Wendy Doniger’s 1998 title, The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth, is rooted in a conversation between two anthropologists. American anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously invokes the image of ‘webs of significance’: the interconnected meanings through which people make sense of themselves and their societies. In one of his critiques of Geertz, Gananath Obeyesekere, a Sri Lankan anthropologist, writes that he never “sees the spider at work” and asks what these “webs” are made out of, as it is clearly beyond the work of the anthropologist to play God and create a world out of nothing. The spider is thus implied. It is true that one might imagine the spider and one might not, like God. But Doniger assumes that this particular spider is to be found within the territory of myth.
The reason Wendy Doniger attempts to find the answer within the realm of myth is simple: myths can be all-encompassing and universal but also help express individual experiences. And importantly, myth rarely performs both these functions simultaneously, in the same way that humans may never find themselves aware of the grand scheme in which they are but a speck and also grasp the importance of the desk job. The two perspectives, as the author calls them, are the “telescope” and the “microscope”.
The ability of myths to function between these extreme scales is what makes them an exceptional “spider”. Their rootedness in the banality of human experience allows them to convey what is common across cultures. Wendy Doniger’s Book of Job example demonstrates this well: Job is exposed to the human experience of loss, but when God takes him to heaven, he realises his own smallness and returns a new man. The author also aptly invokes Yashoda, who, while rebuking Krishna for eating dirt, gazes into the cosmos in his mouth, only to forget it soon afterwards. This is exactly what myths achieve. The two narratives convey similar ideas while emerging from very different contexts, which may make a reader more receptive to one than the other. One may wonder if such reasoning is behind the wise yet mischievous storytelling “spiders” like Anansi, Iktomi and Uttu.
But the point of the book is much more than just gauging the scope of myth. It is a defence of the comparative method in the study of religion. This method, by default, functions by considering the similarities and differences in the two objects of comparison, as well as the third, subject of comparison, with all their beliefs and biases. As Doniger outlines, all cats are grey in the dark, and the dog often barks at difference. In the current academic climate, however, comparison has fallen somewhat out of favour because it necessarily involves a degree of generalisation. The merit of Doniger’s work lies in her convincing case for a qualified notion of ‘sameness’ in an academic climate unmistakably sympathetic to particularity and difference.
The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth
By Wendy Doniger
Speaking Tiger
pp. 380; Rs 699/-
