THE ICONIC FEMALE. GODDESSES OF INDIA, NEPAL AND TIBET. Ed. by Jayant Bhalchandra Bapat and Ian Mabbett. Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute, 2008. 230 p.* The reviewed collection was prepared on the basis of the Institute of Asia. Monash in Melbourne. In modern Australia, indological science is experiencing a significant upswing: one of the factors is the growing South Asian diaspora in the country. The theme of the research included in the collection - female deities in South Asian countries-allows the authors to go far beyond the actual religious studies, which makes the book interesting for anyone who deals with the history, politics, anthropology and philosophy of South Asia. An introduction written jointly by two senior editors is particularly important for indologists, no matter what they do. Using the cult of female deities as an example, it examines the actual problems of methodology, which has undergone a radical transformation in recent decades. The orientalist approach, which assumed the study of South Asian societies only on the basis of classical texts, was replaced by an anthropological one, which assumed "included observation" of living carriers of the studied cultures. Another Orientalist postulate, which reduced the religion or culture of a country to a "Large", i.e. orthodox-Brahman, tradition, reconstructed on the basis of the same classical texts, and considered all unorthodox, "popular" practices and views as marginal, was rejected. The attention of researchers has long been captured by these socially subordinate (subaltern) social groups and their previously considered "primitive" norms of social, cultural and religious existence. If earlier a scholar engaged in Hinduism studied religious, philosophical and didactic treatises in Sanskrit, now, according to new ideas ,the "true essence of Hinduism" could be understood only as a result of field research of some "folk" cult. Unfortunately, for a number of reasons in our country, the study of Indian ... Read more