2023: Envy and Jealousy in Magico-Medical Texts, in K. Sonik/U. Steinert (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Emotions in the Ancient Near East. (For PDF, please email) (original) (raw)
Related papers
2015
At the heart of this volume are three trials held in Athens in the fourth century BCE. The defendants were all women and in each case the charges involved a combination of ritual activities. Two were condemned to death. Because of the brevity of the ancient sources, and their lack of agreement, the precise charges are unclear, and the reasons for taking these women to court remain mysterious. Envy, Poison, and Death takes the complexity and confusion of the evidence not as a riddle to be solved, but as revealing multiple social dynamics. It explores the changing factors-material, ideological, and psychological-that may have provoked these events. It focuses in particular on the dual role of envy (phthonos) and gossip as processes by which communities identified people and activities that were dangerous, and examines how and why those local, even individual, dynamics may have come to shape official civic decisions during a time of perceived hardship. At first sight so puzzling, these trials reveal a vivid picture of the socio-political environment of Athens during the early-mid fourth century BCE, including responses to changes in women's status and behaviour, and attitudes to ritual activities within the city. The volume reveals some of the characters, events, and even emotions that would help to shape an emergent concept of magic: it suggests that the boundary of acceptable behaviour was shifting, not only within the legal arena but also through the active involvement of society beyond the courts.
In a postmodern culture teeming with competing philosophical and physiological theories of the nature of human emotions, a striking recent initiative, in which Martha Nussbaum has been a leading player, is the critical retrieval of insights from Greco-Roman moral philosophers on the constitution and morality of the emotions. The project has involved excavating ancient debates over whether the emotions are diseases (p qh) of the soul, needing always to be sedated or expunged, or instead are rooted in appetitive and aversive faculties (dun meiς) of the soul, intrinsically related to reason, making some emotions worthy of education, healing, and reorientation for the sake of moral well-being.
Revenge, envy and sorcery in an Amazonian society
Revenge in the Cultures of Lowland South America. S. Beckerman and P. Valentine (Eds.). Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 162-186, 2008
The Matsigenka Indians of the Peruvian Amazon appear at first glance to have very little ritual life, but upon closer examination reveal a persistent and continuous practice of small rituals intended to ward off illness, harm and misfortune. Most of these rituals are meant to protect the individual, the family, and the society from the harmful effects of vengeful attacks against them. Illness and other types of misfortune are often attributed to revenge perpetrated by spirit beings, animals and certain plant species as well as other human beings. In Westernizing communities, illness is increasingly attributed to vengeful sorcery by other humans, often motivated by envy. As a small-scale, kin-based family level society, the Matsigenka value harmonious interpersonal relationships, sharing, and hard work. Lacking organized forms of social control such as police or institutionalized punishment, the Matsigenka view the violation of such values as likely to lead to retaliation by various agencies. In this paper we compile ethnographic evidence of the importance of envy and revenge in Matsigenka daily life and ritual practice. We argue in favor of the idea that envy and revenge are closely linked, universal human emotional processes that have received far less attention than they deserve, especially with respect to small-scale societies.
Among the ancient and modern civilizations surrounding the Mediterranean during the last 5,000 years, anger and hatred, like love, appear to have been perceived as fundamental human emotions. The present chapter examines these emotions within the civilizations of the Babylonians and Assyrians in ancient Mesopotamia during the late second and the fi rst millennia BCE. These civilizations shared a common view of the world: their peoples were governed by kings, 1 and humans altogether were subjected to a host of (anthropomorphic) deities. The functions and status of the gods mirrored those of the human world and society: for example, deities, too, were governed by divine kings. The text genres discussed here comprise mainly royal inscriptions, that is, offi cial statements of ruling kings. In the political sphere of these inscriptions, "hatred" and its emotional counterpart "love" did not actually denote personal emotions but rather political opposition or support. Since these inscriptions always express royal sovereignty and serene supremacy, it could prove hazardous to expose too much emotion, particularly in the case of negative emotions. The display of anger or hatred-emotions that were only in place when the divinely installed order of things on earth was disturbed by foreign enemies or political adversaries of a given ruler-had to be carefully hedged in. Preferably, these feelings were projected into the sphere of the divine (i.e., attributed to the gods), where they were safe from critique or ridicule. In the case of human kings, anger and hatred were always in danger of being mistaken for frenzy (maḫḫûtu). 2 Already in the third millennium BCE, the fall of empires was attributed to the wrathful frown of the king of the gods, Enlil. 3 In keeping with the facial imagery which attributed the rise of a ruler to the benevolent glance of the gods, 4 a divine frown would bring kingdoms down. According to the opening lines of the Sumerian Curse of Agade (CA), Enlil's frown had terminated the rule of the fourth dynasty of Kish and the third dynasty of Uruk, as it would do also with the dynasty of Akkad: After Enlil's frown (saĝ-ki gid 2-da) had slain (the House of) Kish as if it were the Bull of Heaven, had slaughtered the House of the land of Uruk in the dust as if it were a mighty bull, (.. .).
The Rot of the Bones: A New Analysis of קנאה ("Envy/Jealousy") in the Hebrew Bible
Journal of Biblical Literature 142.3: 385-408., 2023
This article reassesses the expression of jealousy and envy in the Hebrew Bible as well as their ethical status. Through a systematic analysis of the Hebrew root, קנא I argue that קנאה arises exclusively in scenarios involving a relative loss in status to a rival and that its closest English counterparts are therefore envy and jealousy. While some sort of link between קנאה and envy/jealousy is widely acknowledged, communis opinio has it that קנאה in the Bible regularly refers to other emotions and states, from anger and fury, to devotion and love, to vaguer feelings of passion, emotional excitement, zeal, or the desire for vengeance. Likewise, קנאה is widely considered to be ethically neutral—an emotion that might be positive or negative, good or bad. I challenge these views through new readings of several passages (esp. Song 8:6, Prov 14:30, Num 11:29, 2 Sam 21:1–2) and close with a brief discussion of the significance of these findings for biblical theology, religious zealotry, and the lexical expression of jealousy in cultures that evolved in contact with the Hebrew Bible and its translations.
Schadenfreude, envy and jealousy in Plato's Philebus and Phaedrus
This paper concerns the conflict between loving and envious feelings in the Philebus and the Phaedrus. The Greek word phthonos, used by Plato in different contexts, characterizes emotions that contemporary theories classify as envy, Schadenfreude and jealousy. My claim is that in the Philebus Plato characterizes phthonos mainly qua Schaden-freude (an emotion which plays an important role in comedies). In this case the rivalry towards friends and neighbors neither stops at emulation, nor is explicitly experienced as malicious envy, and laughter offers the opportunity to feel pleasure at the other's misfortune without experiencing guilt or shame. In the Phaedrus, phthonos initially refers to the jealousy felt by the older lover towards his beloved. As the dialogue progresses, however, Socrates highlights the important role played by malicious envy when the love described is blind to transcendent beauty. Reference is made to Aristotle's account of emotions in the Rhetoric, and to Plutarch's treatise On Envy and Hate for valuable insights towards differentiating envy from other negative emotions.
Desire, Envy and Punishment: A Matsigenka Emotion Schema in Illness Narratives and Folk Stories
Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, 2007
Accumulating evidence suggests that folktales in some societies are characterized by a culturally constructed underlying emotional structure, or Cultural Emotion Schema. In this paper we argue that Matsigenka illness narratives and folk stories share an underlying emotion schema, in which death and suffering result from conflicts between strong-willed individuals prompting anger and aggression. Analysis of illness narratives collected by Izquierdo in the Matsigenka community of Kamisea in the Peruvian Amazon between 1996 and 1999 reveals a common pattern in which envy and frustration lead to the belief in sorcery as the main cause of illness and death. This pattern contrasts with the typical stories of a previous generation collected by the Johnsons among the Matsigenka of Shimaa and other Matsigenka researchers, where sorcery beliefs were virtually absent. Our argument is that important changes in ecology, community, politics, and religion have led to a systematic rise in feelings of envy and frustration, and that these have increased the likelihood that sorcery accusations will occur. We explore the likelihood that such beliefs increase as egalitarian peoples become more crowded into settlements where they are likely to experience greater inequality, more competition for resources and increased societal and personal stress.