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ogy" as a categorization of Advaita rather than "philosophy," even though Advaita does not describe itself as focused on "God" or "the gods." |
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2. On the general range of issues related to comparative theology in relation to the study of Advaita and religion in India see also, Clooney 1990c and 1990d. |
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3. Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1984, 1990) has very helpfully analyzed the modes of relationship among theory and practice, in order to describe a practical understanding that is not detachable from practice. He proposes a "theory of practice" which builds on but is not reducible either to practice or to theories (merely) about practice; in his formulation of it he distinguishes three modes of theoretical knowledge. First, there is the phenomenological model of theory, in which theory "sets out to make explicit the truth of primary experience in the social world, i.e., all that is inscribed in the relationship of familiarity with the familiar environment, the unquestioning apprehension which, by definition, does not reflect on itself and excludes the question of the conditions of its own possibility." (1977, p. 3) Second, there is the objectivist model, in which theory "constructs the objective relations (e.g., economic or linguistic) which structure practice and representations of practice . . . It is only on condition that it poses the question which the doxic experience of the social world excludes by definitionthe question of the (particular) conditions making that experience possiblethat objectivist knowledge can establish both the structures of the social world and the objective truth of primary experience as experience denied explicit knowledge of those structures." (1977, p. 3) Third, there is the practical, in which theory "has no other aim than to make possible a science of the dialectical relations between the objective structures to which the objectivist mode of knowledge gives access and the structured dispositions within which those structures are actualized and which tend to reproduce them." (1977, p. 3) Bourdieu argues that this third mode of theory is not a reversion to "lived experience'' and "subjectivity," but a path beyond the objectivist-subjectivist dichotomy, precisely through an exploration of the tension between the practical and the theoretical. |
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4. Comparative theology thus adheres most closely to Bourdieu's third model of theory (described in the previous note), in which the dynamics of practice, in their temporality, spatiality and according to the strategies of their transaction, are the primary object of attention. |
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5. Bourdieu correctly notes the distortion that occurs in a presentation of theoretical knowledge which abolishes this temporal component. Using the example of the dynamics of gift-giving as a social practice (1977, pp. 4-7), he shows that the variables of interval and deferral of return are crucial to the |
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