And I Became Male

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara K. Gold
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Christian

This chapter discusses the metaphor of the martyr as athlete found both in the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis and in many early Christian writers such as Tertullian. It focuses on key images and elements in Perpetua’s fourth vision in which she “becomes male,” and the theological, philosophical, theoretical, and social contexts that reveal Perpetua’s role as a woman and the portrayal of her as an athlete. It discusses the traits of endurance [patientia in Cicero and hypomonê in Greek texts] and suffering that are manifested in martyr athletes such as Perpetua and Blandina and Augustine’s discussion of the body in connection with female martyrs.

New Testament Christianity in the Roman World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry O. Maier
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Social ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Context Specific

The book explores the social contexts of New Testament writings from Acts onward, along with other relevant Jewish and Christian literature. Moving from large to increasingly smaller spheres, the study examines how at each level beliefs and practices related to the gods and the cosmos, the empire, the city, and the household shaped a shifting and context-specific Christian faith and a set of affiliated identities. In each case, the discussion considers intersections with the New Testament and other early Christian and Jewish literature. The introduction discusses theories of canon formation, the history of the Roman Empire relevant to New Testament study, and the concept of lived religion as a means to understand ancient Christianity. Chapter 2 discusses the gods, sacrifices, festivals, divine epithets, temple architecture, magic, neighborhood religion, demonology, pagan and Christian ritual, and Greco-Roman and Jewish views of the cosmos. Chapter 3 examines the empire’s political and administrative structure, urbanization, taxation, nomenclature, patronage, and emperor worship. Chapter 4 treats the organization and governance of cities, liturgies, urban demography, poverty, mortality, economic production, trade associations, and integration of Jews in city life. Chapter 5 considers terms and definitions of the ancient household and family; architecture; domestic rituals; rites of passage; slavery and manumission; expectations of men, women, children, and slaves; funerary practices; and fictive kinship. Chapter 6 discusses the self; the social constitution of identity; physiological understandings of the body; Greco-Roman gender construction; philosophical theories concerning the interrelationship of body, soul, and ethics; and Jewish and early Christian conceptualizations of the self.

The Resurrection Body

2019 ◽  
pp. 660-674
Author(s):  
Taylor G. Petrey
Keyword(s):  
Radical Change ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Synoptic Gospels ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Approaches To Studying ◽  
Early Christian

This chapter surveys the relevant ancient Christian and Jewish texts on the resurrection that discuss gender and sexuality and the scholarship about these topics. It provides particular emphasis on the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels, Paul, and the early Christian reception of their ideas in the second through fourth centuries. The saying of Jesus that those who are resurrected shall be “as angels” is central to early Christian theologies of the body and sexuality. Paul’s discussion of the nature of the resurrected body and the importance of the parts also informs how early Christians developed these ideas. The tension in early Christian writing about the resurrection was between those who emphasized continuity between the mortal and resurrected self, and those who emphasized a radical change between the two. Further, the chapter provides an overview to major scholarly methods and approaches to studying the resurrection, including feminist scholarship.

Contesting Aristotle: Science, Theology and the Resurrection of the Body in Methodius of Olympus’ De Resurrectione and the Dialogue of Adamantius

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Dawn LaValle Norman
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Reasoning ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Parallel Text ◽  
Entire Text

Abstract The contest over the resurrection of the body used the scientific authority of Aristotle as ammunition on both sides. Past scholars have read Methodius of Olympus as displaying an anti-Aristotelian bias. In contrast, through close reading of the entire text with attention to characterization and development of argument, I prove that Methodius of Olympus’ dialogue the De Resurrectione utilizes Aristotelian biology as a morally neutral tool. To put this into higher relief, I compare Methodius’ dialogue with the anonymous Dialogue of Adamantius, a text directly dependent upon the Methodius’ De Resurrectione, but which rejects arguments based on scientific reasoning. Reading Methodius’ De Resurrectione with greater attention to the whole and putting it in the context of its nearest parallel text retells the traditional story of early Christian resistance to Aristotle. Methodius of Olympus’ characters, although they view scientific knowledge as subordinate to philosophy, see it as neutral in and of itself.

The Meanings and Morality of Scenting the Body

Art Scents ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 265-277
Author(s):  
Larry Shiner
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Early Christian

Chapter 13 begins with the views of Plato, Aristotle, Roman moralists, and the early Christian theologians on the ethics of wearing perfumes, views that have continued to reverberate down into the present. After briefly considering the absence of such moral suspicions in Asian and Arab-Islamic cultures, the chapter examines conflicting contemporary ideas about the meanings and morality of scenting the body. Dividing the contemporary meanings and motivations into externally and internally directed, the chapter first examines the objections to externally directed perfume wearing aimed at seduction, masking, or artifice. A second section considers such internally directed and motivated meanings as identity, pleasure, and spirituality.

scholarly journals Pain at the crossroads between nature and culture

2013 ◽  
pp. 145-148
Author(s):  
Francesco N. Gaspa ◽  
Giuliano Pinna
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Research Perspective ◽  
Related Data ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
Specific Meaning ◽  
Pain Stimuli

Pain and suffering represent unavoidable experiences that have left a deep mark on the history of mankind. In this review, pain is examined from an anthropological point of view, because there is no pain without suffering, and every biophysical event is brought to the consciousness of an individual by an emotional signal. The body is an entity that changes from culture to culture and operates within particular historical and social contexts. Each society incorporates the concept of pain into its particular worldview, assigning it a specific meaning and value. Few human experiences can be read in as many different keys: from neuroscience to linguistic research, perspective selection, and emotional and cognitive functions. Although pain is currently regarded as a destructive force that is per se pathological, it is actually a form of protection. In today’s society, pain is experienced as a problem in itself, a disease within a disease, and its physiopathological aspects have been extensively characterized. But pain must also be analyzed within its anthropological, sociological, political, and economic contexts. The phenomenon of pain lies at the crossroads between nature and culture, and analysis from this perspective is essential for explaining the multiplicity of related data. The ‘‘anthropology of pain’’ explains, among other things, the assortment of reactions to identical pain stimuli among individuals and groups: for example, the higher opposition to pain observed among individuals living in poverty, the phenomenon of ‘‘combat analgesia’’, and the wide variety of analgesics used by traditional populations.

scholarly journals It pays to cheat: tactical deception in a cephalopod social signalling system

2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
pp. 729-732 ◽  
Author(s):  
Culum Brown ◽  
Martin P. Garwood ◽  
Jane E. Williamson
Keyword(s):  
Communication Network ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Male Courtship ◽  
Honest Signalling ◽  
Tactical Deception ◽  
Rival Male ◽  
Intraspecific Communication ◽  
Signalling Systems

Signals in intraspecific communication should be inherently honest; otherwise the system is prone to collapse. Theory predicts, however, that honest signalling systems are susceptible to invasion by cheats, the extent of which is largely mediated by fear of reprisal. Cuttlefish facultatively change their shape and colour, an ability that evolved to avoid predators and capture prey. Here, we show that this ability is tactically employed by male mourning cuttlefish ( Sepia plangon ) to mislead conspecifics during courtship in a specific social context amenable to cheating 39 per cent of the time, while it was never employed in other social contexts. Males deceive rival males by displaying male courtship patterns to receptive females on one side of the body, and simultaneously displaying female patterns to a single rival male on the other, thus preventing the rival from disrupting courtship. The use of tactical deception in such a complex communication network indicates that sociality has played a key role in the cognitive evolution of cephalopods.

Metaphors of Inscription: Discipline, Plasticity and the Rhetoric of Choice

1998 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pippa Brush
Keyword(s):  
Cosmetic Surgery ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Body ◽  
Recent Theory ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Standards ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Economic Constraints

The metaphor of inscription on the body and the constitution of the body through those inscriptions have been widely used in recent attempts to theorize the body. Michel Foucault calls the body the ‘inscribed surface of events’ (Foucault, 1984: 83) and Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ‘female (or male) body can no longer be regarded as a fixed, concrete substance, a pre-cultural given. It has a determinate form only by being socially inscribed’ (Grosz, 1987: 2). The body becomes plastic, inscribed with gender and cultural standards. While Foucault assumes the existence of a pre-inscriptive body, many theorists reject that idea and argue that ‘there is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings’ (Butler, 1990: 8). The constitution of the body rests in its inscription; the body becomes the text which is written upon it and from which it is indistinguishable. Starting from Catherine Belsey's suggestion that to ‘give the metaphor literal significance … is to … isolate it for contemplation’ (Belsey, 1988: 100), I discuss this metaphor of inscription, using cosmetic surgery as one literal example. While some theorists reject the pre-inscriptive body, the popular discourses advocating changing one's body assume unproblematically the existence of a body prior to these ‘elective’ procedures and reinforce the mind/body dualism which recent theory has sought so insistently to reject. I examine how popular discourses of body modification enforce a disciplinary regime (in Foucault's sense) and impose degrees of both literal and figurative inscription. Juxtaposing these two perspectives, I explore how both discourses efface the materiality of the body and the social contexts within which bodies are experienced and constructed. While the rhetoric surrounding cosmetic surgery denies the physical process and the economic constraints, so theories of the body which stress the body's plasticity also deny the materiality of that process and the cultural and social contexts within which the body is always placed.

A New Type of Early Christian Ampulla

1971 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 243-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. W. Hayes
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
The Body ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
General Similarity ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Common ◽  
Shape And Size ◽  
Late Roman

A Type of small pottery flask which has so far received little attention from students of the Early Christian period appears regularly on sites of sixth- to seventh-century date throughout the eastern Mediterranean. It is fusiform in shape, with a short tubular mouth marked off from the body by a slight ridge, and tapers at the bottom to a roughly truncated point (Fig. I). In view of its general similarity in shape to the common fusiform unguentarium of Hellenistic times I have suggested elsewhere the name Late Roman Unguentarium for the type. The height of complete speciments may be estimated at c. 18–21 cm.; occasionally one meets larger examples (with small flat bases). Such a flask was obviously not meant to be stood up on its base, but is of a convenient shape and size to be clasped in the hand. One may assume that it was provided with a stopper to keep in the contents (presumably of some perishable material, since no examples survive); the ridge below the mouth may have served to secure this.

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