Hinduism

Editor in Chief

Alf Hiltebeitel has taught and researched Hinduism since studying it at the University of Chicago under Mircea Eliade, J. A. B. van Buitenen, A. K. Ramanujan, and others. His publications and research have taken him back and forth between the Sanskrit Mahäbharata, India’s great epic, and fieldwork on the Tamil south Indian Draupadi cult. From this tandem project, his work branches out into related texts, most notably the Ramayana; other cults, including other Tamil Mahabharata cults and ones related to other regional Indian oral epics similar to the Draupadi cult Mahabharata; and into an attempt to understand the Indian concept of dharma. His current work incudes the following titles: Dharma (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2010); Reading the Fifth Veda: Studies in the Mahabharata, Essays by Alf Hitebeitel, Vol. 1, and When the Goddess Was a Woman: Mahabharata Ethnographies, Essays by Alf Hiltebeitel, Vol. 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, in press); and Dharma: Its Early History in Law, Religion, and Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, in press).

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