Charles Long is most helpful here again. One of the most basic insights of Long, drawn directly from the Romanian comparativist Mircea Eliade, is that what we generally mean by “the human” is in serious danger of being provincialized by the Hebraic, Greek, and Christian understandings in the Euro-American universities. What we now call “humanity” (humanitas) is in historical fact much more ontologically diverse, if we open our hearts and minds to the Asian, African, and Australian cultural traditions, which is exactly what Eliade’s history of religions attempted to do toward what he called a
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