Origins to Classification

Two universal questions have plagued human beings from first consciousness: “where do I come from?” obsesses children, maturing into “who I am?” when we are adults. Buddha said the ego was the cause of all suffering. Our desire to prove we are different will never be fulfilled, as we have no soul, we are anatman, and we are therefore no different from anyone else. Insecurities arise from our inability to prove we are different, something we continue to strive for. Religions can be said to have been created to explain to people the answers to these questions. Most religions have creation myths dealing with the original humans, original language, and original homeland.

The search for origins among the Europeans started with the desire to prove the stories in the Bible, such as the story of the Tower of Babel:

And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language: and this is only the beginning of what they will do: nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and the left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the Earth.” (Gen 11:6-9)

The idea of a linguistically and racially unified people fueled fields of study that aimed at searching for connections between the dispersed people of today. in particular philology was a new field of science that emerged (see Masuzawa pg xii).

This was a time of great anti-semitism and attempts were made to move away from genealogy of the Old Testament patriarch Noah which made everyone a half-sibling of the Jewish “others”. Philology helped with this. with Sir William Jones’ “discovery” of the relations to other Indo-European languages, and the distancing from the agglutinating Semitic languages people could “reconstruct their ancestral roots” (Masuzawa pg xii) they could now be closer to the great traditions of Greece and the exotic India. (see Masuzawa pg 19)

With the Enlightenment, and the rise of science over the sacred, people started to lose the answers to their questions, as the Bible lost its hegemony on ‘truth’ in Europe. Therefore people searched for new beginnings, which they found in India. Adam died as the universal father, and India was born as their new mother.

In the nineteenth century many people early on were beginning to move away from Eden, starting to believe that India was the “womb of the world”. I seem to recall that even Voltaire jumped on the India bandwagon and claimed everything came from India.


OK so what do my totally random ramblings about the need to prove legitimacy and philology have to do with these readings and this class? Well first off they stem from what I was thinking when reading through Masuzawa’s book. But they also respond to part of the discussion question of why Europeans were so eager to classify religions.


I think the nineteenth century European obsession with categorizing largely stems from these insecurities, possibly even an inferiority complex. It is a need for control. Control over the chaos in the new lands they ruled over, such as India.

the question of why Europeans have such a longing to prove their legitimacy must be asked. It is not a recent phenomenon, as the Romans looked for authenticity in their mythical journey from the battlefields of Troy. Maybe Europeans, and people of European decent, felt the need to justify their dominance on the world. They created myths of origin as a means of compensating for the subconscious realization that they may not be as powerful and ancient a race as they would have desired.

With Sir William Jones’ personal conclusion that Sanskrit was possibly the most perfected language. Many British were not comfortable with this. Some even went as far as denying the existence of Sanskrit, saying Jones was deceived by Brahmin forgers. Others claimed that the reason there was a similarity between the Sanskrit of India and the Classic languages of Latin and Greek was because Sanskrit was actually a form of Greek borrowed by the Brahmins when Alexander the Great traveled to the subcontinent!!

Early on, Categorizing also placed Christianity against the “others”. It was the “West-and-the-rest” (Masuzawa pg 3) This “othering” is another form of control.
Categorizing also was a more “scientific” method, and therefore utilizing this technique was a method of securing the status of the subject in academia where scientific thought was at the top of the totem pole (see Masuzawa pg 14). Being based on a more concrete social science of Philology further added to the attempt at raising the status. Sciences still today enjoy higher prestige and funding “This is particularly true in the humanities and many social science departments, where the percentage of outside funding in relation to the total operational cost of the unit is much smaller than most natural science departments and professional schools” (Masuzawa pg 9). With the methods to their studies “the study of the Orient emerged as a fashionable and respectable science” (Masuzawa pg 17).

So I think that classifying was a means of control, putting labels on people made them easier to rule. That is why the census was so important in colonial disneyland. Think about it.

Jackie