Book Reviews 207

reference chart on page 82), which leans heavily upon empirical comparisons
of socialist and capitalist economic arrangements.
Working from his Baptist confession, Gushee argues that Christian ethics
places Christ’s earthly ministry central (Baptist ethics is relentlessly Jesus-
centered) and calls us to live-out the values of God’s Kingdom ( present and
coming). In the economic dimension, we carry a two-fold obligation: (1)
confront economic injustice (of greed, domination, violence, and exclusion)
and (2) live practically the values expressed in the Sermon on the Mount
(offering numerous likely applications).
A final word about the subtitle to FE—The Moral Worlds of a Neutral
Science. Few if any economists are neutral about the norm of efficiency: given
the scarcity that constrains us, we want the least costly/wasteful resolutions to
our problems. Few economists would question the usefulness of a system of
markets for allocating the lions-share of our scarce resources rather than
relying upon some form of bureaucratic allocation. By extension, virtually all
economists would counsel societies to eliminate trade barriers within and
between them and pursue a regime of free trade—and precisely because free
trade via markets practically allows most households to escape demeaning
poverty better than any known alternative means of allocation, and yields less
waste in the process. The subtitle appears to reflect the positive-normative
distinction that mainstream economics finds useful in the quest for an
objective understanding of reality, but this epistemological preference hardly
finds economists neutral about measures that will make this world a better
place.
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfl048 John D. Mason
Advance Access publication February 15, 2007 Gordon College

The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and
Power in Premodern India. By Sheldon Pollock. University of California
Press, 2006. 684 pages. $75.00.
Those concerned with identifying the relationship of culture to power
will find the present work to be not only an intriguing study of classical and
medieval India, but also a useful contribution to the theoretical literature. In
a work as far-reaching as it is voluminous, Pollock explores the “mutually
constitutive” (18) relationship between rājya, i.e. kingship and power (6), on
the one hand, and kāvya, i.e. literature stricto sensu (2–5, 99), on the other.
Surveying a wide range of material drawn from a massive geographical
region and spanning some 1500 years in history, Pollock argues that kāvya
was invented with the advent of writing in South Asia (81–89, esp. 83) and,
moreover, that the connection between written, literary language and political
power is self-consciously and variously constructed. Consequently, the use of
language in literary production is determined by a history of human choice
208 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

and action—a conclusion that the author suggests has far-reaching

consequences.
In South Asia, explains Pollock, “cosmopolitan” languages—principally
Sanskrit, but also Prakrit and Apabhrahmsha (89–105)—became, as a result
of court patronage, the dominant form of literary expression across the sub-
continent beginning a little before the Common Era, and it remained thus
for roughly a millennium, with Sanskrit in particular spreading across
“Southern Asia” from “around the fourth century on … to the places now
known as Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, and
Indonesia” (115–148, esp. 123). A culture of “hyperglossia” (50, passim), i.e.
the severe division of labor for language use, was exhibited in the inscrip-
tional corpus from the time of the Śakas (12–13), and beginning with the
first public inscription in Sanskrit, a stylized panegyric (Sanskrit: praśasti),
on the famed Junāgaṛh rock in contemporary Gujarat (67–68), the work of
“expressive” literary production became the domain of what was formerly a
liturgical and “sacred” language, while the vernaculars were employed in
writing exclusively to communicate quotidian matters. Thus, “cosmopolitan”
language—language that transcended regional, ethnic, and sectarian identity
and was widely understood (if only by elites)—was used expressively,
whereas vernaculars were written only to communicate information, when
they were written at all.
This act of utilizing particular languages for particular uses, Pollock
notes, was not only the de facto practice across South and “Southern” Asia,
as is evidenced in the inscriptional corpus (115–161), but it was also expli-
citly prescribed in the Sanskrit works on esthetics (105–114). Similarly, strict
grammars were developed for Sanskrit (162–184), rendering it suitable for
kāvya (as were, in some instances, other trans-regional languages, such as
the aforementioned Prakrit and Apabhrahmsha), even while the vernaculars
were adequate for conveying news of more mundane matters. Pollock is fas-
cinated by this division in the use of written language, with the fact that
languages underwent “literarization,” i.e. the employment of a language for
literary composition (5), only much later than “literization,” i.e. the commit-
ment of the same language to writing (4). Indeed, the temporal gap between
the appearance of a given language in writing and its employment for
“expressive” forms of communication serves as his key piece of evidence in
mapping the transition from the cosmopolitan to the vernacular era (283–
329, 380–397).
Arguing against received wisdom, Pollock suggests that one can identify
the very origins of vernacular literature (283 ff.), because one can discern the
moment when people chose grammatically to codify the vernaculars and, more
importantly, to use them to compose literature. Regional vernaculars, supersed-
ing Sanskrit, became the primary mode of literary expression before the end of
the first millennium, first in South India in around the eighth or ninth centu-
ries (384) and then throughout South and Southeast Asia over the course of
some 600 years (380–436). Insofar as “there is no parthenogenesis in culture”
 Book Reviews 209

(318 ff.), however, the rise of the vernaculars mirrored that of Sanskrit (e.g.
395–397). The vernaculars were subjected to “grammaticization” and “philolo-
gization”—which, as far as I can tell, are roughly the same phenomenon, viz.,
the process of making standard a language by formalizing the rules of usage
(363–379, 397–410)—in an effort to furnish them with a degree of precision
similar to that of Sanskrit grammar. Heavy borrowing from the Sanskrit
lexicon granted the vernaculars a degree of prestige, allowing them to speak
persuasively and authoritatively. Indeed, in one of the most intriguing chapters
of the book, Pollock maps the innovations of one vernacular, Kannada, in a
case study of the “localizing of the global political” (356), i.e. the process of
imagining a regional political order, achieved in the process of a vernacular
language’s trek from “literization” to “literarization,” with the help of the royal
court (330–379, cf. 410–436).
Thus were born “Cosmopolitan Vernaculars,” languages that aspired to
the authority achieved by the trans-regional languages with written literary
production, but ones that defined themselves regionally. In the cosmopolitan
era, the geographic horizon of the “Sanskrit Cosmopolis” was essentially
unlimited, with Sanskrit praśastis praising kings for holding empires that
extended to the end of the world (237–258); the Mahābhārata repeatedly
mapping a global polity while narrating the struggle to control it (223–237);
literary works, such as Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa (237 ff.), appropriating the
same imagined political world in eulogizing political power; and treatises on
esthetics mapping language-use on a universal scale, with normative
classifications suggesting abstracted, “regional” distinctions without real
difference in language-use across the Sanskrit world (189–222). In the
vernacular age, by contrast, the vernaculars developed a real sense of
geographical and cultural identity, because authors engaged in a process of
“literary territorialization” (380 ff.), the marking and praising in the literature
of the region in which the languages were used and the people who used
them.
The significance of all of this, argues Pollock, is made clear by a com-
parison of the Sanskritic with the Latinate world (259–280, 437–467, 468–
494, and esp. 571–574). Although both Latin and Sanskrit were historically
liturgical languages, the uses of which were extended to worldly matters, and
although both the Latinate and the Sanskritic worlds witnessed a roughly
contemporaneous shift to the use of vernaculars and for similar purposes
( prompting Pollock to ponder possible causal links between them), Latin
was spread by imperialism, Sanskrit by consent. Moreover, vernaculars in the
Latinate world ( particularly Europe) were linked to ethnicity, whereas South
Asian vernaculars were not (473–477). Religion was also more intimately
tied to European language-use than in South Asia (477–482). These facts
compelled one to choose either vernacular or cosmopolitan languages in the
European case, whereas both could be accepted simultaneously in South
Asia. Pollock suggests that herein lies a lesson for contemporary times. To
accept, argues Pollock (574–580, esp. 580), the South Asian “And” approach
210 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

to cosmopolitan and vernacular, as opposed to the “Either/Or” approach,

would better equip us to handle the conflicts of the day, those stemming
from the domineering cosmopolitanism of “American-style globalization” or
the vernacularism of “ethnonationalism” as found in, e.g. “the institutional
complex of Hindutva, Serbia at the end of the last century, or Afghanistan
and Iraq today” (574–576).
Intriguing and far-reaching as the book is, it leaves the reader with
certain questions and doubts. To start, Pollock rejects out of hand the
notion that the royal inscriptions were written to legitimate political power
(511–524). While I find the concept of legitimation to be as “tediously pre-
dictable” as Pollock does, I am not sure he has made the case that it is
“empirically false” [though he is probably right in labeling it “intellectually
mechanical, culturally homogenizing, (and) theoretically naive”] (18). It is
hard to understand how the author is so certain that the language used for
“the very expression of official culture,” a language that “makes the real
superreal” and the fame of the ruler known, can be used to craft the “public
image rulers sought to have promulgated” without validating the ruler in
question (146). Moreover, although I certainly appreciate Pollock’s important
observation that members of the royal courts engaged in Sanskritic culture
because “it played an authentic, unquestioned role in the ennoblement of
political life” (524), to the point that knowledge of language and literature
was closely associated with kingly virtue (184–188), it is nevertheless also
possible that doing so conferred an aura of authority, nobility, and even divi-
nity on those wielding power—in a word, legitimized them. Definitive evi-
dence concerning the reception and practical uses of these inscriptions needs
to be presented to make either case.
Elsewhere (423–436), Pollock dismisses the role of religion in bringing
about the rise of the vernaculars in South Asia, suggesting that vernaculariza-
tion was a courtly project, that the court was not much concerned with religion
and that the use of the vernacular in religious contexts postdated the use of the
same in the court, and constituted a second vernacular revolution, a “regional
vernacularization” that was a popular response to the “cosmopolitan vernacu-
larization” of the royal courts (5). The evidence makes such a claim proble-
matic, however. One is left with no explanation, for example, for the
contemporaneousness of Jñāneśvar’s Marathi-language Jñāneśvarī, according
to Pollock a circa 1290 text (382), and the initial “literarization” of Marathi in
the inscriptional record in, according to Pollock, 1278 and 1305 (290). The
Tamil case is even more problematic.
Finally, the theory rests in part on the assumption that the development of
the vernaculars ushers in, for the first time, the innovation of regional cultural
identities and, indeed, regional culture. Thus, Pollock explicitly states that “they
[regional recensions of the Mahābhārata] in fact possessed no true regional
specificity aside from their currency in given regions—something shown to be
true of virtually every work of Sanskrit literature that has been critically edited
(which have regional recensions that nonetheless show no cultural regionality
 Book Reviews 211

whatever)” (231). A great deal of evidence remains to be presented, however,

to prove this large claim.
These observations notwithstanding, the present volume makes
impressive strides in theorizing language-use and its relationship to political
and cultural institutions and imagination, a topic that no doubt impinges on
notions (and theories) of the nation, as the author indicates (525–565),
and as such this book provides a useful counterpoint to Eurocentric theories
of the same. Perhaps, then, the present work’s greatest contribution is to the
theoretical literature, with the author’s critique of Gellner’s understanding of
nationalism (on the basis of the patterns of vernacularization in South Asia,
outlined above) being particularly well balanced and forceful (542 ff.).
Pollock has also offered a novel perspective on South Asian language and
culture, constituting a grand narrative of the rise of literature in the subcon-
tinent and beyond, and in doing so he makes the topic more accessible to
the non-specialist scholar in a work that will surely be read for years to
come.

ERRATA
p. 5: “it close cousin” for “its close cousin”
p. 108: “it is clear is that” for “it is clear that”
p. 148: “KALĀYṆA” for “KALYĀṆA”
p. 224: “they way things are” for “the way things are”
p. 311: “Jñāneśar’s” for “Jñāneśvar’s”
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfl049 John Nemec
Advance Access publication January 29, 2007 University of Virginia

Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the

Study of Ancient Judaism. By Jonathan Klawans. Oxford University
Press, 2007. 372 pages. $74.00.

“This book sets out to reexamine modern scholarly approaches to ancient

Judaism’s temple cult. In part I we will evaluate current scholarship on purity
and sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible. In part II we will evaluate scholarship con-
cerning ancient Jewish views of the temple cult in Jerusalem. The common
denominator of parts I and II—and the thesis of this book—is the claim that
scholarly understandings of Jewish cultic matters have been unduly influenced
by various contemporary biases, religious and cultural” (3). In other words,
instead of investigating the topic systematically in his own right, Klawans
reviews other peoples’ available scholarship on the stated theme, Temple sacri-
fice in Judaism, and mostly passes his opinion on their work. The result is a
protracted research report only occasionally enlivened by engagement with the