionary process. They offer, instead, the concept of change in the face of other changes" (175). "What was left, after many indigenous persons had lost their native languages and no longer adhered to ritual in daily life, was a set of values instilled in childhood and reinforced by the Native communities. They served to ward off the assimilation attempts of educators, government officials, and missionaries. It seems, in talking with Native persons throughout North America, that there is something 'pan-Indian' that has escaped the efforts of White America to rub out the final evidence of the real 'winning' of the West" (193). "Rather than accepting diversity as a natural phenomenon, human beings are labeled according to a singular notion of 'developed', 'developing', or undeveloped'" (202). "The result of modernization attempts is not the elevation of 'backward' people onto a higher notch on the scale of evolutionary progress. The result is an incomplete and perhaps impossible attempt to create a monoculture" (206). "Whatever degree of alienation from the Earth is caused by the Judeo-Christian account in Genesis, it is enhanced in the Christian postulation of 'another world' as the true home of mankind" (209). "The image of the Native American that is prevalent in the United States is a product of someone other than the Native American. The Native American's own image was one that allowed him not only to survive but thrive on this continent for thousands of years. When Europeans first arrived on these shores they described a paradise. Five hundred years later the land suffers almost three hundred million people. The air, even the mountaintops, is dirty, and you can no longer safely drink the water even in the most isolated streams" (213). "The theologian and the philosopher are largely to blame for the present view of humans and their environment. It is their fields that have provided the conceptual underpinnings that allow the present sate of environmental degradation to exist" (215). "Native American groups who often come together in regional 'powwows' do not waste time arguing over whose myth of origin is the 'correct' myth. It is understood that each group has its own story that pertains only to its group and that all other groups will have their own unique stories or 'explanations' that account for their existence in a specific place with a specific identity" (224). "The European masks this attempt to create a mono-cultural world under the guise of 'bringing people into modernity'--'modernity' meaning simply an adoption of the European lifestyle and conceptual framework" (226). Codova should have saved John Trudell's quote for the conclusion: "John Trudell, an 'angry' Indian, says: 'I don't trust anyone who isn't angry'" (45).

Review # 2 was written on 2012-01-30 00:00:00 Eric Rever An interesting exploration of the Native American worldview in contrast to Western Philosophy. Many people will put Cordova into the "postmodern" camp, which means that there is a mix of insight and sloppiness. She seems to hate Christianity so much that she dismisses anything she an see as even remotely Christian, even a scientific theory. This was not written as a cohesive book but cobbled together from numerous essays, so it is partially graded on a curve. There are so few books about Native American philosophy that this one has more value than it might have otherwise.