David Gordon White

David Gordon White (born September 3, 1953 in Pittsfield , Massachusetts) is an American religious scholar , university teacher and author . He has become known in the professional world and beyond through his detailed research on the cultural history of Indian yoga .

Life

David Gordon White initially studied from 1972 to 1975 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison up to the academic degree of a bachelor's degree in South Asian Studies . During this time he also spent eight months studying at the Banaras Hindu University in Benares (European name form) / Varanasi (indigenous name form) in India , where he obtained a language diploma in Hindi . From 1978 to 1981 he continued his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Chicago , where he obtained a master's degree in religious studies . This was followed by a doctoral degree at the same location, interrupted for a six-month research stay at the Sorbonne. White graduated with a PhD in 1988. In his dissertation , he examined the cultural-historical phenomenon of reports about dog-headed people , so-called kynokephale , in the Central Asian region ( The Other gives rise to Self: Dog-Men on the borders of medieval Europe, India, and China ). From 1981 to 1983 he also worked as Mircea Eliade's research assistant .

White began his career as a university professor at the University of Virginia , since 1986 as a lecturer, from 1994 to 1996 as an assistant professor ( assistant professor ). From there he moved to the University of California in Santa Barbara as an Associate Professor , where he took up a chair in 2000 , which he still holds today.

In addition to the publication of numerous of his own research papers, White was and is often active as a specialist translator for books and articles from French .

Research interests

David Gordon White is particularly interested in the following areas:

• Religion in South Asia,
• Sanskrit and
• History of Indian science and medicine ,
• especially Hindu tantra and
• Yoga tradition of India,
• as well as comparative Indo-European (in English usage: Indo-European ) studies and
• comparative mythology .

plant

For David Gordon White it has become the main scientific concern to correct the distortions in the image of lived religious tradition, which have arisen over many centuries both on the Indian subcontinent and since the colonial times in Europe and America due to the pronounced detail of the written documentation and tradition and by the strong religious, ideological, promotional, political and material interests that guided the representation of all authors. Contrary to the largely usual representation of religion in India , it was not the topics, deities, ideas and practices dealt with in the classical theological and propaganda texts that dominated the actual life of the majority of people, but a large number of local cults and those described separately under the collective term Indian folk religion Ideas and actions. In particular, the large group of religious specialists associated with the term tantra - which in the western world is again misunderstood and used in an extremely narrow and distorting form - has been by far the most influential for a thousand years.

Publications (in selection)

Monographs

• Myths of the Dog-Man . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1991, ISBN 0-226-89508-4 (This is the book version of his doctoral thesis).
• The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1996.
• Sinister yogis . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2009.

Collected works (as editor)

• Tantra in practice . Princeton Readings in Religions , Princeton University Press, Princeton 1991.
• Yoga in practice . Princeton Readings in Religions, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2011.

Essays and Articles

• Three articles in The Encyclopedia of Religion . Second, revised edition. Macmillan, New York 2005. (This encyclopedia was first published by Mircea Eliade and is the world's most comprehensive reference work for the subject.)
• Fifteen articles in the Encyclopedia of Hinduism . Routledge, London 2007.

Web sources

• Portrait of David Gordon White on the portal of the University of California at Santa Barbara (in English); there is also a detailed list of publications .
• First part and second part of an interview with David Gordon White in November 2010 for The Magazine of Yoga about his work and the importance of precise historical research.
• A detailed interview with David Gordon White on November 18, 2011 in the electronic journal the yoga examiner about his research, following a short review of the anthology he edited, Yoga in practice (in English).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See the statement in his portrait on the Internet portal of his university, as well as his numerous publications on this topic, such as the anthology Tantra in practice and relevant articles.