"Survival" as an Interpretive Strategy: a Sino-Western Comparative Case Study

It seems strange to me that students of comparative religion have seldom asked whether there are people in the cultures we study who do something analogous to what we do. To pursue this sort of self-comparative inquiry requires going beyond studying their datai with our theory to ask after their theory; and it requires self-consciousness about what we ourselves have done and aimed to do in writing about religion. What follows is an example of how such comparisons might work. I will compare the way in which a common key idea or interpretive strategy informed two bodies of ethnographic writing. This last phrase I intend in the broad sense of writing about the ideas and customs of (usually other) people, ideas and customs which, by the very fact of being written about, are taken by the writer to be somehow unusual, problematic, and requiring an effort of understanding and perhaps of explanation. The bodies of