Corpora Foedata: Bodily Taboo and Corruption in Antiquity

Detailed schedule TBA. See website in the meantime.

What constituted ancient logics of corruption and pollution? Ancient medicine speaks to the curative effects of ‘purification’ (katharsis), the body’s release of corrupting pestilence or imbalance. Mindful of the history of the 20th century, which saw the application of Germ-theory to disastrous ideologies of ethnic purity, we are sensitive to thoughtscapes which relate notions of the body’s corruption to that of the community. The analogy of body to community and of community to body was, indeed, not uncommon in antiquity. What then were the notional processes by which familial, civic, religious, or ’social bodies’ became corrupted? Ancient discourses testify certain behaviors which are uniquely ‘polluting’ or ‘corrupting’: incest, cannibalism, homicide, among others. How are these violations of the flesh presented in the literary and material records? More abstractly, within the full spectrum of ancient discourse, where are the places, times, or moments where corruption and taboo are normatively defined? How, moreover, was the discourse of corruption caught between asymmetries of socio-political power and traditional modes of defining or questioning social values?

A quarter-century ago, Horden and Purcell’s Corrupting Sea provided a new ecological model of the ancient economy. The Mediterranean was a unique geography which maximized, as it were, the constant ‘corruption’ of communities through their necessitated yet ever-complicated relationship with the sea. Communities were built on exchange, meixis, the very expectation of ‘corruption,’ and indeed its need for positive integration. What therefore made sense of the world’s seemingly constant corruption of the community or perhaps of the oikoumēnē itself as a constantly self-corrupting body? We remember the descriptions of socially subversive Bacchic ritual, related to us by Euripides and Livy, but communities also institutionalized and welcomed both Dionysus and many other new gods, a complex phenomenon central to the study of religious change. Initiatory religion, through such components as aischrologia, adapted contexts for licensed obscenity, otherwise corruptive speech ritually made acceptable. We are therefore moved to juxtapose different models of transformation–personal, ritual, and communal–, their bearing on the language of ‘corruption,’ and their practiced and discursive traits.

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For more information, contact the conference organizers at: nyuclassicsgraduateconference@gmail.com

This conference is generously sponsored by the NYU Department of Classics, Center for Ancient Studies, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, Italian Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Center, Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, and the New York Classical Club.