Wagging the Dog

The eighth chapter concludes by recapitulating the argument and drawing out its wider implications for the study of religion, script and writing in Southeast Asia and beyond. Three key unresolved issues are also addressed: whether it is ultimately coherent to posit practice as an ‘object of study’; whether taking purpose and presupposition as ‘prologues to action’ entails a residual ethnocentrism; and, finally, to what extent the book’s findings may suggest limitations to Pollock's conception of ‘the Sanskrit cosmopolis’.