Alexander Stille, "The Ganges' Next Life," and:

• Karen Armstrong, "Does God Have a Future?"
• Amy Chua, "A World on the Edge"
  

Stille and Armstrong: The "Death of God" in the East and in the West

When Armstrong refers to the future of God, she has in mind primarily the notions of God embraced by theologians and philosophers in Western Europe and the United States. In "Ganges Next Life," however, Alexander Stille offers a portrait of religious life among Hindus in South Asia. After reading both Armstrong and Stille, would you say that the "death of God" is a problem only for the West? What forces does Amstrong identify with the gradual decline of religious conviction? Given what Stille tells us about India, are those same forces at work in Veer Bhadra Mishra's world, or does his society face challenges very different from the ones that Armstrong describes?

Back to top

Stille and Chua: Identities and Globalization

Stille spends a good deal of "The Ganges' Next Life" considering what he calls "the complex double identity" (538) of Mishra, noting that “Like India itself . . . Mishra is trying to incorporate what is best from the West in order to preserve the Hindu traditions that he loves” (540). Stille uses Mishra as an example of challenges faced by India as a whole. He writes that “the battle to clean up the Ganges is about much more than the environmental future of a river. Just as the river is a symbol of India, its cleanup is a test of India’s condition fifty years after independence, and the outcome may answer some of the fundamental questions about the country’s future” (Stille 539) Although Chua is more concerned with global trends than examples taken from the lives of individuals, she argues that the importance of ethnic identity as one of the main factors informing globalization has been overlooked: “It is ethnicity, however, that gives the combination of markets and democracy its special combustibility. Ethnic identity is not a static, scientifically determinable status but shifting and highly malleable (Chua 112).

Questions: How can the complex identities discussed by Stille be used to address the challenges presented by globalization? How could William Oswald’s sensitivity to the national and religious identity of Indians be used as an example to “address the potentially explosive problems of ethnic resentment and ethnonationalist hatred” cited by Chua (115)?

How does globalization inform or even produce "complex double identities"? What problems and advantages do such identities offer in a global world? How do examples of individual and collective identity presented by Chua differ from the model offered by Mishra? What difficulties and strengths do the conflicts in Mishra's identity create? What is the role of media in creating identity? How do the examples discussed in Stille’s essay complicate the idea that accepting/embracing globalization will lead to a loss of identity? Stille discusses the limited utility of a Western model of waste management in India . What are the implications of the solution Stille presents for the difficulty of exporting other Western models such as free markets and democracy as discussed by Chua?

Suzy Ford and Francis Fletcher, Fall 2005

Back to top