Talk:Stephanie Jamison

By Sachi Anjunkar

Stephanie Jamison is a Professor, Department of Asian Languages & Cultures at, University of California as of April 2024. According to her university profile, she has concentrated on Indo-Iranian, especially (Vedic) Sanskrit and Middle Indo-Aryan languages and textual materials.

In 2016, she signed a letter addressed to the State Board of Education, California Department of Education, dated May 17, 2016. The letter stated the following:

1. "There is no established connection between Hinduism and the Indus Civilization."
2. "It is inappropriate to remove mention of the connection of caste to Hinduism."

Publications related to Ancient India

Books

1. Jamison, Stephanie. The Rig Veda between Two Worlds: Four Lectures at the Collège de France, May 2004. Collège de France, Publications de l'Institut de Civilisation Indienne, fasc. 74, 2007.
2. Jamison, Stephanie. Sacrificed Wife / Sacrificer's Wife: Women, Ritual, and Hospitality in Ancient India. Oxford University Press, 1996.
3. Jamison, Stephanie. The Ravenous Hyenas and the Wounded Sun: Myth and Ritual in Ancient India. Cornell University Press, 1991.

   In this book, Stephanie Jamison, fails fo define the meaning of 'Vedic' and run around the bush with his biased opinions, propagating false information.

   "We must first roughly define the term Vedic. Vedic India is the first India we know, at least verbally, and indeed to a great extent it is its language that demarks what is Vedic. Vedic or Vedic Sanskrit is a language markedly more archaic than either Epic Sanskrit, the lan- guage of the two epics, the Mahābhārata and the Ramayana, or the very similar later Classical Sanskrit, the learned language whose norms were established by the great grammarian Panini (c. 500 B.C.). Vedic was also still a living language: unlike Classical Sanskrit, whose grammar has been artificially fixed for the last twenty-five hundred years, Vedic Sanskrit continued to change and develop. The language of our earliest Vedic text is quite different from that of the latest ones; indeed, late Vedic looks very much like what became grammatically codified as Classical Sanskrit. It is not merely the language that defines Vedic but also its culture. Given the nature of our evidence, what we primarily know about this culture is its religion. Political, social, economic, and quotidian matters we know in general only as they were filtered through a religious lens, but "religion" here is to be broadly defined. It profoundly affected most areas of what might today be considered secular life, and we are therefore luckily in possession of much incidental information in these arcas."

   Jamison incorrectly states that Vedic literature is categorized as Vedas, Brahmanas, and Aranyakas and calls it in-adequate categorization. In reality, Vedic literature is divided into four parts: the Samhitas (Vedas), Brahmanas, Aranyakas, and Upanishads. Each part represents different aspects of Vedic knowledge, ranging from hymns and rituals to philosophical teachings.

   "Vedic literature has traditionally been catalogued into Vedas, Brāhmaņas, Aranyakas (and Upaniṣads), and Sūtras, in roughly that chronological order. This is a useful, more or less accurate, but not adequate categorization."

   Jamison grossly misdirects readers about the true nature of Hindu rituals and priestly duties. It wrongly portrays officiating priests as manipulative figures who can misuse their ritual power to harm the Yajamāna (sacrificer), which is entirely contrary to the sacred and ethical principles laid out in Hindu scriptures, he states:

   "The officiating priests derive none of the spiritual benefits from the worship they perform, but they can to some degree control how these benefits are allotted. If they feel hostility towards the Yajamāna for whom they are acting, they can perform certain actions in such a way as to make the Yajamāna "worse off," as the Brahmanas frequently tell us."

   The author's assertion is not only a gross distortion but an outright insult to the intellect of the Vedic people. To claim that they feared words more than physical harm.

   "The Vedic people profoundly did not believe that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me"; in most instances they would rather confront a cudgel than a curse. This aspect of Vedic (and Indo-European) society has been amply discussed and documented; it is now a commonplace of the field."

   Jamison makes a glaringly superficial and poorly informed remark. Claiming that there is no organized or hierarchical pantheon in Vedic mythology reflects a complete misunderstanding of Vedic cosmology.

   "The list is otherwise unordered and mixes what we might term "ritual" gods with gods of action, gods of the ethical and conceptual sphere, and gods representing natural phenomena. There is no organized and hierarchical pantheon in Vedic mythology, and no overarching organizing principle."

4. Jamison, Stephanie. Function and Form in the -áya-formations of the Rig Veda and Atharva Veda. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983.