Fenomeni di fondamentalismo all'interno di una religione considerata come sistema complesso

Abstract

1) The paper takes into consideration some religious and political phenomena labelled as examples of fundamentalism in the domain of Hinduism. Hinduism itself is best described as a (religious) complex system, according to some recent definition of this particular taxonomical and hermeneutical tipology. 2) The particular phenomenon taken into consideration is a sort of conscious and deliberate rewriting of historical textbooks in the light of a political objective, i.e. the revisionism of well grounded facts and hypotheses about ancient Indian history (e.g. the Indo-aryan migration theory). These facts and hypotheses are replaced by new ones (“Out of India” theory), often not so well grounded from the historical, archeological, linguistical point of view. 3) A specific field study is analyzed, being the recent denigratory campaign against Michael Witzel (Harvard University), built up for political reasons by some fundamentalist groups of the Hindu diaspora in the USA.