Laudator Temporis Acti

Stephanie W. Jamison, Sacrificed Wife/Sacrificer's Wife: Women, Ritual, and Hospitality in Ancient India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1006), p. 3:

Ancient India remains the province of the philologists—among whom I am proud to number myself. It can only be approached through its texts, and the philological methods employed to investigate these texts may, to the outsider, appear to approach the status of a mystery religion, to be even more esoteric than the contents of the texts they study. As a philologist, a practitioner of this cult, I am certain that the intricacies of the method are necessary. But I also regret the result: that the knowledge we gain too often remains walled off from the rest of the scholarly community, that the process of gaining it is so consuming that we often lack the energy to communicate it to others—and that others will not invest their energy in attending to the unfamiliar details that must be grasped in order to understand the whole.