278. identity
and then frame Hinduism within the broader theory and research from the per-
spective of India and Indic culture in general.
DECODING THE ARCHIVE OF THE WEST
Michel Foucault uses the metaphor of an archive to convey how the West draws
upon a vast history of itself and multiple traditions of knowledge, which incorpo-
rate cultural views of reality, and of space and time. Particular knowledges, philoso-
phies, and definitions of human nature form what Foucault has referred to as the
West ’s cultural archive. This archive is a veritable storehouse of histories, artifacts,
ideas, texts, and images, which are classified, preserved, and represented. Foucault
suggests that this archive reveals rules of practice that the West and Western schol-
ars themselves need not subscribe to, inasmuch as they operate within rules and con-
ventions that are thoroughly internalized and therefore are taken for granted.^15
Western scholars use this archive to retrieve, enunciate, and represent knowledge
of and from the Other.^16
To take back Hindu studies, it will be necessary for Hindu researchers to decode
the West ’s archive and its rules of practice, because theories about research are un-
derpinned by (1) a cultural system of classification and representation, (2) views
about human nature and human morality and virtue, (3) conceptions of space and
time, and (4) conceptions of race and gender. Hindu scholars will need to learn how
ideas about these things are formulated in the West in order to determine what
counts for real in the eyes of the West and Western researchers. It is only after being
confronted by alternative or competing conceptions of other societies or cultures
that the reality of the West-sponsored knowledge will become reified and may then
come across as something not necessarily “better” or reflecting “higher orders” of
thinking, and so on.
The Hindu and Vedic conceptions of spiritual relationships to the triple cosmos,
to the social and material universe, to the landscape, and to stones, rocks, insects,
and other things (seen and unseen) have generally been difficult for Western sys-
tems of knowledge to deal with or accept. Yet they offer at least a partial indication
of alternative or different worldviews and ways of coming to know and of being.
Hindu concepts of yoga and spirituality, which Christianity and Western scholars
of Hinduism first attempted to destroy, then to appropriate, and finally to claim, are
therefore critical sites of resistance for Hindu scholars. The values, attitudes, con-
cepts, and language embedded in beliefs about spirituality provide, in many ways,
the clearest contrast between the Hindu and Western worlds. To date, Hindu spiri-