INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE IN KRAKOW "Theory and Methods in the Study of Greek Ritual Terminology"

The change of the Christian paradigm in modern culture has turned the attention of specialists and the broad community of researchers in the humanities and social sciences to the philosophical, linguistic, and cultural contexts of the roots of European religious and philosophical culture. The study of the ancient religion in the Greek world as well as in other ancient cultures of the Mediterranean, with a strong emphasis on their fundamental importance for understanding the religious phenomena of modernity, seems to be a flourishing and dominating area of research on antiquity. On the other hand, recent discussion in the field of the academic study of religion on the key categories draws our attention to the need for redefinition and re-description of the main theoretical concepts used in the field. Ritual is one of the best examples of the concept which were borrowed and adapted from classical language and introduced in our theoretical toolbar in the late 19th century. But at the same time the concept of ritual has undergone a deep change in the new context of modern scholarship. Now, ritual is the subject of a separate discipline, the ritual studies, but it is also the research topic in other disciplines such as performance studies, academic study of religion, or anthropology of religion. Since “ritual” as a modern concept is used for a classification of phenomena from an outsider point of view, it should be approached also from an insider perspective. The best way to achieve the goal is the complex analysis of emic terms concerning various performative practices regulating the relationship between humans and super-human beings. Discussions of the meaning of sacrifice, mysteries, rites of passage, funeral and wedding rituals, oath, prayer and other forms of religious worship focus on an awareness of paradigm shifts, the negation of established theories and an opening to cognitive science, narratology, anthropology and comparative approaches. The lexicographic description provided by standard dictionaries is insufficient to describe, understand and also render in translation the phenomena and concepts related to ritual and religiosity. In this perspective, the development of a professional lexicographic tool taking into account interdisciplinary anthropological, comparative and religious studies is a pressing need. Rituals as a communication event fulfilled a number of tasks: in addition to attracting the attention of the recipients of the action, they highlighted the intentions of social actors and articulated social order, ascribing the roles according to political status, age and sex, thus determining the boundaries of social groups.

The Greek technical terms of the language of ritual require linguistic, semantic, philological, and historical explication in conjunction with religious studies, anthropological, and cross-cultural descriptions. The first phase of the study, of critical importance, includes the methodological preparation, clear consideration and evaluation of the status quaestionis of the research on Greek ritual terminology and setting of further research directions, integration of researchers and students dealing with technical language of ritual.

PROGRAMME 

Venue: Collegium Maius, Bobrzynski’s hall, ul. Jagiellońska 15, first floor 

25 January (Thursday): 

15.30-16.00: Registration 

16.00-18.30: Opening session (Chair: Edward Harris) 

Welcome addresses by Representatives of the Faculty of Philology JU and Organizers: 

Key-note lecture 1: Douglas Olson, Pollux as an Author and a Lexicographer. 

Lech Trzcionkowski, Looking for a Ritual in Greek Evidence/Data 

Discussion. 

26 January (Friday): 

09.00-13.00: Session 1 (Chairs: Douglas Olson, Marco-Antonio Santamaría) 

09.00-10.00: Key-note lecture 2: Alberto Bernabé, The Difficult Identification of Mycenaean Religious Vocabulary. Continuity and Rupture with Archaic Greek. 

10.00-10.30: Juan Piquero Rodríguez, Mycenaean Lexicon and Animal Sacrifice: Reconstructing the Puzzle. 

10.30-11.00: Discussion 

11.00-11.30: Coffee break 

11.30-12.00: Anastasia M. Vergaki, Towards a Theory of Ritual in Late Bronze Crete: How do We Discern and Identify Ritual Actions? 

12.00-12.30: Ana Isabel Jiménez San Cristóbal, Ritual Terminology of the Greek Mysteries. 

12.30-13.00: Discussion 

13.00-14.30: Lunch break 

14.30-19.00: Session 2 (Chairs: Lech Trzcionkowski, Giuseppina Paola Viscardi) 

14.30-15.30: Key-note lecture 3: Irene Polinskaya, TBC 

15.30-16.00: Ramón Soneira-Martínez, Kneeling as Relational Ritualistic Performance. A Comparative Re-evaluation of Proskynēsis in Classical Greece. 

16.00-16.30: Giuseppina Paola Viscardi: Ethics and Aesthetics of the Ritual: the Case of Arkteia Teleté and Related Terms in Ancient Lexicographers’ Analysis. 

16.30-17.00: Discussion 

17.00-17.30 Coffee break 

17.30-18.00: Marco-Antonio Santamaría, Ritual Terminology between Wedding and Mystery Cults 

18.00-18.30: Pablo R. Valdés, Towards a Paradigm of Cyrenaica’s Religious Terminology. 

18.30-19.00: Discussion. 

27 January (Saturday): 

09.00-11.30: Session 3 (Chairs: Ioanna Patera, Krzysztof Bielawski) 

09.00-10.00: Key-note lecture 4: Dariusz Piwowarczyk, Towards the Identification of the Indo-European Component in the Ancient Greek Ritual Language. 

10.00-10.30: María Flores Rivas, The Terminology of Pig’s Ritual Sacrifice in the Papyri of Greco-Roman Egypt. 

10.30-11.00: Chiara Di Serio, Sacrifices to the Greek Gods in Athanasius’ Lexicon of Idolatry. 

11.00-11.30: Discussion 

11.30-12.00: Coffee break 

12.00-12.30: Sławomir Bobola, Towards Agalma Theory. 

12.30-13.00: Michał Bzinkowski, Conceptualisation of the Passage to the Other World in the Modern Greek Language. The Case of Demotic Songs. 

13.00-13.30: Discussion 

13.30-15.00: Lunch break 

15.00-19.00: Session 4 (Chairs: Ana Isabel Jiménez San Cristóbal, Irene Polinskaya) 

15.00-15.30: Marco Dieste Trillo, Between Religion and Poetry: Lexical Components of Didymaean Hexametric Oracles. 

15.30-16.00: Aitor Boada Benito, Making Place: Defining and Articulating Ritual Diversity in Religious Dissent. 

16.00-16.30: Discussion 

16.30-17.00: Coffee break 

17.00-17.30: Wojciech Sowa, In the Shadow of Attis and Kybele. Remarks on the New Phrygian Curse Formulae. 

17.30-18.00: Krzysztof Bielawski, Towards the Theory and Methodology of “Technical Languages” 

18.00-19.00: Discussion and closing remarks.