The Oxford Handbook Of Ancient Greek Religion by Esther Eidinow & Julia Kindt

Author:Esther Eidinow & Julia Kindt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-12-08T05:00:00+00:00

WHERE ARE WE GOING? CURRENT DEBATES

This brings us to current scholarship, and the tautological impasse, pointedly criticized by Robert Parker (2004: 57–8): ‘texts assembled in Sokolowski are sacred laws and sacred laws are the texts assembled in Sokolowski’. Given the current state of the corpora, and increasingly vocal recognition of difficulties with the term ‘sacred law’, scholars are gradually turning their attention to issues of typology, taxonomy, and the notion of authority in these texts. In order to dispense with the ‘scare quotes with which “sacred laws” regularly continue to be invoked’ (Carbon and Pirenne-Delforge 2012: 164), a number of alternatives have come to be used. Recent studies will typically employ any combination of adjectives ‘sacred’, ‘cult(ic)’, ‘religious’, or ‘ritual’ with nouns ‘regulations’, ‘ordinances’, and ‘norms’, while sacred law (without inverted commas) is used with either a subversive or a reactionary tone, or by the less well informed. Underpinning this tendency is research conducted over the past decade that has been decisively influenced by methodological concerns in legal history on the one hand, and ritual studies on the other.

Starting with the former, in 2004 Robert Parker drew attention to the distinction in our corpora between decrees issued by civic bodies on the one hand, and the texts he labelled ‘exegetical laws’ on the other. In his parlance, ‘exegetical laws’ were texts which, while not being formally decrees, were mostly concerned with prescribing rituals in the strict sense of the word (sacrifices, prayers, purifications). This important distinction presents a milestone in our thinking about these texts, not simply because of the emphasis on formal or generic features of the texts, but especially because the distinction highlights the various levels of authority involved—a point which was developed further and most clearly articulated by Angelos Chaniotis in 2009, in his analysis of ‘stratigraphy’ of ritual norms, to which I will return shortly.

A second force driving current debates comes from ritual studies. In 2005, building on concepts of praxis by Pierre Bourdieu (e.g. 1972, 1990, 1998), and notions of agency and power developed by Anthony Giddens (esp. 1979), Krüger, Nijhawan, and Stavrianopoulou (2005) made a significant contribution to the debate on the role of ritual agency. In particular, they emphasized the distinction between emic and etic perceptions of the role of agency in ritual: what modern scholars call a ‘sacred law’ is, in emic context, a set of stratified heterogeneous agencies with distinct appellation. They argue that scholars should instead identify and engage with each of these separately. Various contributions in Eftychia Stavrianopoulou’s 2006 edited volume consequentially also drew attention to the question of agency in these texts, and tackled the issue of the typological features of these texts, and how this relates to the issuing authority.

In a seminal article published in 2009, Angelos Chaniotis argued that many of the texts labelled as leges sacrae can be assessed in terms of their issuing authority. He posited a ‘stratigraphy’ (2009: 98–102) that starts with ta patria ethe ‘ancestral customs’, that is, those texts without a

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