{"product_id":"the-implied-spider","title":"The Implied Spider","description":"\u003cp\u003eAt this time of heightened political sensitivities  it may seem impossible to make serious comparisons among different cultures. And at a time when human difference is so relentlessly celebrated  it may even seem impossible to talk about the traditions and experiences that join us across race  religion  and nation. Wendy Doniger offers a powerful antidote to the paralysis of postcolonial intellectual life. In this spirited  enlightening book  she shows just how to make sense of  and learn from  the extraordinary diversity of cultures past and present. Tapping a wealth of traditions  from the Hebrew Bible to the Bhagavad Gita  Doniger crafts a new lens for examining other cultures  and finding in the worlds myths--its sacred stories--a way to talk about experiences shared across time and space.  \"Of all things made with words \" Doniger writes  \"myths span the widest of human concerns  human paradoxes.\" Myths  she shows  bridge the cosmic and the familiar  the personal and the abstract  the theological and the political. They encourage us to draw various  even opposed  political meanings from a single text as it travels through different historical contexts. And she demonstrates how studying myths from cultures other than our own can be exhilarating and illuminating.  Myth  Doniger shows  provides a near-perfect entree to another culture. Even if scholars such as Freud  Jung  and Joseph Campbell typically overstated the universality of major myths and suppressed the distinctive natures of other cultures  postcolonial critics are wrong to argue that nothing good can come from a systematic comparative study of human cultures. Doniger offers an engaged  expansive critical tool kit for doing just that. She suggests critical and responsible ways in which to compare stories--or texts or myths or traditions--from different cultures by revealing patterns of truth from themes that recur time and again.  In this book  Doniger helps expand the arena of meaning we live in  leaping  in her words  \"from myth to myth as if they were stepping stones over the gulf that seems to separate cultures.\" She enables us to see  at last  the \"implied spider\" that weaves the web of meaning that sustains all human cultures-the fabric of our shared humanity.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44976834805813,"sku":"ByrdShop_0231111711","price":37.04,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780231111713.jpg?v=1770838747","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-implied-spider","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}