The Documents in Sokolowski’s Lois sacrées de l’Asie Mineure (LSAM )

Harris, Edward M.; Carbon, Jan‐Mathieu

doi:10.4000/kernos.2465

Cited by 1 publication

(3 citation statements)

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“…43 A festival dedicated to Demeter, the Thesmophoria is best known for having the criteria of exclusively female participants so this is not only an example of functionalism applied to ancient Greek 39 LSCG 166 via Carbon and Harris, 2015. 40 For example, the fragmentary epigraphic text LSAM 4 from Kalkedon in the late 3 rd c. BC records the payment for a single contract of the priestesshood of the Mother Goddess to a woman named Aristonike (LSAM 4 via Carbon and Harris, 2015). There is no mention of a kyrios who necessarily oversaw and permitted the transaction, but as Connelly identifies, the inscription is broken at the place where the name of the kyrios would be expected to appear (2007: 54).…”

Section: Classical Functionalism In Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

“…341 The simple fact that it is the priestesses who undertake the action of killing, despite being in the presence of priests, casts their role as a particularly violent one. 335 LSAM 61 via Harris and Carbon, 2015;Detienne, 1989: 143, notes 97 and98. 336 Bremmer, 1987: 199.…”

Section: Four Old Womenmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… Detienne, 1989: 138. 220 LSAM 61 viaHarris and Carbon, 2015; Detienne, 1989: 138. 221 Detienne, 1989: 138; Valdés Guía, 2017: 272-273.222 Detienne, 1989: 139.…”

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The Violence of These Women Blazes at Our Door: A New Approach to the Violent Rituals of Ancient Greek Women

Louverdis¹

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The religious experience of women in ancient Greece is a difficult reality to uncover. There is very little in the way of epigraphical and historiographical evidence that preserves the voice of women themselves and our evidence is heavily defined by the male authors of the time. This issue of inadequate evidence is further problematised when one is to consider the rare and extreme cases of violence performed by women within a ritual context. The traditional methodological approaches to these violent cases have often understood women via these ideologically androcentric accounts which tend to reduce the actions of women to aberrant and scandalously extreme outliers, unwelcome in their polis communities. This thesis aims to add to the existing corpus of methodological approaches by proposing a new lens for the interpretation of women’s violent ritual practices, one that attempts to re-legitimise the violent rituals of women as necessary components of their poleis and authentic aspects of women’s ritual reality. This lens understands that ritual violence might be best understood as a ‘rupture’ to the social fabric that encircles the institution of religious practice. Building on the valuable framework of the traditional ‘functionalist’ approach to women in religion, the theoretical schema proposed in this thesis synthesises two pre-existing methodologies. Barbara Goff’s lens of an ideological theory of agency proposed in her 2004 publication Citizen Bacchae, combined with Pierre Brulé’s ‘safety-valve theory’ of religion in his 2003 work Women of Ancient Greece, come together to accept that women could exercise agency within their ritual spaces in a way that served to reconcile their own subjugated position in society. When the agency exceeds the expectations of the androcratic polis (who administer the tangible aspects of ritual practice), however, the evidence of male unease directed toward these violent cases indicates that something more than simple female agential activity is taking place. Women’s violence in ritual, therefore, might be considered an agentially forced widening of the safety-valve boundaries, here defined as a ‘rupture’. By interpreting women’s ritual violence by way of a ‘rupture’ to the safety-valve, we stand to re-legitimise the rare and extraordinary violent rituals of women.

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Section: Classical Functionalism In Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Four Old Womenmentioning

confidence: 99%