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Overview
Redfield devotes much of the book to placing Locri within a more general account of Greek culture, particularly with the institution of marriage in relation to private property, sexual identity, and the fate of the soul. He begins by considering the annual practice of sending two maidens from old-world Locris, the putative place of origin of the Italian Locrians, to serve in the temple of Athena at Ilion, finding here some key themes of Locrian culture. He goes on to provide a richly detailed overview of the Italian city; in a set of iconographic essays he suggests that marriage was seen in Locri as a life transformation akin to the eternal bliss hoped for after death.
Nothing less than a general reevaluation of classical Greek society in both its political and theological dimensions, The Locrian Maidens is must reading for students and scholars of classics, while remaining accessible and of particular interest to those in women's studies and to anyone seeking a broader understanding of ancient Greece.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691116051 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/07/2003 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 480 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Locrian Maidens
Love and Death in Greek ItalyIntroduction
On IntroductionEvery work of history appears to require an introduction. The oldest known to me is that of Hecataeus:
Hecataeus of Miletus has the following story to tell. I have written this as I believe it to be true. But the stories of the Greeks are numerous and (to me at least) obviously ridiculous. (1 FGH 1)
The stories Hecataeus is about to tell are of the type we call mythical; nevertheless he appears here as the grandfather of history, not so much in his promise to tell a true story (a promise that is also made by myth) but in his passion to replace all other stories. It seems that a narrative becomes historical in its effort to correct the errors of previous narratives. No history is ever the first. The present work also is revisionist in that it aims to recover lost aspects of our classical past, with the hope that this recovery may expand our understanding of ourselves. As such a work is adversarial to whatever fixed opinions have up to now limited our understanding, I come before my audience with some apprehension. Let me explain.
We call fifth- and fourth-century Greece "classical" because we believe, with some reason, that we all come from there, thatthese people originated the civilization we call "Western." We also believe that the West invented modernism, now becoming the world civilization. Therefore we also believe that the classical West experienced a kind of "first modernism," which in some respects set the pattern for the post-Enlightenment modernism still in process. Of course all these beliefs also deserve effective revisionist criticism. Here, however, I intend something different; I accept (at least for the sake of argument) this notion of the classical, I take it as somewhat true that the Greek city-state was the social system within which the West originated, and I seek to extend our notion of the human possibilities of that system. We tend to talk of these possibilities in terms of Athens, or of Athens in contrast to Sparta; I here propose Epizephyrian Locri as a third type, a different way of being Greek. What gives this inquiry a justification beyond the antiquarianism of local history is the possibility that the Locrians may show us something about the Greeks that we had missed, and therefore something that we lost as we became Western.
The difference that made the Locrians different was (as we shall see) more than anything else something about their women. This has therefore become a book about women in the Greek city-state and thus begins my apprehension. After slavery, the Greek repression and political disenfranchisement of women have become in our time the most disreputable thing about the Greeks. Here I intend, however, neither to defend nor to denounce this fact, but to differentiate its meaning. I shall be describing a society, that of the polis, which everywhere foregrounded sex differences and turned them to social uses. Also (in the ethnographic tradition) I believe that it is not possible to describe a society accurately without a certain sympathy with its values, even when they conflict with other values that I hold. The ancients, so far as we can tell, rejoiced in sex differences, whereas we tend to see them as an unfortunate fact, something as far as possible to be overcome by technology and social practice. Our time has discovered that sex differences appear in culture only as they are socially constructed into those collective representations we call "gender"; for some reason it tends in our time also to be assumed that anything socially constructed is somehow illegitimate and oppressive.
Difference, the manner in which persons and groups define themselves in contrast to some defining "other," has become in our time a leading historical topic, and gender has become the leading instance of difference. By historicizing these differences we can then distance ourselves from tradition: No longer do we have to take it for granted that men and women must have radically different life chances, since we now know that those differences are not dictated by nature but are culturally and historically conditioned. From this point of view our classic tradition is one source of what is wrong with us, worth study only in order to disenthrall ourselves from it. But it seems to me that we need also to remember that a fact can be evaluated only in terms of values (including ours) that are themselves culturally and historically conditioned, that we, like the ancients, are the creators of our cultural world, and that we, like the ancients, created culture not to oppress us but to sustain us (even if it contains much oppression). The uneasiness produced by certain facts about this classic past we have otherwise been taught to admire may usefully lead us to reevaluate the past, but also to reevaluate our own values. In the interest of that project I proceed to a rather lengthy unhistorical introduction. I am going to say something about our own society and its values, and then I am going to imagine an alternative society that those values might invent.
Human Nature
The Enlightenment discovered human nature-not for the first time, certainly, but perhaps for the first time as an alternative to history. The revolutionary project of the Enlightenment was our liberation from history in the name of nature: As privileges and prejudices were swept away, the Rights of Englishmen-or even Saxon Liberties-would be replaced by those Natural Rights supposed to be self-evident; reason would sweep away monopolies, preferential arrangements, the whole historic amalgam in order to give play to individual choice in the service of natural desire-thus naturally producing the adjustment of the economy to human nature. Society would not be imposed on persons but would arise from their natural tendency to sociability. Such a society would for the first time be founded not on traditional relations but on individual needs, conceived as the ultimate human reality.
This Enlightenment project required a reevaluation of difference, a reevaluation that can be conveniently discussed in terms of the old sociological contrast between ascribed status and achieved status. Persons have ascribed status according to the categories into which they are born; nobility is ascribed status, as is caste, as is race. Achieved status, by contrast, comes to people in terms of what they do. Inherited wealth confers ascribed status; one achieves status by making money. To be sent to the right sort of school confers ascribed status; one achieves status by doing well enough there to get into the right sort of college. The ideology of ascribed status claims that persons are born with readily distinguishable natures; the ideology of achieved status asserts that the true nature of persons, their talents or absence thereof, are revealed only as they diversely come to success or failure.
The project of the Enlightenment was that careers be open to the talents; the result was to be what Jefferson called a natural aristocracy. Those who achieved status were then to be really superior. Our term for this "real" superiority is merit. The problems proposed by this term are not my topic here; suffice it to observe, first, that we are not at all clear what we mean by merit, so we tend to ascribe it to those who do in fact come out on top (a circularity that puts the system beyond criticism); second, that equal opportunity, even when it exists, does not produce equality but rather generates inequality according to a specific set of rules (a natural aristocracy is a type of aristocracy); and, finally, that, however meritocratic the society, merit is continually being redefined by those who have already succeeded in such a way that most of the time their own children will be judged meritorious. These therefore succeed partly owing to a favorable inheritance (they belong to the families that control the resources and make the rules); their achieved status is thus a mystification of ascribed status. Furthermore, a society in which this was not true would be a repellent and dysfunctional society in which people did not care about their children. Thus a natural (or at least very general) human tendency produces the mystification of historically contingent advantages in order to disguise them as natural superiority.
All this is only to suggest that the founding fathers did not after all find the way to a society freed from historically contingent inequities, and that our society, like all societies, falls short of its own expectations of itself. It is this fact about ourselves that suggests that we still have something to learn from the others, including our own past.
In pursuit of this project I here draw attention to an ambiguity in the term human nature that our post-Enlightenment ideology brings to the surface. Human nature seems to mean two different things. In the first place our nature is to be cultural; we are the creatures with reason or with the power of speech, or capable of symbolic predication (the terms differ, but the difference indicated is the same), and we recognize this quality in one another, thus finding a basis for communication, exchange, and compassion. I call this our philosophical nature. In terms of this distinctive quality of ours we can claim inalienable and self-evident rights: Nature, surely, makes nothing without a purpose, and since we have capacities we are entitled to explore them to fulfillment. Since we have the ability to deliberate we are entitled to define our own interest and pursue it. Since we can form a society we are entitled freely to participate in shaping the society we inhabit. Furthermore merit is to be defined in terms of these natural capacities; the reasonable, the sensible, the wise, the sympathetic are the really superior. A level playing field is one that we permit no other factors to influence.
Our biological nature, by contrast, is my name for those features of humanity that are characteristic of us as a type of animal, that are both culture-universal and specific (not necessarily unique) to us. It includes things such as upright posture and the opposable thumb, infantile dependency and the general shape of the life-cycle, the five senses, the necessity of dreams, the capacity for shame, and also those underlying structures that, according to neo-Cartesian linguistics, are common to all languages. These things are "of the body" but they are also of the mind; they are "hardwired" and, as they everywhere underlie the varieties of culture, they are normally taken for granted. But we could certainly in principle encounter rational beings with none of these things. Probably only at that moment would we begin to discover just how many of them there are. I remember reading somewhere that the mocking noise, "nyah nya-nyah nya-nyah nyah" is found everywhere irrespective of diffusion, and is therefore hardwired in the brain. Also those things that while far from universal, are independently invented in different places-things such as the wheel, the value of gold, the divine right of kings-are aspects of our biological nature; they are things that come naturally to our species and that another rational species might find impossible or incomprehensible.
Our philosophical nature is a philosophical idea and can historically be traced back to the origins of philosophy in the Pythagorean schools, which divided body from soul so completely that it was thought a human soul could inhabit a body of a different species. Our biological nature is more characteristic of the poets (and Aristotle among the philosophers); it sees our higher faculties-reason, sentiment, and the like-as functions of the body, and therefore sees the body as implicated in our intellectual and emotional life. A tall person sees the world differently from a short one (not that all tall persons are the same, but height is a factor); a man thinks differently from a woman.
Of all the aspects of our biological nature, the most significant is the division of the species into two sexes. By this I mean both that the overwhelming majority of human beings are obviously either male or female, and also that sexual difference, which in combination with infantile dependency gives each of us an "original" relation to a mother and/or mother-substitute, is the primary building block of social structure. The first difference we experience as we become socialized is the difference between mother and everyone else, and all societies find that mothers are normally female. This being the case, it is also true that the first gendered classification presented to most children is sameness with and difference from the mother.
All of this is "natural," which does not mean that it has to be immutable. From the point of view of technology, nature, including human nature, consists of those things that we do not yet know how to alter. And in fact we already have or are on the verge of having a technology that could change all this: Cloning techniques are about to make it possible to fertilize one woman from the cells of another. All the offspring of such unions would be female, and we could imagine a world in which this was the only form of conception, and the Y chromosome, considered a genetic defect, had been eliminated. Paradoxically enough, this would be the Final Solution of the Woman Question.
This fantasy is rich in science-fictional possibilities; careless pregnancy, for instance, would disappear; each conception would be the result of a planned technical and fairly expensive procedure, and childbirth would be definitively uncoupled from sexual enjoyment (which latter in any case might lose much of its importance). Let us assume that the incest taboo would be extended to cover self-fertilization, true cloning; this would secure each child two parents, only one of whom would be the birth mother. The resulting kinship system would be interesting, possibly generating sentences such as: "I have no cross-siblings, since my father couldn't carry a child." More generally, all social positions would be occupied, and since they would all be occupied by women, sex would have no social relevance. On the other hand motherhood would not disappear, and we could imagine important differences between those who chose to bear children and those who did not, and reasonably expect social expectations about the social correlatives of this choice: sex would disappear, but gender might not. Perhaps it is true, as David Gutmann has suggested, that children are protected by a transfer of the mother's aggression to the father, a transfer that helps her not to abuse her children, mother and child then being sheltered by male aggression turned outward in the service of the family. Such a differentiation might still be needed, and "mothers" and "fathers" would then be thought of as different kinds of people with different life-chances and appropriately different standing. It is only that "motherhood" would become a career open to the talents.
There is more to gender than this, and quite possibly less; the elimination of sex difference would surely bring into play the law of unintended (which is to say unpredicted) consequences. Here I am making only the point that it would be a further step in the great adventure of modernism, which involves among other things the substitution of achieved status for ascribed status, the shift, in the language of Sir Henry Maine, from status to contract. Most of us now feel that to ascribe a status to a human being in virtue of his or her sex is an injustice. This attitude of ours was completely unknown less than two hundred years ago. Would we now be ready (assuming that the costs could be met) to eliminate the possibility of such injustice by forever eliminating males? And if not, why not? Would such a society be a human society? It would unquestionably be composed of human beings.
"The principle of community," said Aristotle, "is difference." Society functions because it has a structure, and it is structured by an internal differentiation of functions. The question is: Should this differentiation be prior to social action, or its consequence? Achieved-status societies, which take the second choice, are experienced as dynamic, characterized by mobility and innovation; changes in status are possible and those who are disadvantaged are constantly seeking to join the advantaged. Such societies are suffused with hope and disappointment. Ascribed status, asserting that the social order is "natural," assures that certain social functions will be served by assigning them to some and at the same time denying them to others. The most perfected version of this solution is the Hindu caste system. Since (and this is the tragic reality of social structure) social difference always involves inequality, such prior assignment advantages one category to the disadvantage of others. At the same time, ascribed status shelters certain differentiations from competition and thus can promote continuity and peace. Max Weber remarked that the point of hereditary monarchy is to assure that the highest position in the state is already filled and is therefore out of reach. Ascribed-status societies, which put most positions out of the reach of most people, are relatively inert, characterized by custom and a sense of resignation. Since competition is minimized there are few losers. A society that ascribes gender (labeled as sex) at birth asks us to resign ourselves to our gender.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Locrian Maidens by James M. Redfield Copyright © 2003 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Abbreviations xv
Introduction 1
PART ONE: Sexual Complementarity 15
One: The Sexes in Cosmos and History 17
Two: Women in Civil Society 27
Three: The Theology of Consent 57
PART TWO: The Locrian Maidens at Troy 83
Four: The Locrian Maidens at Troy 85
EXCURSUS 151
Five: On Development 153
PART THREE: Epizephyrian Locri 201
Six: Epizephyrian Locri 203
Seven: Locrian Culture: Locri, Locris, Sparta (and Crete) 241
PART FOUR: Four Iconographic Essays 309
Eight: Nymphs 311
Nine: The Tortoise and the Knucklebone 318
Ten: The Ludovisi and Boston Thrones 332
Eleven: The Locrian Pinakes 346
EPILOGUE 387
Twelve: Pythagoras at the Locrian Frontier 389
Appendix: Ritual Prostitution at Locri 411
Bibliography 417
Index 435
What People are Saying About This
This is a splendid book. It contains many revelations and new material on both fundamental and neglected aspects of Greek culture, and a lot of very acute anthropological reflections. General readers will appreciate it, and specialists will enjoy discussing the Redfieldian approach to myth, ritual, and gender. Masterfully written, it takes us on an enchanting tour from Peloponnesus to Athens, from Troy to Sparta, in a grand quest for the 'Locrian strand' that is ours, as much as Greek.
— Philippe Borgeaud, University of Geneva, author of "The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece"
"This is a splendid book. It contains many revelations and new material on both fundamental and neglected aspects of Greek culture, and a lot of very acute anthropological reflections. General readers will appreciate it, and specialists will enjoy discussing the Redfieldian approach to myth, ritual, and gender. Masterfully written, it takes us on an enchanting tour from Peloponnesus to Athens, from Troy to Sparta, in a grand quest for the 'Locrian strand' that is ours, as much as Greek."—Philippe Borgeaud, University of Geneva, author of The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece"James Redfield's ability to read symbolical stories and iconographical documents, combined with his interest in economics and social structure, offers an original contribution in a field where the attention of many has been too easily captured by the (well documented) case of Athens. His striking cross-interpretation of the data yields highly valuable, and new, results."—Claude Calame, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris University of Lausanne, author of Myth and History in Ancient Greece
James Redfield's ability to read symbolical stories and iconographical documents, combined with his interest in economics and social structure, offers an original contribution in a field where the attention of many has been too easily captured by the (well documented) case of Athens. His striking cross-interpretation of the data yields highly valuable, and new, results.
— Claude Calame, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris University of Lausanne, author of "Myth and History in Ancient Greece"
Recipe
"This is a splendid book. It contains many revelations and new material on both fundamental and neglected aspects of Greek culture, and a lot of very acute anthropological reflections. General readers will appreciate it, and specialists will enjoy discussing the Redfieldian approach to myth, ritual, and gender. Masterfully written, it takes us on an enchanting tour from Peloponnesus to Athens, from Troy to Sparta, in a grand quest for the 'Locrian strand' that is ours, as much as Greek."—Philippe Borgeaud, University of Geneva, author of The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece
"James Redfield's ability to read symbolical stories and iconographical documents, combined with his interest in economics and social structure, offers an original contribution in a field where the attention of many has been too easily captured by the (well documented) case of Athens. His striking cross-interpretation of the data yields highly valuable, and new, results."—Claude Calame, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris University of Lausanne, author of Myth and History in Ancient Greece