"Come from Wherever You Are": Methods of Borrowing and Methodology in Comparative Studies in Greek and Near Eastern Religion (original) (raw)
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Our Terms and Theirs: Some Reflections on Recent Approaches to Greek Religion
Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory, eds. B. Akrigg and K. Blouin (London and New York: Routledge, 2024), 265-79
This paper examines the intersection of Greek religion and postcolonial theory by uncovering the ethical and political investments of the dominant paradigms and theoretical frameworks in the study of Greek religion. I focus on three important approaches that raise the problem of the application of modern categories to ancient contexts: the anthropological approach to Greek religion; the application of the 'lived religion' model to ancient religions; and the ontological turn in Classics. I argue that the use of anachronistic concepts for the study of Greek religion is inevitable and that attention to the disjuncture of our terms and the terms of the ancients in fact encourages us to interrogate our own scholarly positions.
Two Centuries of Scholarship on Greek Religion. A Survey of Themes, Approaches and Debates
2019
This piece offers a survey of the history of scholarship on Greek religion in Germany, Britain and France from the foundation of its study as a modern academic discipline in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries to the twenty first century. From nineteenth-century romanticism and historicism, Indo-European Comparative Mythology and anthropology to structuralism and polis-religion, we look at different interpretive traditions in the history of the field and their impact. In addition, we discuss how specific issues have been approached in the history of the discipline including the question of Greek monotheism, the role of belief in Greek religion, the relation between myth and ritual, the questions of origins and foreign influences, periodization, and others, and link them to current debates. Particular attention is given to how such factors as the Christian background of nineteenth century scholars, gender, the idealization of the Greeks and Orientalising attitudes affected past accounts of Greek religion and how subsequent generations of scholars have been responding to these aspects of the work of their predecessors.
Which dimensions of the religious experience of the ancient Greeks become tangible only if we foreground their local horizon? This book explores the manifold ways in which Greek religious beliefs and practices are encoded in and communicate with various local environments. Its individual chapters explore 'the local' in its different forms and formulations. Besides the polis perspective, they include numerous other places and locations above and below the polis level, as well as those fully or largely independent of the citystate. Overall, the local emerges as a relational concept that changes together with our understanding of the general or universal forces as they shape ancient Greek religion. The unity and diversity of ancient Greek religion becomes tangible in the various ways in which localising and generalising forces interact with each other at different times and in different places across the ancient Greek world.
gadayil. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011. Pp. xiii + 295. Paper, $76.95. In the first major section of his four-part dissertation, Karingadayil surveys Aquinas and Ś an · kara on humankind's alienation from the divine and the need for transformation, describing both thinkers' theological anthropologies and basic conceptions concerning the nature of God. In the second part, Karingadayil juxtaposes Aquinas's soteriologysalvation by grace through faith in the mediating power of Christ made present through the sacraments-with Ś an · kara's pursuit of liberation through meditative insight into the soul's non-duality with Brahman at the culmination of a path of ascetic renunciation. In the third part, Karingadayil outlines Aquinas's and Ś an · kara's teachings about the present and postmortem implications of salvation or moks · a for the individual, while the final part isolates major theological themes from Aquinas and Ś an · kara to explore points of continuity or dissonance, concluding that there is a decisive preponderance of similarities over differences allowing for interreligious encounter. The work is burdened with typographical errors and an inconsistent and sometimes unintelligible scheme of transliteration and diacritical notation, while being hindered methodologically by too-sparing use of contemporary critical sources on Aquinas and Ś an · kara. Thus, his reading tends toward a received consensus interpretation rather than a critical reconstruction of the theologies in question. The impression of deference to canonical interpretation is compounded by Karingadayil's occasionally generalizing comments about particular Christian or Hindu theologoumena as normative for the religions as a whole, rather than competing trajectories of theological interpretation within more diverse faith traditions. Although generally accurate in its interpretations and serviceable for its intended purposes of fostering awareness of religious plurality and promoting interreligious dialogue, Karingadayil's work offers little of the polish or methodological sophistication of the best recent works in the field of comparative theology.
Greek literary tradition and local religion (1st page uploaded)
de Hoz, García-Alonso, Guichard (edd.), Greek Paideia and Local tradition in the Graeco-Roman East (Colloquia Antiqua 29), 2020
There are a great number of metric dedications to the gods in Asia Minor that are worth studying in order to document the level of dispersal of Greek paideia in the different areas of that vast territory, as well as the level of survival of ancient local cults. Some verse dedications from late-Hellenised settlements and rural areas of the interior of the Peninsula will be presented in this paper, and analysed as example of the interaction between both phenomena. The cult content of the dedications will be compared with local, prose inscriptions that seem to be made by roughly Hellenised persons who maintained their ancestral religious customs and beliefs. The conclusion is that metric dedications in the rural centre of Asia Minor adapted the Greek paideia to their own religious world. At the same time, the religious elements we find in these dedications demonstrate that oriental religions are the main origin of a new religious koine that was being created in the Greek world from at least the end of the Hellenistic period. Some of the religious elements of the dedications analyzed in this paper are surely local, but they belong at the same time to this religious koine that returns to the East integrated in the Greek paideia.
Review: Jan N. Bremmer, Greek Religion (Arys 19, 2021, 475-480)
The first edition of this book by Jan n. Bremmer was published in 1994. For various reasons, including its clarity, discussion of all the central issues in greek religion and extensive documentation, it became a key reference text for anyone undertaking research on the religion of the ancient greeks.
The Archaeology of Greek Religion
Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology (Springer Reference), ed. C. Smith, 2014
a culture-historical approach to the interpretation 33 of archaeological materials. The culture revealed 34 was deemed a priori unique and so beyond com-35 parison with other nations. The great ritual cen-36 ters were among the sites apportioned to these 37 foreign schools. Greek religion was already well 38 established as a field of textual inquiry when 39 these excavations commenced. The rich epi-40 graphic record from these sites, which named 41 figures familiar from myth and history, 42 reinforced the unproblematized relationship 43 with textual sources and delayed the emergence 44 of a critical body of theory regarding the relation-45 ship between the textual and the archaeological 46 record. Although calls for greater integration of 47 textual and material evidence appear in many 48 surveys of Greek religion, literary continues to 49 outweigh material evidence in the key texts for 50 the field (Hägg 1992; Osborne 1994; Morris 51 2000; Burkert 2011: 1-7). Archaeologists work-52 ing on Greek cult, moreover, are rarely located in 53 anthropology or religion departments, more fre-54 quently in art history, classics, or history -where 55 publications focused on iconography, architec-56 tural history, or the relationship of finds to 57 Greek and Latin texts speak most clearly to col-58 leagues judging questions of promotion and 59 tenure.