Discourse Analysis of Ancient Religious Texts

Discourse Analysis of Ancient Religious Texts

Organisatoren
Sonja Amman, Department of Biblical Studies, Humboldt University Berlin; Lara Weiss, Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt University
Ort
Erfurt
Land
Deutschland
Vom - Bis
08.08.2014 -
Url der Konferenzwebsite
Von
Lara Weiß, Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Universität Erfurt

Lived Ancient Religion (LAR) is the program to study ancient religious practices and beliefs as they were appropriated, modified or even invented in daily life and thus possibly beyond ‘given’ norms in the Roman Imperial Period. The project analyses the lived ancient religion in houses, temples, but also in intellectual spaces, and aims at including textual as well as material, epigraphic, and iconographical evidence. Discourse analysis appears as an important heuristic tool whose role in the analysis of ancient religious texts is surprisingly limited. Therefore SONJA AMMANN (Berlin) and LARA WEISS (Erfurt) joined forces and organized a workshop to discuss the applicability of different approaches. The funds were kindly provided by the ERC Advanced Grant ‘Lived Ancient Religion: Questioning “cults” and “polis religion”’ supervised by Jörg Rüpke and the Department of Biblical Studies at Humboldt University Berlin (Bernd U. Schipper). The format was explicitly not a conference, but a workshop in which after theoretical inputs by the organizers, the emphasis was on joint preparations in small groups and intensive plenum discussions that followed a brief presentation on the examples of pre-circulated source texts chosen by the two PhD students of the LAR project. The participants’ expertise from Amsterdam, Berlin, Erfurt, Göttingen, Leipzig, Marburg and Würzburg included Ancient History, Archaeology, Biblical Studies, Byzantine Studies, Coptology, Egyptology, Keltology, Linguistic Studies, Modern Greek, Religious Studies, Social Sciences, and Theology.

The workshop started with a keynote by EWA ZAKRZEWSKA (Amsterdam) on “Sacred languages and religious discourse: past and present” in which she challenged two fundamental myths: Firstly that sacred languages reflect actual speech and secondly that non-spoken languages are dead and ceased to exist. Contrary to prevailing views Ewa Zakrzewska could show that sacred languages (in the sense of languages used exclusively for liturgical purposes) are often deliberately constructed as written languages and – given for example restricted literacy in Antiquity – represent prestige rather than vernacular language. Looking at the function of sacred language as marker but also constructor of identity Ewa Zakrzewska presented an adaptation of earlier work by Roman Jacobson and Webb Keane. This discourse analytical approach distinguishes various roles of the ‘addresser’ such as the author who formulates sacred words and the animator who utters them. This is especially relevant for the difference between revelation and prophetic speech, because discourse analysis allows distinguishing between the author, who formulates sacred words, and the animator, who utters them. The contact channel used to reach the addressee (that is the supernatural) can vary greatly and involves multimodal interaction including writing, images, clothes, gestures, inner speech, but also silent meditation, all of which are crucial non-verbal elements of a given discourse that have to be carefully considered and scrutinized by the modern scholar. Texts written in sacred language, but also of course important messages within religious discourse, are persuasive discourse acts, like sermons, which Ewa Zakrzewska could show were not intended for information transfer but as a means to affect the addressee’s behavior or attitude, akin to the following speech acts. In her model sacred language is thus understood as set apart, highly prestigious, formulaic and non-ordinary, which from LAR perspective provoked a vivid discussion on how individuals and groups dealt with these regulations in everyday life, in how far deviation, appropriation, modification or even invention was possible and by whom, in what situation and where.

INA ALBER (Marburg) and SONJA AMMANN (Berlin) presented a theoretical input on Reiner Keller’s “Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse Analysis” (SKAD)1 and how it can be applied to the study of the role of idols in Biblical polemics against Babylonian gods. The most important insight of this approach is to consider discourses “as historically situated real social practices, not representing external objects, but constituting them”. SKAD links the principles of the interpretative paradigm in social sciences found especially in Alfred Schütz’s, Peter L. Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s conceptualization of the “social construction of reality”2 with the power and knowledge relations as discussed by Michel Foucault and offers a research perspective that takes into account the interrelation between discourses and actors. This means discourses are characterized as institutionalized patterns of speaking/writing etc., which define what can be said in a particular context at a particular time and what cannot be said/performed thereby shaping and reshaping ‘reality’. But it is not a method of social research per se, in order to analyze texts or pictures the researcher has to make use of other methods of text analysis.

How SKAD can be applied to Biblical religious polemics was demonstrated by Sonja Ammann, who showed how the other gods were denigrated by identifying them with lifeless cult images. The term “idol” (as construed in this discourse) denotes a man-made, inanimate, useless object that is called “god” by its worshippers, but as such not known in other ancient Near Eastern discourses. A Babylonian person, for example, would probably not understand what the Biblical writers meant, because the concept of man-made powerless objects of worship would most likely be alien to him/her. By understanding “idols” as a phenomenon shaped in polemical discourse and hence not as the representation or misrepresentation of a “more real” entity, we can thus avoid a judgmental approach by not sharing the polemical perspective of the biblical texts. The discourse analytical perspective thus facilitates to take seriously the “idol” concept in its own right and investigate its functions without a need to “correct” the texts. A second important insight provided with the help of discourse analysis is that discourse is about and created by people, and not about gods. Whereas most scholars read the idol polemics as theological texts that make statements about “wrong” and “true” gods, Sonja Ammann could demonstrate that the discourse constitutes not only the phenomenon of “idols” but also the phenomenon of the “idol worshippers”, that is, the persons associated with the “idol”. Since “idols” are described as powerless and their worship is presented as useless, it is the “idol worshippers”, according to this discourse, that are unable to realize that their actions are useless and do not make any sense. They are hence presented as foolish and the worshippers of the “true god” as intellectually superior. From that perspective SKAD proved productive to pay attention to mechanisms of self-positioning and positioning of others, and to observe which arguments and lines of reasoning the texts draw on. In this case, for instance, it showed that “idol worship” is condemned as useless and absurd (rather than as transgressing a divine commandment), which then enables the discourse to construct the “idol worshippers” as stupid.

In the following section the methodology was put into practice in the analysis of a text by Seneca the Elder, in which mourning scenes in Republican Rome are described. The source was briefly introduced by CHRISTOPHER DEGELMANN (Erfurt). The juridical practice speeches opened questions about the strategies used to claim authority or truthfulness for an actual case or to make it look like one and the potential authority of historical characters versus the idea of generalized standards ‘how things should be done’. Questions concerning the social/political context were raised as well as concerning the (imagined) audience such as for entertainment, scholarly use, as reference for court members, different spheres of society. The rhetorical pattern appeared uniform as the three topics discussed all followed the same form namely a general statement followed by the arguments and then the division that exemplified which practices of mourning are mentioned and which attributes are applied, but also what values are referred to. One of the results was that mourning was conceptualized not only as involving feelings of sadness, but also of danger, and clearly politically instrumentalized.

LARA WEISS (Erfurt) continued with a theoretical input and introduced the hegemonial theory as proposed by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau.3 This theory allows a comprehensive understanding of how various options were created, or rather why certain appropriations might be more popular than others without ever prevailing. Different from SKAD, Mouffe/Laclau’s model is a social theory rather than a discourse model. They argue that society is not a self-evident totality, but that any historical formation of society can only be understood as a complex result of divergent political articulations, which themselves result from the hegemonial practices of diverse social forces. Identity is thus constructed through hegemonial practices of articulation and these identities are never stable, but can only temporarily be fixed. Even temporary fixation in hegemonial discourse is only possible in relation to ‘the other’ (often to an empty signifier). In her case study Lara Weiss applied Mouffe/Laclau’s hegemonial discourse theory to the Late Antique Egyptian writings by Apa Shenoute and his subsequent tradition in the “Life of Shenoute” a kind of “biography”. Even though Shenoute’s works remain largely unpublished and are indeed highly fragmentized, an interesting observation is that Shenoute’s main opponent in his fight against paganism is never mentioned in contemporary sources such as Shenoute’s sermons or codices, but that he was only named in retro-perspective. Mouffe/Laclau’s model proves helpful not only for scrutinizing the “Life of Shenoute” as to whether or not it may serve as a ‘valid’ historical source, but also to look for the strategies behind the text and thereby understand how Shenoute and his followers created a hegemonial discourse against paganism and other heresies.

Hegemonial discourses and the concept of empty signifiers proved relevant for the work of MAIK PATZELT (Erfurt), who showed how prayer was conceptualized by Seneca and Juvenile, and thereby tied into discourses that constructed loud or silent praying as normative practices. In the workshop discussion, it became clear that ‘the other’ is always the deviant behavior in these texts which adopt a surprisingly similar repertoire of authorities such as quotes, names or mos maiorum, whereas not being consequent in their assessment of what is right and what is wrong. Especially Seneca sometimes favors the silent over the loud prayer or vice versa depending on the argument for which he uses the prayer as illustration. Prayer thus does not serve as an empty signifier per se, yet demonstrating how important it is to not only to collect sources to find whatever is deemed standard behavior, but to look for the frictions, textual strategies and intended effects of given texts and their relation to each other.

Through the theoretical inputs and the application of the theory in the workshop discussions, the participants explored the three discourse analytical approaches – that is linguistic discourse analysis, SKAD, and hegemonial discourse theory. As a common denominator, discourse can be understood as a kind of frame for communication and also practices, thereby itself structuring and constituting said frame in an ongoing process. Differences between the approaches were experienced with regard to the theoretical presuppositions and the corresponding research strategy, that is starting from the texts with certain epistemological backgrounds and then moving into theory, or theory as a particular lens into a given source material. The workshop character of the meeting gave much room to individual and group participation and interdisciplinary discussions; this helped to clarify and thereby also rethink concepts taken-for-granted in the respective fields and allowed for an inspiring exploration of ancient religious discourses.

Conference Overview:

Keynote
Ewa Zakrzewska (Amsterdam), Sacred languages and religious discourse: past and present

Workshop Discussion

Sonja Ammann (Berlin) / Ina Alber (Marburg), Theoretical Input I: A Social-Scientific Approach to Discourse Analysis: Keller/Jäger

Christopher Degelmann (Erfurt), Introduction Source Texts I: Mourning Scenes

Text Workshop I

Lara Weiss (Erfurt), Theoretical Input II: A Post-Marxist Discourse Theory: Laclau/Mouffe

Maik Patzelt (Erfurt), Introduction Source Texts II: Praying Gestures

Text Workshop II

Final Discussion

Notes:
1 Reiner Keller, The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD), in: Human Studies 34 (1), 2011, pp. 43–65.
2 Peter L. Berger / Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Garden City, NY 1966.
3 Ernesto Laclau / Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London 1985.


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