Perhaps of interest.

Best,
Roberto


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From:  <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 5:38 PM
Subject: [JFRR] Finding Persephone: Women's Rituals in the Ancient
Mediterranean (ed. by Parca, Maryline and Angeliki Tzanetou)
To: [log in to unmask]


Finding Persephone: Women's Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean.
Edited by Maryline Parca and Angeliki Tzanetou. 2007. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press. 352 pages. ISBN: 978-0-253-34954-5 (hard
cover), 978-0-253-21938-1 (soft cover).

Reviewed by Richard Martin, Stanford University
([log in to unmask]).

[Word count: 1094 words]

Sophisticated studies of gender and ritual began to converge in
Classics about thirty years ago, fostered by such scholars as Claude
Calame, Bruce Lincoln, Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, and Susan Guettel
Cole. These fourteen essays, more than half by younger scholars,
build on the findings of that founding generation while refining its
methods and opening new questions. Originating in a 2002 conference
at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), the volume spans
nearly a millennium of the Greco-Roman world. It offers a snapshot of
the best work in a burgeoning subfield. Especially welcome is the
fresh attention paid to issues of female agency, local
differentiation in cult practices, and the precise literary,
material, and socio-political contexts of our evidence.

Angeliki Tzanetou's introduction sketches the field from Bachofen's
"Mother Right" through the Cambridge Ritualists, adding an in-depth
account of recent decades that nicely situates the volume's leading
themes. An anthropologically deft exploration of the knottiness of
method comes in the second overarching essay, by Deborah Lyons, on
the "scandal" of ritual. Facing the paradox that women's rituals were
essential to Greek city-states and to Rome, but also highly suspect
in the male imaginary, Lyons carefully unpacks the multiple views of
two Roman events -- suppression of the Bacchanalia in 186 BC and male
intrusion into a Bona Dea celebration held by Caesar's wife -- to
produce an interpretation based on Butler-style performance of
gender. She extends this elegant piece with suggestive ethnographic
comparanda that highlight the ambivalence involved in any male
reception of women's rites.

Four essays comprise the section on "gender and agency." Jenifer
Neils provides a meticulous survey of rituals carried out by girls in
classical Athens, as we see them depicted on Athenian painted vases,
in particular grain-preparation, weaving, and the carrying of cult
objects. Her high point is a bold reading of the iconography of a
bowl by the Phiale Painter (circa 440 BC), which, Neils suggests,
depicts four stages in the coming of age of a female sex worker
(hetaira), in relation to ritual. A different expressive Athenian
medium concerns Barbara Goff as she analyzes drama's presentation of
female ritual acts. Her key conclusion -- that tragedy stages Hecuba,
Cassandra, the women of Thebes and others improvising rituals out of
the materials at hand is wisely balanced by the proviso that women's
actions, as conceived by this male art-form, do not always end well:
Medea framing her child murder as "sacrifice" is an assumption of
agency not to be celebrated. The two remaining essays in this
rewarding section deal with Roman rituals -- an admirable advance, as
so much past work favored Greece. Celia Schultz makes excellent use
of epigraphic and literary evidence to delineate how social
categories configured women's religious roles, whether in restricting
cult participation or determining selection for office (where lineage
meant much). Vassiliki Panoussi finds in the epic poetry of Vergil,
Lucan, and Statius varied responses to the rituals of women, from
anxiety about its potential for violence to respect for its
peace-keeping possibilities. Both essays helpfully articulate the
limits of their respective genres of evidence -- another advance.

Those with interests in folklore and myth might read first the three
essays in the "performance" section. Andromache Karanika offers an
interesting case-study, based on her fieldwork, in which modern Greek
women's work-songs from the southern Peloponnese, and the study of
performative utterances, combine to illuminate social critiques
inherent in ancient Greek milling songs. Christopher Faraone focuses
on another sort of performative utterance, ancient medico-magic
spells, particularly texts for adjuring a woman's "wandering womb"
(cause of "hysteria") to stay put -- a case of male ritual doctoring
against female agency. Eva Stehle, by contrast, investigates how the
agency of women and their powers over fertility, in secret local
rites to Demeter, became so desirable that the city-state expanded
and transformed them into the sacred mysteries at Eleusis. Athenian
men, in her rendition, craved the communitas produced by rituals
celebrating the mother-daughter bond of Demeter and Persephone. If
this sounds like contemporary gender psychology it could still be
argued that modern ethnography (of the sort Lyons draws on) does
offer parallels for gender-specific rites becoming broader community
paradigms.

The final five essays in the book explore "appropriations and
adaptations" -- including interrogations of the very notion of the
category "women's ritual." Maryline Parca delves into papyri in Greek
and Demotic Egyptian to track the worship of Demeter in Egypt during
the centuries after Alexander the Great. As in Stehle's reading of
the mysteries, women's cult, she suggests, might have fulfilled a
larger civic function, giving natives and newcomers a common
religious experience, with echoes of (if not genetic links to) the
indigenous worship of Isis and Osiris. Lauren Caldwell explicates an
equally challenging set of ancient texts, the highly technical legal
writings of Roman jurists, to understand their views on women's
marriage ritual. Surprisingly, it is not ritual, as time-fixed
ceremony, that most exercises the Roman lawyers, but rather an
extended process of consent, betrothal, transfer, and childbirth that
completes a free-born woman's change of status.

The pieces by Eve D'Ambra and David Leitao demonstrate the
entanglement of male concerns with what are nominally women's rites,
in Roman Nemi and Greek Paros, respectively. D'Ambra cuts through not
only the Frazerian romance of the "king of the grove" at the cult
site famous for its golden bough and ritual murder, but also the
modern assertion (influenced by parallel work on Artemis) that
Diana's cult was exclusively for women. D'Ambra's fresh look at all
categories of evidence leads her to see Diana as a symbol of Roman
culture and male virtus paradoxically appropriate for young girls
since they had not yet moved into the realm of matrons. Leitao makes
explicit the methodological stakes in widening our focus to ritual
actors -- men and women -- instead of dwelling with the founding
generation on gender-exclusive rituals. His case study of a
first-century CE dedication to the childbirth goddess Eileithyia
initiates a rich journey into semantics and mythic paternity, ending
with the persuasive idea that an adoptive parent manipulated the
protocols of a primarily female cult to represent himself
strategically as citizen and father.

Eileithyia's own fate was to become one of several pagan "demonized
baby snatchers," in the words of Kathy Gaca, whose erudite coda piece
explains early Christian opposition to Greek and Roman "women's gods"
in terms of Pauline views on mixed marriages and the threat that
traditional women's rites posed to monotheistic endogamy. Her
conclusions reinforce the main theme that unites the expertly argued
and richly sourced essays in this book: deeply embedded within the
cult activities of girls and women lay a crucial source of power for
Classical civilization.

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