Locality of Sacrality: Theoretical Approaches to the Emplacement of Religion
Session II: Theoretical Approaches to the Emplacement of Religion - Memory and Identity
Saturday, May 1st
2:30-6:00 pm
Session Organizers: Claudia Moser and Cecelia F. Weiss (Brown University)
Session Abstract: The discipline of archaeology has long been concerned with issues of ritual, religion, and sacred space. With an increasing disciplinary awareness of ritual theory and conceptions of 'place,' a deeper understanding of the connection between the two is likewise increasing. Ritual was often practiced in a specific topographic and material nexus, and as such a contextual study of the material and topographical aspects of ritual is critical. Ritual and religious practice, when viewed as bound in a network of times, places and materials, becomes 'emplaced.' Such a conception can reveal the interrelation between sacred and profane spaces, sacred landscapes, hierarchies of places and individuals, and ritual action as a place-making process.
This session will consider questions such as:
3:15: Claudia Moser and Cecelia F. Weiss (Brown University): Introductory Remarks
3:20: Chihhua Chiang (University of California, Berkeley): The Sacred House: A Case Study from the Wansan Society in Taiwan
3:40: Chryssanthi Papadopoulou (King’s College London): Transforming the Surroundings and Its Impact on Cult Rituals: The Case Study of Artemis Mounichia
4:00: Coffee break
4:30: Claudia Moser (Brown University): Linear Reflections: Ritual Memory and Material Repetition in the Thirteen Altars at Lavinium
4:50: Robert N. McCauley (Emory University): Putting Ritual in its Place: Ways that Cognition Can Influence the Shapes and Locations of Religious Rituals
5:10: Discussion
Abstracts and Participants
The Sacred House: A Case Study from the Wansan Society in Taiwan
Chihhua Chiang (UC Berkeley)
The goal of this paper is to explore the place-making process of the prehistoric Wansan people in Taiwan. I argue that this process challenges the traditional divisions between sacred and profane spaces in archaeological research. The division not only distorts our understanding of prehistoric society by simply projecting current social conditions onto the past, but also impedes us from exploring the processes of how people interact with the landscape and build up their sense of place through both ritual and daily practices.
Inspired from the concept of House Society, I analyze the distribution of artifacts and features from the Wansan site to demonstrate the prehistoric Wansan people’s place-making process. Ethnographically speaking, it is repetitively shown that residential houses in House Societies are not just mere building structures standing on the landscape; houses are also sacred arenas or functioned as “ritual attractors”. It has been proposed in several archaeological studies that certain residential houses probably became a shrine after containing too much “sacred power”. The concept of House Society challenges the traditional division of sacred and profane based on rich ethnographic examples. At the same time, it facilitates archaeologists to interpret prehistoric people’s place-making process through household level analysis.
Through the analysis of the distribution of features and artifacts, I show how prehistoric Wansan people created their connection with the landscape through building of residential houses and everyday practices. At the same time, they transformed their residential houses into a sacred sphere by interring their deceased ancestors surrounding the houses. The houses were more than roofed areas for the living. The houses were also places where the deceased resided. The presence of the ancestors thus imbued the houses with sacred power. The example of the Wansan society testifies that no such separation between domestic and sacred spaces existed. On the contrary, the landscape was both profane and sacred where ritual and daily practices were conducted.
Transforming the Surroundings and Its Impact on Cult Rituals: The Case Study of Artemis Mounichia
Chryssanthi Papadopoulou (King’s College London)
Artemis Mounichia was worshipped in the Piraeus since the 8th c. B.C., as material remains indicate. Scholars treat this deity and Artemis Brauronia as the patrons of girls transcending to womanhood. Due to the similarity of their votive offerings, scholars assume that the rites taking place in both sanctuaries were similar and have named the Mounichian rite “Arkteia”, or “lesser Brauroneia”. What they have overlooked is the major change in the surroundings of the sanctuary of Artemis Mounichia in the 5th c. Prior to the 5th c. the promontory where the temple is located was a secluded site with no evidence of habitation nearby. By the mid. 5th c., when the Piraeus became the primary harbour of Athens, the area around the promontory was densely inhabited and horoi excavated by the sanctuary delineated the secular from the sacred space. Additionally, the use of the military port of Mounichia made the sanctuary visible and visited by mariners.
Thus, a previously extra‐urban sanctuary, which housed rites for young girls – including nudity and requiring seclusion – became a central sanctuary in the city of the Piraeus. I present and investigate this change in the surroundings of the sanctuary in regard to the rites it housed. I will show that a gap was created in the functions of the sanctuary, which led the Athenians to re‐interpret the persona and rites of Artemis Mounichia, who in the 5th, became one of the patrons of the Athenian navy, which was stationed right under her sanctuary.
Linear Reflections: Ritual Memory and Material Repetition in the Thirteen Altars at Lavinium
Claudia Moser (Brown University)
Within a confined, designated place, over the course of three centuries, from the 6th - 4th century B.C.E, a series of thirteen altars was constructed at Lavinium. From the time of the discovery the altars in the 1950s, many different hypotheses have been proposed for the significance of their alignment, for the relevance of the number thirteen, for the divine attributions of the individual structures and for the implications of this sanctuary for the regional politics of Latium. But within this concern to uncover the symbolism of these altars, seeking to extract the all-embracing ideal they are designed to represent, the physical structures of the altars are lost; from this perspective, the altars are not considered entities unto themselves but rather are some representative, abstract manifestation of a society, a culture or an institution. The continued attention over three centuries to this one fixed site and the repetition of form, style and orientation of the altars necessarily promote memories of past ritual practice. The landscape and the altars themselves must play some part in the construction, preservation or reinvention of ritual practice and ritual memory over time. The fixity of the natural features of the site juxtaposed with the dynamic, ongoing construction of the altars, presents the opportunity to recall, reenact, reinterpret past ritual practices that occurred within the space defined by the landscape and by earlier construction. And conversely, the iterations of architectural form question the accompanying reconfiguration and evolution of ritual and change in religious practice; the rituals performed at these altars might be remembered practices, continued and repeated, their very continuation mirroring the repetition of the architectural forms of the altars. By approaching the study of the material remains at this sanctuary and their physical setting through a variety of persepctives informed by ritual theory, I will examine the implications of ritual change, ritual memory and ritual reification.
Putting Ritual in its Place: Ways that Cognition Can Influence the Shapes and Locations of Religious Rituals
Robert N. McCauley (Emory University)
One school of thought in the cognitive science of religion holds that religious forms, including ritual, are by-products of opportunistic cuing of various cognitive dispositions that typically arise in human beings for reasons having nothing to do either with religion or with one another.The operations of a collection of cognitive tools concerned with agent and action detection, theory of mind, social cognition, social transactions, and hazard precautions, at least, shape both the profiles of particular religious rituals and the configurations of religious ritual systems overall. They can also influence the places where rituals occur, the structures imposed on those spaces, the character of some of the associated practices and artifacts, and the features of consecration rituals. Pascal Boyer and Pierre Lienard propose that mental systems concerned with environmental contaminants and hazard precautions (which play prominent roles in obsessive compulsive disorder) provide ready means for designating sacred places and spaces, for ordering them, and for motivating the focus of so many religious rituals on cleansing. Tom Lawson and I have argued that basic cognitive capacities for the detection of agents and for the representation of actions determine a variety of religious rituals’ features as well as features of ritual systems. These variables may have implications for the layout of ritual locations in a territory, for restrictions on access to ritual locations, and for features of consecration rituals, whether for places, structures, or artifacts.